Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

Our whole society is instantaneous.

I love the fact that the present is the only real reality we have.

Don't live online, live in real time. I'm just astonished how many people live online.

Today, everything is about speed and real time. We are no longer concerned with real space.

Once I've taken photographs, I look at them, and I get into them, and I'm there for the moment - and then that's it. I find little time for reflection.

A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.

In the year 3000, everything will be instant.

Most simply, 'present shock' is the human response to living in a world that's always on real time and simultaneous. You know, in some ways it's the impact of living in a digital environment, and in other ways it's just really what happens when you stop leaning so forward to the millennium and you finally arrive there.

Thanks to Twitter, iPads, BlackBerrys, voice-activated in-dash navigation systems, and a hundred other technologies that offer distraction anywhere, anytime, boredom has loosened its grip on us at last - that once-crushing 'weight' has become, for the most part, a memory.

I never think too far into the future. I'm too busy thinking about tomorrow's news.

In this era of instant communications, the people want instant results.

People like things they can do now, not just think about.

When you do something in the moment, it may just be for that stage, that audience, that head space that you're in.

TV is the only thing that's really alive, because it's happening as you go. You don't know the end, so another day brings a new life to it. Unlike a play, unlike a movie, where you know the beginning, middle, and end.

I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.

I'm always living in the moment.

I feel like throughout history we've heard bullshit from politicians, but now we're at the perfect intersection of technology and entertainment where we can, in real time, produce something that holds people accountable. That's an exciting time to be living in.

You already gave me forever, Aislinn. I'm asking for a chance at right now.

I have one aim only: to impart a fraction of the meaning of the word now.

Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.

I, for one, am not nearly as engaged when I'm looking at something that's been completely drawn up on a computer that replaces anything that's in real time and real space. It just engages me all the less, rather than all the more.

All we have is here and now. That's why procrastination feels so right. Procrastination isn't the problem, it's the solution.

Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for - for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.

The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life - whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you're 85 years old.

Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?