Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

by Douglas Rushkoff

  It’s an economy we want to own.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is a product of the interactions I have had with hundreds of people over the past twenty years. I am grateful to every person who asked a question at a talk, e-mailed me about your situation, called in to a radio show, raised your hand in class, commented on an article, or tweeted me a link. Don’t stop. I am: http://rushkoff.com, douglas@rushkoff.com, and @rushkoff on Twitter.

  For implanting the dream of how a digital society and economy might function, I thank Internet cultural pioneers including Howard Rheingold, Mark Pesce, David Pescovitz, Mark Frauenfelder, Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow, John Barlow, Jaron Lanier, RU Sirius, Andrew Mayer, Richard Metzger, Evan Williams, everyone on the Well, Richard Stallman, George P’or, Neal Gorenflo, Marina Gorbis, and Michel Bauwens.

  For leading digital enterprises in ways worth writing about, thanks to Scott Heiferman, Ben Knight, Zach Sims, Slava Rubin, the Robin Hood Cooperative, Enspiral, and Jimmy Wales. For sharing with me some of the perils of growth-based business and being open to discuss alternative possibilities, I thank Frank Cooper, Gerry Laybourne, Sara Levinson, Bonin Bough, Jon Kinderlerer, William Lohse, Ken Miller, and Judson Green.

  Thanks to my publisher, Adrian Zackheim, for recognizing the single most important and counterintuitive assertion I’m making here, and to my editor, Niki Papadopoulos, for making sure it comes through loud and clear. Thanks to John Brockman for challenging me to tackle subjects that matter, and Katinka Matson for helping me craft my ideas into books and then finding them the right homes. Thanks to Jane Cavolina for bringing the full power of the English language to the service of these ideas, and Leah Trouwborst for turning the perfunctory into the delightful.

  Thanks to the students who took my Digital Economics lab at ITP, for researching and workshopping many of these ideas, as well as innovating so many of your own. Thanks especially to Venessa Miemis, Adam Quinn, and Jon Wasserman for growing from brilliant students into inspiring colleagues. Thanks to Shareable, FastCoExist, Techonomy, the P2P Foundation, and the New Economy Coalition for sharing so many ideas, and to the funders and attendees of the Contact Summit I convened in 2011 for prototyping technological development outside the venture capital bubble. Thanks to everyone at Occupy for modeling alternative approaches to activism and at Burning Man for experimenting with new approaches to value exchange.

  For consistently challenging my own assumptions about economics, I thank Bernard Lietaer, Brian Lehrer, Trebor Scholz, Amanda Palmer, and Micah Sifry. For consistently challenging my own assumptions about everything, I thank Seth Godin, Mark Stahlman, Amber Case, Mark Filippi, Joe Rogan, Marc Maron, and Helen Churko. Thanks to the Hermenautic Circle for your fellowship, and to Civic Hall for creating a physical space for this sort of discussion to occur as well as building a community willing to have it.

  Thanks to Richard Maxwell, Mara Einstein, and the faculty of the Queens College Media Studies department for inviting me to help them build a graduate program for the study and practice of new solutions to the challenges of our political economy. Thanks to all the scholars and activists who have come to work with us already, and to those of you who may be encouraged to join after reading this book. You are invited: http://queenscollege.media.

  Thanks to every community, company, and conference that invited me to speak or will in the future. It’s where these ideas are born. And thanks to David Lavin and Charles Yao for making sure those opportunities happen. Thanks also to the independent bookstores, whose time has come again.

  Thanks to Brian Hughes for assistance beyond reason.

  Thanks most of all to my wife, Barbara, and daughter, Mamie, for keeping life fun.

  Appendix

  Notes

  Introduction: What’s Wrong with This Picture?

  1. Andrew Gumbel, “San Francisco’s Guerrilla Protest at Google Buses Swells into Revolt,” Guardian, January 25, 2014.

  2. Vivian Giang, “A New Report Ranks America’s Biggest Companies Based on How Quickly Employees Jump Ship,” businessinsider.com, July 25, 2013.

