Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity Hardcover – March 1, 2016

There is much to like and learn from this book, but it has some clear shortcomings too: it does not see the vitality of possibilities with near-future autoThrowing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
Douglas Rushkoff
Last accessed on Tuesday July 24, 2018
I truly enjoyed this book, although in the beginning I didn’t think I would. Rushkoff focuses on what he calls “extractive capitalism” especially near- monopolies who use their power to grow incessantly (Reminds me of Amazon). This analogy to mining seemed right for many industries but raises some doubts in my mind about many service industries where service is really important. Planned parenthood certainly strives to grow, but there is no doubt that they provide a valuable service that many states already have curtailed beyond reason. But even Amazon was brilliant in its cloud strategy and devices like the Kindle and Alexa really improve the world. Even Google is transforming advertising dollars into self driving cars. Yes, this may become an 8 Trillion dollar industry but it will also reduce accidents dramatically, destroy the wasteful insurance industry, and reduce the demand for roads and gasoline. Rushkoff spends a good deal of his time denouncing the financial derivatives industry, but they too will automate finance in ways that will allow everyone to shares in productivity.
The best part of Rushkoff’s analysis came out in his analysis of gigacompanies/unicorns and venture capital’s role in directing companies into gigantic payouts. Here he says: “
“That’s why those firms usually demand a seat on the board of directors, from which they can steer company policy away from moderately successful outcomes and toward winner-takes-all conclusions. Most venture capitalists would rather drive a company into the ground than let it settle in as a sustainable operation. A s long as there is a chance, however small, for a company to become a billion-dollar supersuccess, the investor would rather push on. This means abandoning even surefire profit models if they aren’t going to generate the outlandish returns required by the venture capitalist’s overall portfolio strategy. He or she would prefer to let the company die, squeezing out every possible megawin, than let it carry on as a moderately successful enterprise. Without a major exit through acquisition or IPO, it is worthless on the level that venture capitalists are playing the game.”
This has the ring of truth.
As he says: “ Growth is the single, uncontested, core command of the digital economy.”
Growth is much too important in our economy. We should focus much more on happiness, love, grace, care, and equality. Growth is too easily transformed into greed and lust for power. We need to balance it with fairness and a safety net for everyone: medical care for all, food and leisure for all. As I was sitting on the toilet today I heard a woman say she could not afford a home for her children. This is a travesty. How could we have billionaires who drop a billion for a yacht when children are not being given the essentials! It just makes no sense.
He deals reasonably well with automation and jobs: quoting McAfee and Brynjolfsson, he explains. “Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs”. What he fails to explain is that the disruption will be enormous, but there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If we do things right, we will have Eden. If things go wrong, there will be a crushing dystopia with the wealthy elites in Nirvana and the rest of us dead.

He has a great quote from Mill, but he does not seem to take it to heart: “Instead, Mill saw the end of growth concluding in what he called the “stationary state”—a sustainable equilibrium in which there would be “a well-paid and affluent body of labourers; no enormous fortunes, except what were earned and accumulated during a single lifetime; but a much larger body of persons than at present, not only exempt from the coarser toils, but with sufficient leisure, both physical and mental, from mechanical details, to cultivate freely the graces of life.”
I take this to be a recognition that the need for labor will end; and in fact automation is bringing that to reality. However, our understanding of the value of human life has to shift, so that we value life on its own, not as work but as living. It is not clear that the elites have the empathy to do that, if our current crop of billionaires like Trump, Kochs, and their ilk are to be understood. But under their megalomania is the spark of empathy, as Gates, Buffet, and others demonstrate. Who will win?
63. Matt Bruenig, “This One Weird Trick Actually Cuts Child Poverty in Half,” demos.org, July 21, 2014.
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65. Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015).
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18. Beth Ann Bovino et al., “How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide,” globalcreditreport.com, August 5, 2014.
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John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), IV.6.2.
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I was raised in a labor intensive culture. The author does an excellent job of exposing "more is better" . As a retired policeman, management kept demanding more tickets each day. The emphasis being a revenue stream was in place and it needed to expand. Economics, not safety was the goal. Highways became a business model. Removing bad drivers from the highway took time and patiences. This would result in revenue loss and was not acceptable.

This is a great book. It explains why the people in the United States do not share in the current form of prosperity and what we can do to change it.

Highly recommended for the subjects as they're both very applicable today. Author does a good job explaining the content well but can sometimes go off on tangents that are harder to follow. If you can stick with the book and its contents, you will be very happy you did.

I really enjoyed this book and was a little disappointed when it ended. I hope the author writes another book geared towards practical aspects of distributed economies.

I had a friend/coworker at Google in 2013 who arrived at work one morning a little upset when her Google bus had been stopped by demonstrators. This bit of history is the lead off for this book but for me the most valuable part of the book was understanding how centralized powers extract value from local producers, and how historically this started at the end of the Dark Ages.

Great observations

I use yellow highlighters to mark important / good to remember parts of books. This one may have ended up with most of them.

Some reviewers had criticized that Rushkoff doesn't offer solutions. They must've stopped reading halfway, because he absolutely does - now, as he readily admits, there are no immediate easy one-off solutions, but he offers a plethora of methods (e.g. local currencies, certain types of organizations etc) that we can use to start us on the journey to a better system.

I found Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus compelling reading, with well-articulated and researched points. It's a lot to take on the "system" and provide guidance towards fixing it, but Rushkoff manages to pull it off admirably well for such a compact (<250pgs) book. Highly recommended.

The author looks at today's unsustainable, growth based economy and compares its history and impact to the new resurgence of a distributed way of balancing and funding trade. Where should we, as individuals, families or members of small social groups, look for a stable and long term substainable way to live and prosper.