The leading intellect on digital culture believes the recent tech reckoning is corrective justice for Silicon Valley barons
further trashed his reputation with the disastrous Twitter launch of a presidential campaign; and senior executives at OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, called for the urgent regulation of “super intelligence”.
Rushkoff said that he believes that the tech billionaires are in escape mode – planning missions to Mars, creating island bunkers or moving to higher ground – in the event of “The Event” and by creating a virtual “metaverse”, fulfilling the prophecy that the tech revolution was always about preparing us for a world in which it was no longer possible to go outside.He’s called this “The Mindset” – an analysis of the way Silicon Valley technocrats think.
To Rushkoff, author of seven books on new media and popular culture, including Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace in 1994, government warnings of the kind seen last week about social media are belated. Rushkoff’s renunciations are not new. The gen X techno-optimist was, at one time, a proponent of decentralization, crypto-currency, file-sharing and other technologies initially hailed as disruptive and corrective to the old order. But alongside some benefits, they have also produced extremism, secrecy, environmental damage and fraud.With a new tech revolution in the works in the form of AI, cyber-futurism is looking even less palatable.