  3. Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, “The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020,” Wired, July 1997.

  4. Telis Demos, Chris Dieterich, and Yoree Koh, “Twitter Shares Take Wing with Smooth Trading Debut,” Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2013.

  5. John Hagel et al., Foreword, “The Shift Index 2013: The 2013 Shift Index Series,” Deloitte, 2013.

  Chapter One: Removing Humans from the Equation

  1. Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 1999).

  2. Women of the late Middle Ages in Europe were taller than at any other period until the 1970s. Bernard Lietaer and Stephen Belgin, New Money for a New World (Boulder, Colo.: Qiterra Press: 2011).

  3. Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How Corporations Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Random House, 2009), 8.

  4. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2014).

  5. Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, “Netizen: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet,” First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet 3, no. 7 (July 6, 1998).

  6. “Organization: Organic,” www.crunchbase.com/organization/organic#/entity.

  7. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006).

  8. Anita Elberse, Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2013).

  9. Will Page and Eric Garland, “The Long Tail of P2P,” Economic Insight, no. 14 (May 9, 2014).

  10. Clay Shirky, “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality,” shirky.com, February 8, 2003.

  11. Elberse, Blockbusters.

  12. Denise Lu, “Spotify vs. Bandcamp: Which Is More Band-Friendly?,” mashable.com, November 19, 2013.

  13. David Bollier, “The Tyranny of Choice: You Choose,” economist.com, December 18, 2010.

  14. Evelyn M. Rusli, “Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion,” nytimes.com, April 9, 2012.

  15. Liz Gannes, “Instagram by the Numbers: 1 Billion Photos Uploaded,” All Things D, April 3, 2012, allthingsd.com/20120403/instagram-by-the-numbers-1-billion -photos-uploaded/.

  16. Hilary Heino, “Social Media Demographics—Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest,” agileimpact.org, 2014.

  17. Peter Cohan, “Yahoo’s Tumblr Buy Fails Four Tests of a Successful Acquisition,” forbes.com, May 20, 2013.

  18. Chris Isidore, “Yahoo Buys Tumblr, Promises Not to ‘Screw It Up,’” money.cnn.com, May 20, 2013.

  19. Jordan Crook, “Snapchat Sees More Daily Photos Than Facebook,” techcrunch.com, November 19, 2013.

  20. Vindu Goel, “Facebook Tinkers with Users’ Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry,” nytimes.com, June 29, 2014.

  21. Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: The Culture of Power in a Networked Age (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2014), 205.

  22. “Generation Like,” Frontline, PBS, February 18, 2014.

  23. Bob Lefsetz, “Tom Petty,” The Lefsetz Letter, July 22, 2014.

  24. Wire staff, “AOL Acquires Huffington Post for $315 Million,” money.cnn.com, February 7, 2011.

  25. “Generation Like,” Frontline.

  26. Jon Pareles, “Jay-Z Is Watching and He Knows Your Friends,” nytimes.com, July 4, 2013.

  27. According to Galbithink.org (“Annual U.S. Advertising Spending Since 1919,” September 14, 2008), total ad and marketing spend in the United States has remained at less than 3 percent of GDP through the print, radio, television, and Internet eras. In 1925, advertising and marketing as a share of GDP was approximately 2.9 percent. By 1998, it was actuall
y down to about 2.4 percent.

  Market research, even counted separately (which likely counts these amounts—normally baked into ad budgets—twice), only accounts for about 0.12 percent more. Adding to this all additional promotions, research, demographics, direct marketing, and public relations doesn’t even double the figures. For the best data, see Glen Wiggs, “AdSpend and GDP—2014 Update,” Foundation for Advertising Research, June 19, 2014. Also, see U.S. Census and IRS data for advertising and marketing expenditures, which is well parsed and linked by Douglas Galbi at the Purple Motes Web site, purplemotes.net/2008/09/14/us-advertising-expenditure-data/, accessed January 2015.

