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Summary: PLUR Generation Founding Myth
Review: A charismatic Brit and his entourage of overeducated dropouts take over a piano factory in Oakland, intending to squat there and throw the most massive raves the Bay Area has ever seen. But, as their project progresses, they find the mix of their idealistic youthful hormones and the hard drugs they gobble up like Captain Crunch has turned their enterprise into a paranoid schizophrenic cult called Ecstasy Club bent on time travel and transcendence. Things get weird when they actually succeed. But all is not well in Nirvana. Rushkoff manages to hard-wire a psychotically charged volume that connects all the pop-culture dots, like conspiracy theories, aliens, and MTV. The ironic distance of the narrator seems malleable, like physical distance on too much acid. Ecstasy Club seems to turn its own pages.
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Summary: "Game Over?"
Review: Disturbing. It's Rushkoff against the Puppeteers. "The Vendetta Begins". <lightning strikes the Statue of Liberty> <fade to black>
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Summary: witty, smart, audacious, fascinating reading
Review: Douglas Rushkoff is undoubtedly one of the best minds in the communications business today. You may not agree with everything he has to say...you may find some of what he has to say disturbing...but you really owe it to yourself to read what he has to say. His point of view is convincing...his writing superb!
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Summary: How "they" short-circuit our better judgment
Review: Douglas Rushkoff used to be a lot more hopeful that the rise of the Internet would free us from the "arms race" of manipulation and counter-manipulation to which we're subjected through the major media. He's changed his mind, in part because he found that his earlier work (notably the famous _Media Virus!_) was being taught in marketing classes to people who wanted to _create_ media viruses. But he hasn't turned into a pessimist; he still thinks we can break the cycle, and this book is supposed to help us do it. And given his subject, he writes with a refreshing lack of paranoia: he's well aware that all of these techniques are (a) based on common features of "human nature" that ordinarily serve us just fine, and (b) used all the time, to some degree, by all of us. "We are all coercers," he says," and we are all coerced." As you read the book, it will help to be aware of something Rushkoff doesn't actually get around to explaining until his closing chapter: by "coercion" he means the sort of "persuasion" that is intended to make it difficult or impossible for us to exercise our better judgment -- as distinguished from genuine, no-scare-quotes persuasion, which engages our reason rather than trying to short-circuit it. Bear that in mind if you think -- as I initially did -- that he's confusing coercion and persuasion. What he's actually talking about is what people of approximately my generation would at one time have called a "mind-cop." (That term, by the way, has very nearly the same literal meaning as "geneivat da'at," or "stealing the mind" -- a term used in Jewish law for certain sorts of deception.) I assume no reader of this page will need me to explain that there's something ethically wrong with such practices, even though they fall short of physical force or the threat thereof. Indeed, by my lights, the sort of thing Rushkoff writes about, being a violation of the integrity of the mind, seems somehow _more_ wrong than the "initiation of force." At any rate the subject should be of interest to a wide range of readers. I'll single out two kinds: (1) readers interested in the psychology of judgment and decision-making (and see Scott Plous's excellent book of that title for a good introduction), and (2) law students. (Yes, law students. It's relevant to all sorts of questions that arise in the study of the law: How are juries persuaded? When may a contract be rescinded? Why does the law protect stuff like "brand identities" and "public images"?) Rushkoff's discussion covers a pretty wide range of methods, from advertising to PR, from "atmospherics" to pyramid schemes. One of his greatest strengths is his ability to draw parallels between, for example, CIA interrogation techniques and Nazi rallies, on the one hand, and sales techniques on the other, _without_ making you feel as though he's pushing a wild-eyed conspiracy theory. The narrative is also peppered with on-point personal anecdotes, and his passages on "cults" are downright spine-tingling. (And if you've ever felt a little funny about the popularity of Dale Carnegie's famous book, you'll like what Rushkoff has to say about it.) Above all, don't make the mistake of dismissing Rushkoff as a "leftist" (as he says has happened to him). The political division between "right" and "left" is so malleable as to be almost meaningless. The relevant political division is between authoritarians/corporatists/statists and libertarians/populists, and Rushkoff is firmly in the anti-"authoritarian" camp. He's under no illusion that the government is going to Protect Us From All This; indeed some of his own examples demonstrate just the opposite. He's out to free us, not find a new way to enslave us. Rushkoff's musings on the nature of "coercion" should also lead us to reflect on the nature of the "free market." According to libertarians (including me), the "free market" is simply the society that results when people respect each other's rights/integrity and engage one another only in voluntary relationships. But can a relationship based on "coercion," based on getting the other person to exercise something less than his or her best judgment, indeed based on anything less than full disclosure and fully informed consent, really be called voluntary? If not, then the old Roman-law-based "caveat emptor" standard doesn't belong in the _real_ free market, and a very great deal of what we've been _told_ is the "free market" is really something else. A genuinely free market, in which all "exchanges" were truly informed and voluntary, would be communitarian rather than corporate-statist -- less, that is, like the military-industrial complex and more like a Grateful Dead concert ;-). Anyway, Rushkoff's book is very nicely done, and bound to appeal to those of us who think we're skilled in the art of "crap detecting" -- a phrase I first encountered nearly thirty years ago in the brilliant _Teaching as a Subversive Activity_, by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. If you've read that book, or even if you just like the title, you'll like Rushkoff as well.
