Keen On

If there’s a Marshall McLuhan for our digital age, then it might be the much published media theorist Douglas Rushoff. One of the founding evangelists of the digital revolution, Rushkoff then became one of the earliest critics of its increasingly market-driven and monopolistic forces. But now, as the zeitgeist has sharply shifted against the digital revolution, Rushkoff has become cautiously optimistic about the potential of AI to improve the world. As he told me when we talked recently in New York City, AI might be what he called “the first native app for the internet”. I’m not exactly sure what this McLuhanesque message means, but it does suggest that today’s AI media revolution might not be quite as dismal as most of us fear.Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as