  According to the marketing industry’s own publication, Advertising Age Marketing Fact Pack, 2015 Edition (New York: Crain, 2014), the total global advertising spend for 2015 was to be an estimated $545 billion. With gross world product (GWP) at about $75 trillion, that represents 0.7 percent.

  28. Dominic Rushe, “Nearly 25% of ‘People’ Viewing Online Video Ads Are Robots Used by Fraudsters,” theguardian.com, December 9, 2014.

  29. Tracy Boyer Clark, “Wall Street Journal’s Digital Strategy Amidst the Digital Revolution,” innovativeinteractivity.com, May 14, 2012.

  30. Ryan Chittum, “The Upside of Yesterday’s New York Times News,” cjr.com, October 2, 2014.

  31. Joshua Clover, “Amanda Palmer’s Accidental Experiment with Real Communism,” newyorker.com, October 2, 2012.

  32. Natasha Singer, “Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome,” nytimes.com, June 16, 2012.

  33. Brian Womack, “Google Updates Flu Trends to Improve Accuracy,” businessweek.com, November 1, 2014.

  34. Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 286.

  35. Ibid., 227.

  36. Ibid., 20.

  37. Jason Clampet, “Airbnb in NYC: The Real Numbers Behind the Sharing Story,” skift.com, February 13, 2014.

  38. Ron Miller, “An Uber Valuation Comes with Uber Problems,” techcrunch.com, December 16, 2014.

  39. “Organization: Uber,” www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber.

  40. Moshe Z. Marvit, “How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine,” thenation.com, February 4, 2014.

  41. Trebor Scholz, “Crowdmilking,” collectivate.net, March 9, 2014.

  42. Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015).

  43. Vivek Wadhwa, “The End of Chinese Manufacturing and Rebirth of U.S. Industry,” forbes.com, July 23, 2012.

  44. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

  45. David Rotman, “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs,” technologyreview.com, June, 12, 2013.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014).

  48. Bernard Lietaer, The Mystery of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity, 148 [PDF].

  49. Jeff Tyler, “Banks Demolish Foreclosed Homes, Raise Eyebrows,” Marketplace, American Public Media, October 13, 2011. Transcript available at www.marketplace.org/topics/business/banks-demolish-foreclosed-homes-raise-eyebrows/.

  50. Dr. Jacques Diouf, “Towards a Hunger-Free Century,” Millennium Lecture, M. S. Swaminathan Foundation, Chennai (Madras), India, April 29, 1999, available at Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO.org.

  51. Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

  52. Juliet Schor and Julia Slay, “Attitudes About Work Time and the Path to a Shorter Working Week,” New Economics Institute, Strategies for a New Economy Conference, June 2012, vimeo.com/47179682.

  53. Juliet B. Schor, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).

  54. “Telecommuters with Flextime Stay Balanced up to 19 Hours Longer,” accounting.smartpros.com, July 2010; Daniel Cook, “Rules of Productivity Presentation,” lostgarden.com, September 28, 2008.

  55. Jenny Brundin, “Utah Finds Surprising Benefits in 4-Day Workweek,” npr.org, April 10, 2009.

  56. John de Graaf, “Life Away from the Rat-Race: Why One Group of Workers Decided to Cut Their Own Hours and Pay,” alternet.org, July 2, 2012.

  57. Bryce Covert, “This Company Has a 4-Day Work Week, Pays Its Workers a Full Salary and Is Super Successful,” thinkprogress.org, April 18, 2014.

  58. Ilya Pozin, “Thursday Is the New Friday: Embracing the 4-Day Work Week,” linkedin.com, May 6, 2014.

  59. Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

  60. Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

  61. Mike Alberti and Kevin C. Brown, “Guaranteed Income’s Moment in the Sun,” remappingdebate.org, October 3, 2013.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Matt Bruenig, “This One Weird Trick Actually Cuts Child Poverty in Half,” demos.org, July 21, 2014.

  64. Dylan Matthews, “A Guaranteed Income for Every American Would Eliminate Poverty—And It Wouldn’t Destroy the Economy,” vox.com, July 23, 2014.