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Summary: "We are all coercers, and we are all coerced."
Review: Douglas Rushkoff, a man best described as a cross between Marshall McLuhan and Malcolm McLaren, here presents a brilliant expose of the all-pervasive coercion in modern Western society. His book focuses on direct and indirect sales techniques, the public relations strategies of celebrities from Marv Albert to Bill Clinton, and even the tactics of cult leaders (including Mary Kay). While rich in both wit and scholarship, there is one thing that this book lacks: a conclusion. After spending 300 pages explaining how business, government, and the media set up their smoke and mirrors, the author offers us no alternative to sitting back and trying to enjoy the magic show, knowing full well that we are being manipulated. Some might say this was a deliberate attempt to avoid coercing the reader... my guess is that he doesn't know either.
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Summary: A look at salemenship for a consumer
Review: Douglass Rushkoff , to put it simply, here tells us about the psychology of a purchase, whether we are sold on a product, service, idiology, or way of life. He explains the strategies and techniques used to get us from a "no" to a "yes", using case studies, interviews, and analysis of several different kinds of sales. Some of the techniques he explains are relatively benign, but Mr. Rushkoff spends most of his time exposing some of the more subversive and invasive techniques of marketing. He sees salesmenship and marketing as an exercise in mind control, which, to a large degree, it is. In doing so, he is raising questions about our consumer society, giving us a critique of ourselves, our way of life, and capitalism itself (Though I doubt he's a socialist). He is simply being honest. I guess the question he seams to be raising with this book is "To what degree have we allready been "coerced" into our current way of life?". Of course, the real answer to that question is: Completely. The quickest way to explain this book is that it is a book on salesmenship, marketing, and propaganda, not for a salesman or marketing specialist, but for a consumer.
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Summary: Rocked my world
Review: Finally someone pulls back the veil. I read Doug Rushkoff's other books (Cyberia, Media Virus) and felt like he was talking to *me.* Now, I've got something I can give my parents, too. The press and cover stuff makes it look like Rushkoff did a turn around, but he's really saying the same thing he's always said, in a different way. The Internet belongs to us, not "them." This book explains how the Internet and almost every other public space has been taken over by marketers, and teaches people how to think for themselves in the midst of it all. I'll never see things quite the same way again.
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Summary: Extremely entertaining, peculiarly pessimistic
Review: Great style, truly captivating. Wealth of information about FBI interrogation techniques, CIA psy-war with the Huk guerillas of the Philipines, arcane science of atmospherics and (much) more. Plus application of the above in efforts to make us buy, buy, buy. The author detects vicious undertones in almost every sphere of modern life with zeal bordering on paranoia. Or maybe he just knows better and I'm a bloody optimist.
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Summary: The Stock Market is a Ponzi Scheme!
Review: I agree with a previous reviewer, "coercion" is influence by force, and is not quite the mot juste for his case. That sort of takes away something, for me, the incorrect use of the language. If he meant to exaggerate for effect, he should say so, and not just leave it that way. He is furthering the degeneration of the language. That said, it is a somewhat disturbing book, written by a dissilusioned former true believer. The internet may not make us free. Lots of stuff in it has been said before, but the explanation that the stock market is a big Ponzi scheme, written right after the chapter on Ponzi schemes, sort of made me wake up and take notice. I belong to a stock club, and it had ocurred to me that all our charting and figuring didn't really help in picking winners much. Neither did the earnings per share, strength of the company, management experience-anything. It was festering in my mind that, like Amway, we weren't really caring about if the company was successful as a business or not, but whether other suckers would pour enough money into the stock to raise our worth, so we could get out with a killing! Just like a chain letter! For all the faults of the book, this was the one that made me stand up and take notice. Especially since it had been germinating in my mind for awhile.
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Summary: Take the red one..
Review: I felt, like Neo, that things go in this way, but something was missing to understand wat it was. So Orpheus gave me the pills and I took the red one: read this book. But beware before to fight! Don't begin another cult-pyramid with the mission to destroy the net guardians and the capitalism force and bla, bla... Simply enjoy your life with a more opened mind.
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