Progress and the Future

Douglas Rushkoff’s conversation with investment bankers and billionaires catalyzes his explorations of progress and the future. Rushkoff opens the introduction describing his trip “to a super-deluxe resort to deliver a speech . . . on ‘the future of technology” (1). This anecdote acts as the throughway into Rushkoff’s larger social examinations. After his conversation with this group of technocrats, Rushkoff began to interrogate what he calls The Mindset: or technocrats’ “fatalist drive to rise above and separate from humanity” (10). For followers of The Mindset, the future is defined by an escape from human society and the natural world. For Rushkoff, however, the future is not an illusory realm that can deliver humanity from the proverbial mess on Earth.

Rushkoff instead argues that progress has robbed human society of a sustainable future. In Chapter 5, for example, Rushkoff traces the roots of The Mindset back to empirical science. He...