PhD Defense Douglas Rushkoff

We are proud to announce that Douglas Rushkoff will defend his PhD dissertation on June 25. Below you can find the description of his thesis, titled Monopoly moneys: the media environment of corporatism and the player’s way out, from the Utrecht University website:

By analysing corporatism through the lens of media ecology, Douglas Rushkoff shows how an invented set of rules became – like any totalising media environment – indistinguishable from nature. He concludes that while the corporatist rule set may have become the default operating system of our economy, it is not necessarily closed to intervention.

While a closed economic operating system may have been consonant with the closed, top-down media of the print and broadcast eras, as Rushkoff argues, interactive technology does offer new avenues for resistance and redesign. This “playability,” as he describes it, might yet return to economic systems in the form of digital innovations such as peer to peer exchange, decentralised value creation, and even new alternative currencies. This playability would be a positive development for the way it would allow for human intervention in a mechanism that has disproportional influence over our society.

Rushkoff’s PhD defense takes place during the Citizen Science On The Move Conference.