Just finished Douglas Rushkoff's new book, 'Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age'.

It's very good - a disturbing, insightful, quick read about the biases of the digital age, and what we might do about them. Makes me want to run off and learn how to code stuff. Order here. Ebook is $10. For a quick overview of the Ten Commands, have a look here.

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Instead of pursuing new abilities, we fetishize new toys . . . instead of optimizing our machines for humanity - or even for the benefit of some particular group - we are optimizing humans for machinery.

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Digital technology is programmed. This makes it biased towards those with the capacity to write the code. In a digital age, we must learn how to make the software, or risk becoming the software. It is not too difficult or too late to learn the code behind the things we use - or at least to understand that there is code behind their interfaces. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of those who do the programming, the people paying them, or even the technology itself.

~Douglas Rushkoff