Douglas Rushkoff

If you're not already familiar, you sound like you may enjoy the works of Douglas Rushkoff: https://rushkoff.com/ https://teamhuman.fm

Would you happen to be Douglas Rushkoff? He wrote a fantastic book about this. http://www.rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/

Several people I respect highly recommended this video and immediately ordered his book. But I was bored after a few minutes and stopped watching. His site has a summary: http://www.rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/

As others here have pointed out, she's not living without money so much as making her own, on the spot, when she needs it - in the form of the very adaptable just-in-time currency known as barter. Douglas Rushkoff's book _Life Inc._ and his recent talks are all about centralized currency's corrosive (or rather, extractive) effect on society and are an excellent source of more economic-hack ideas. Here's his talk from the Web 2.0 conference last week: http://rushkoff.com/2009/11/21/radical-abundance/

For a deeper dive, Douglas Rushkoff wrote about this in Survival of the Richest https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fantasies-of…

I think that's what they believe, but I buy Douglas Rushkoff's argument that this is a collective illusion on the part of the billionaire class. See https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fantasies-of…

The bubble goes both directions. I've been working in tech from Colorado for a decade, and only started getting involved in SF this year; the culture shock is surreal (not least because it's normal to those on the other side), and the street-level economic disparities are beyond Dickensian. Relevant: https://rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/

A recent book that tries to address this (kinda annoying title): http://www.rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/

Good on you for finally hitting the jackpot. If you ever end up with real money, think about ending homelessness in your city. Why not? One strategy to make friends: just show your disdain for working people and rich people will flock to you. :-D It's funny that everyone seems to have trouble meeting new friends when older, even the 1% apparently. Add Covid to the mix, and things are tough. I guess it's probably only really possible to meet other rich people to be friends with, else you'd always be worried that people were just using you. This question seems to show up a lot in the Reddit FIRE communities -- maybe they've figured out the answer. Reminds me of Douglas Rushkoff's anecdote about how, when growing up, his dad got promoted, they moved to a bigger house in an outer burb, own backyard and pool and grill, so fewer friends, etc. What's the basis? https://rushkoff.com/books/ If you move to the right hood, your neighbors are prob rich, too. And if you just have hobbies like pickup soccer, you can have casual friends without being true/real friends. And once you start the kids in their private schools, you'll run into those parents. Good luck.

We live in a post-post-modern world. These days it's more relevant to read Rushkoff and look into his 'present shock' idea: http://www.rushkoff.com/books/present-shock/ > In his new book, PRESENT SHOCK: When Everything Happens Now (Current; March 15, 2013), Rushkoff introduces the phenomenon of presentism, or – since most of us are finding it hard to adapt – present shock. Alvin Toffler’s radical 1970 book, Future Shock, theorized that things were changing so fast we would soon lose the ability to cope. Rushkoff argues that the future is now and we’re contending with a fundamentally new challenge. Whereas Toffler said we were disoriented by a future that was careening toward us, Rushkoff argues that we no longer have a sense of a future, of goals, of direction at all. We have a completely new relationship to time; we live in an always-on “now,” where the priorities of this moment seem to be everything.

There is one more important thing here: the 8 bit computer immediately invited you to start coding. The barrier to entry was incredibly low to the point of nonexistent. Compare this to a laptop today or even worse a tablet. I very strongly believe that perpetuating a "code me!" mindset vs the "consume me!" mindset has really big consequences. The ability to make your computer do something that you can do something with, that the kind of game you bought with your computer is something you could attain as well (which is not necessarily true -- some of those games were incredible feats of programming but still the illusion was there) is completely, absolutely missing today. And the consequence is: you get (at least the illusion of) the possibility that you yourself can create something that is easily spread worldwide. The HN readers will argue the huge audience of tablets makes up for this but the problem is -- most people will never even think they can do it. That's the problem: did your iPad came with a manual for a programming language? I didn't think so. Prorgam or be programmed. http://www.rushkoff.com/program-or-be-programmed/ Kids Can't Use Computers http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ (I know there is a lot of controversy about this article but it does have valid points.)