The media research constructing at Queens College is small and darkish, with low ceilings and slender corridors. It was constructed greater than a century in the past as a residential college for incorrigible boys, and a sure environment of neglect stays. When I go to on a January weekday to see Douglas Rushkoff, who teaches right here, he guides me round a stack of fallen ceiling tiles to his workplace in a again nook of the primary ground. The Wi-Fi within the room is spotty, so he makes use of an Ethernet adapter to plug his laptop computer into the wall. The solely proof that we haven’t traveled again to the ’90s is that when it’s time for sophistication, no college students present up. Instead, Rushkoff opens his laptop computer and brings up a grid of faceless black containers.

This is the primary course assembly of “Digital Economics: Crypto, NFTs and the Blockchain.” Rushkoff is an efficient sport about instructing on Zoom, although it’s a disgrace his class of principally undergraduates can’t absolutely admire the 62-year-old media-studies-professor look that he’s completely nailed: black V-neck, cropped grey hair. He launches into an impassioned half-hour lecture wherein he urges his college students, solely three of whom have their cameras on, to see by means of the social development of cash—he pulls out a greenback invoice and waves it in entrance of the laptop computer display, saying, “This is not money. This is a piece of paper that we use to represent money”—and to probe what he calls the “big question” of his life’s work: how energy travels throughout media landscapes.

Outside of this Queens College classroom, Rushkoff is a extensively cited theorist of the web, recognized for his prolific and influential writings on tradition and economics. He will get the occasional scholar who acknowledges his work—“He’s a famous author,” one writes on Rate My Professor, “just do a Google search”—however most of them are busy individuals logging in to class from their telephones, extra taken with fulfilling their diploma necessities than within the dense collage of Rushkoff’s e-book covers taped to the wall behind his desk.

That his class is probably not his college students’ first precedence doesn’t hassle Rushkoff a lot. He’s made a degree of touchdown at City University of New York in Queens after a instructing stint on the far dearer, prestige-mongering, personal New York University. In a portion of his lecture, he hints on the trajectory his mental life has taken:

“I was pretty freaking excited in the ’90s about the possibilities for a new kind of peer-to-peer economy. What we would build that would be like a TOR network of economics, the great Napsterization of economics in a digital environment,” he tells his college students. But extra not too long ago, he continues, he’s turned his consideration to one thing else that this new digital financial system has created: “It made a bunch of billionaires and a whole lot of really poor, unhappy people.”

This type of rhetoric is a part of a latest, decisive shift in path for Rushkoff. For the previous 30 years, throughout greater than a dozen nonfiction books, innumerable articles, and varied media initiatives in regards to the state of society within the web age, Rushkoff had at all times walked a tightrope between optimism and skepticism. He was one of many authentic lovers of know-how’s prosocial potential, charting a path by means of the digital panorama for individuals who shared his renegade, anti-government spirit. As Silicon Valley shed its cyberpunk soul and devolved into an incubator of company greed, he continued to advocate for his values from inside. Until now. Last fall, with the publication of his newest e-book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Rushkoff all however formally renounced his membership within the guild of spokespeople for the digital revolution. So what occurred?

It is, typically talking, a troublesome time to keep up a straight face as a diehard advocate of decentralization. A few months earlier than I come to see Rushkoff, the cryptocurrency alternate FTX, run by a cabal of tasteless pyramid schemers blathering platitudes about artwork and group, collapsed, torching billions of {dollars} within the course of. These web capitalists proved to be worse guardians of the general public curiosity than even the company robber barons of yore. (Some weeks after my go to, Silicon Valley Bank failed and almost dragged the worldwide monetary system down together with it—a direct results of the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda.)

Confronted with such irrefutable proof, Rushkoff isn’t simply mendacity low or altering the topic the best way perennial techno-optimists typically do. His conversion is deeper. “I find, a lot of times, digital technologies are really good at exacerbating the problem while also camouflaging the problem,” he tells the black containers that characterize his college students. “They make things worse while making it look like something’s actually changed.” Still, as he talks, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of Rushkoff reverting into his former persona: the inveterate Gen X techno-optimist, the person who can’t resist the untested promise of ever newer instruments. Near the tip of sophistication, he begins instructing his college students to not use ChatGPT to write down their assignments, then halts abruptly, as if unable to go on. “Well, actually,” he says, reconsidering, “we’ll figure it out.”