  65. Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015).

  Chapter Two: The Growth Trap

  1. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).

  2. For the best historical explanation of the negative effect of chartered commerce and corporatism on the marketplace, see Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).

  3. Ann M. Carlos and Stephen Nicholas, “‘Giants of an Earlier Capitalism’: The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals,” Business History Review 62, no. 3 (1988): 398–419.

  4. Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights (New York: Rodale Books, 2002).

  5. Binyamin Appelbaum, “What the Hobby Lobby Ruling Means for America,” nytimes.com, July 22, 2014.

  6. Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How Corporations Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Random House, 2009), 13.

  7. Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town, PBS, directed by Micha X. Peled (2001).

  8. Abigail Goldman, “Wal-Mart not joking with smiley face lawsuit,” Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2006.

  9. “Walmart,” www.lippincott.com/en/work/walmart.

  10. “Is Walmart Good for America?,” Frontline, PBS, November 16, 2004.

  11. Rick Ungar, “Walmart Pays Workers Poorly and Sinks While Costco Pays Workers Well and Sails—Proof That You Get What You Pay For,” forbes.com, April 17, 2013.

  12. John Hagel et al., “Measuring the Forces of Long-term Change: The 2009 Shift Index,” Deloitte, 2009.

  13. John Hagel et al., Foreword, “The Shift Index 2013: The 2013 Shift Index Series,” Deloitte, 2013.

  14. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Duleesha Kulasooriya, Shift Happens: How the World Is Changing, and What You Need to Do About It (Houston, Tex.: Idea Bite Press, 2014).

  15. Hagel et al., Foreword, “The Shift Index 2013.”

  16. “‘Trying to Recapture the Magic’: The Strategy Behind the Pharma M&A Rush,” knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu, May 28, 2014.

  17. Rushkoff, Life Inc., 174.

  18. Beth Ann Bovino et al., “How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide,” globalcreditreport.com, August 5, 2014.

  19. Geoffrey Rogow, “Wealth Inequality Can Damage Economy, S&P’s Bovino Says,” blogs.wsj.com, August 5, 2014.

  20. Joseph
A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).

  21. “Worldwide Revenue of Major Toy Companies in 2012 (in Million U.S. Dollars),” statista.com, 2015.

  22. Media Squat, WFMU, June 8, 2009.

  23. Megan Rose Dickey, “We Talked to Uber Drivers—Here’s How Much They Really Make,” businessinsider.com, July 18, 2014.

  24. Aaron Sankin, “Why New York Taxis Are Powerless Against Uber’s Price War,” dailydot.com, July 8, 2014.

  25. Don Jergler, “Transportation Network Companies, Uber Liability Gap Worry Insurers,” insurancejournal.com, February 10, 2014.

  26. Tim Bradshaw, “Uber’s Tactics Pay Off as It Goes Head to Head with US Rival,” ft.com, September 11, 2014.

  27. Fred Wilson, “Platform Monopolies,” avc.com, July 13, 2014.

  28. David Streitfeld, “Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed,” nytimes.com, July 12, 2014.

  29. Venkatesh Rao, “Why Amazon Is the Best Strategic Player in Tech,” forbes.com, December 14, 2011.

  30. Elvis Picardo, “Apple? Google? Tesla? Which Will Be the First to Reach a $1 Trillion Market Cap?,” investopedia.com, July 7, 2014.

  31. Wilson, “Platform Monopolies.”

  32. Josh Constine, “Hail a Fellow Human, Not a Taxi with ‘Sidecar’—The New P2P Uber,” techcrunch.com, June 26, 2012.

  33. Wilson, “Platform Monopolies.”

  34. Betsy Corcoran, “Blackboard’s Jay Bhatt Strikes Up the Brass Band,” edsurge.com, July 23, 2014.

  35. Justin Pope, “E-Learning Firm Sparks Controversy with Software Patent,” washingtonpost.com, October 15, 2006.

  36. withknown.com.

  37. Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar Press, 2002).

  38. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014).