The tech boom created billionaires and 'a whole lot of really poor, unhappy people,' says prolific author Douglas Rushkoff

Writer and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff told Wired he was excited for the possibilities of the digital economy in the 1990s, but that's changed.

• Writer and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff has changed his thinking on the digital boom, he told Wired.
• Rushkoff, who now teaches, said the digital economy made billionaires, but also "poor, unhappy people."
• He told his students he was "excited" in the 1990s about the possibilities of the digital economy.

Douglas Rushkoff, a prolific author and documentarian, has changed his mind on the digital economy that he was "excited" for in the 1990s, according to a new profile in Wired.

Rushkoff, who is now a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens College, told his students in a Zoom lecture observed by Wired that he "was pretty freaking excited in the '90s about the possibilities for a new kind of peer-to-peer economy," but now sees that economy has "made a bunch of billionaires and a whole lot of really poor, unhappy people."

Over his career, Rushkoff has written dozens of books, articles, and documentaries about the digital boom's influence on people and other structures. His latest book, "Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires," is about how the people who've profited the most from the digital economy want to "escape a disaster of their own making." He calls himself a "Marxist media theorist," in the book, as Wired notes.

For decades,  wealth disparity among Americans has increased due to policy changes and rising costs in areas like education and childcare. Insider has previously reported on the "two-track" economy, where those already earning middle to high incomes or who owned stocks are the main beneficiaries of a previously booming economy. Inequality worsened when the coronavirus pandemic struck in March 2020, as those at the bottom income brackets became even more financially and physically vulnerable, and those at the top continued to benefit.

As for "unhappy people," according to a study from the World Happiness Report in 2019, feelings of happiness and well-being among US adults has been in decline since 2000, despite being high throughout the 1990s. Adolescents too saw a decline in happiness after 2012. 

Despite the optimism for the potentials of the digital economy he had decades ago, Rushkoff has changed his thinking, Wired reports.

"I find, a lot of times, digital technologies are really good at exacerbating the problem while also camouflaging the problem," Rushkoff told his students over Zoom according to Wired. "They make things worse while making it look like something's actually changed."

He also told Wired that he's "come to see these technologies as intrinsically antihuman."

Wired notes that Rushkoff might still be open to technological developments, like ChatGPT, which he tells his students not to use to write papers, but then counters saying "we'll figure it out."

A representative for Rushkoff did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

You can read more about Rushkoff's thoughts on the digital boom on Wired.