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“There are hundreds of examples of highly functioning commons around the world today. Some have been around for centuries, others have risen in response to economic and environmental crises, and still others have been inspired by the distributive bias of digital networks. From the seed-sharing commons of India to the Potato Park of Peru, indigenous populations have been maintaining their lands and managing biodiversity through a highly articulated set of rules about sharing and preservation. From informal rationing of parking spaces in Boston to Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) for software, new commons are serving to reinstate the value of land and labor, as well as the ability of people to manage them better than markets can. In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commoning, studied what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest. Managing a fixed supply of minerals is different from managing a replenishing supply of timber. Finally, size and place matter. It’s easier for a town to manage its water supply than for the planet to establish water-sharing rules.78 In short, a commons must be bound by people, place, and rules. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, it’s not an anything-goes race to the bottom. It is simply a recognition of boundaries and limits. It’s pooled, multifaceted investment in pursuit of sustainable production. It is also an affront to the limitless expansion sought by pure capital. If anything, the notion of a commonsâ€� becoming “enclosedâ€� by privatization is a misnomer: privatizing a commons breaks the boundaries that protected its land and labor from pure market forces. For instance, the open-source seed-sharing networks of India promote biodiversity and fertilizer-free practices among farmers who can’t afford Western pesticides.79 They have sustained themselves over many generations by developing and adhering to a complex set of rules about how seed species are preserved, as well as how to mix crops on soil to recycle its nutrients over centuries of growing. Today, they are in battle with corporations claiming patents on these heirloom seeds and indigenous plants. So it’s not the seed commons that have been enclosed by the market at all; rather, the many-generations-old boundaries have been penetrated and dissolved by disingenuously argued free-market principles.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“The folks contributing their automobiles and driving labor to Uber, or their property and hosting to Airbnb, make less than minimum-wage employees and don’t own a piece of the company even though they constitute the infrastructure. Only money talks.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Keep the progress, but recover the lost values. Technically, then he's talking about renaissance: the rebirth of old ideas in a new framework.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“an economic operating system designed by thirteenth-century Moorish accountants looking for a way to preserve the aristocracy of Europe has worked as promised. It turned the marketplace into one giant debtorsâ€� prison. It is not only unfit for the needs of a twenty-first-century digital society; central currency is the core mechanism of the growth trap.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“In country after country where local moneys were abolished in favor of interest-bearing central currency, people fell into poverty, health declined, and society deteriorated12 by all measures. Even the plague can be traced to the collapse of the marketplace of the late Middle Ages and the shift toward extractive currencies and urban wage labor. The new scheme instead favored bigger players, such as chartered monopolies, which had better access to capital than regular little businesses and more means of paying back the interest. When monarchs and their favored merchants founded the first corporations, the idea that they would be obligated to grow didn’t look like such a problem. They had their nationsâ€� governments and armies on their side—usually as direct investors in their projects. For the Dutch East India Company to grow was as simple as sending a few warships to a new region of the world, taking the land, and enslaving its people. If this sounds a bit like the borrowing advantages enjoyed today by companies like Walmart and Amazon, that’s because it’s essentially the same money system in operation, favoring the same sorts of players. Yet however powerful the favored corporations may appear, they are really just the engines through which the larger money system extracts value from everyone’s economic activity. Even megacorporations are like competing apps on a universally accepted, barely acknowledged smartphone operating system. Their own survival is utterly dependent on their ability to grow capital for their debtors and investors.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Companies with new technologies are free to disrupt almost any industry they choose—journalism, television, music, manufacturing—so long as they don’t disrupt the financial operating system churning beneath it all. Hell,”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“We are caught in a growth trap. This is the problem with no name or face, the frustration so many feel. It is the logic driving the jobless recovery, the low-wage gig economy, the ruthlessness of Uber, and the privacy invasions of Facebook.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“It's not that Twitter isn't successful, it just isn't successful enough to justify all the money investors have pumped into it.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“But there may never be enough to satisfy shareholders who expect to win back one hundred times their initial twenty billion dollar bet.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Shareholders are demanding that Twitter find better ways of monetizing its users Tweets.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“But now, digital technology was to return the Nasdaq to its former glory and beyond.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Until one corporation is left standing, and the impoverished revolt.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“We're all operating on borrowed time and borrowed money. We need to make a choice.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Growth is good, at least for those doing the growing.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“The company's stellar growth revived more than a few economic sectors, as well as a few neighborhoods.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Alas, the big data profiles of teenagers can’t support the same robustness of growth as entire continents of slaves and spices. Besides, consumer research is all about winning some portion of a fixed number of purchases. It doesn’t create more consumption. If anything, technological solutions tend to make markets smaller and less likely to spawn associated industries in shipping, resource management, and labor services. They make the differential between real growth and return on capital worse, not better. This means they push the banks and investors even further away from anything like real earnings until eventually there’s a complete disconnect between capital and value.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Early twentieth-century English writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton—and, later, a young Marshall McLuhan—saw in distributism a definitive answer to the failures of both capitalism and state socialism.6, 7, 8 They looked to that same brief moment in the late Middle Ages we’ve been exploring, when the market was in ascendance and former peasants were making and trading things, as the best example of the ideal economic system. Wealth was relatively widely dispersed, and people had a great deal of control over their livelihoods. They had access to the commons, to a low-cost marketplace, and to their own currencies and credit systems. Craftspeople belonged to trade guilds that both bounded their investment of labor and allowed for the advancement of skills to successive generations. The former peasants of this period became so collectively wealthy that they used their surplus profits to build cathedrals and municipal projects as investments in the future. The centralization of power by the aristocracy and the great Renaissance that followed, according to all three popes, were less a pinnacle of human achievement than an undeserved celebration of dehumanizing technologies, economic injustice, colonial slavery, and an increasingly mechanized approach to life. In distributism, they saw a way to bring back what had been forcibly left behind by the industrial age and the rise of Protestant values that were, not coincidentally, much more directed toward personal achievement, individual wealth, and progress. But”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“many of us use what spare time and money we have earned undoing the impact of our jobs or companies. And that gets harder every day.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Resistance to digital industrialism may look like communism, but it’s better understood as a simple reinstatement of the commons. Most”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“The bank transforms itself from an agent of debt to a catalyst for distribution and circulation. Like money in a digital age, it becomes less a thing of value in itself than a way of fostering the value creation and exchange of others. Less a noun than a verb.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Each algorithm is a feedback loop, taking an action, observing the resulting conditions, and taking another action after that. Again, and again, and again. It's an iterative process, in which the algorithms adjust themselves and their activity on every loop, responding less to the news on the ground than to one another. Such systems go out of control because the feedback of their own activity has become louder than the original signal.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“The smartest hackers understand that their skill at hacking technology may be less important than their skill at hacking the digital marketplace.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“She reverse engineered a startup based on market conditions, industry trends, and nascent investor fads.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Rejecting the rules of late-stage tech-bubble venture-capital madness is a better, more resilient, and durable approach to business in a digital landscape. Who better to affirm this than one of the digital industry's most trusted news and analysis sources, PandoDaily.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commons, studies what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“creating a company for acquisition or IPO is different from building a profitable enterprise; it’s about building a sellable enterprise. Startups are not trying to earn revenue (which is a liability); they are setting themselves up to win more capital. They are not part of the real economy or even the real world but part of the process through which working assets are converted into new stockpiles of dead ones. That’s all they have really accomplished with whatever digital fad they’ve foisted onto the market or sold to yesterday’s tech winners. They thought they were engineering a new technology, when they were actually engineering a reallocation of capital. That’s why digital entrepreneurs who do win often end up becoming the next generation of venture capitalists. Everyone from Marc Andreessen (Netscape) to Sean Parker (Napster) to Peter Thiel (PayPal) to Jack Dorsey (Twitter) now runs venture funds of his own. Facebook and Google, once startups themselves, now acquire more businesses than they incubate internally. With each new generation, firms and investors leverage the startup economy more deliberately, or even cynically. After all, a win is a win.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Our measures of economic success, from corporate profits to gross national product (GNP), specifically ignore the human component of the economy. That’s how an environmental disaster and its resulting cancer rates can still be considered a net positive to the economy. They require more spending on cleanup and chemo, so it’s good for business as we currently define it. In less morbid examples, from corporate layoffs to tax law, we have set in place an economic system whose growth works against our own prosperity. We have lost track of the purpose of the economy.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“Publicly traded corporations direct financial surpluses back to investors, CEOs, and boards of directors. They have little incentive to churn it back into the business and, as we have seen, a great deal of incentive to maximize surpluses at the expense of employees, the environment, and even the corporation itself.82”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“A nongrowing company can be tremendously prosperous and deliver the vast majority of that prosperity to its shareholders. It just might not come in the form of a rising share price, which is the only metric most shareholders understand. That’s why shareholders need to be trained to value other metrics or be replaced by people who do.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“the industrial ideal: anyone can request work, do so anonymously, never meet the employee, and reject the results without ever paying. The”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity