Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, author, and documentarian whose work examines how digital technology, economics, and corporate power reshape culture and human agency. Born in 1961 in New York and educated at Princeton University and the California Institute of the Arts, Rushkoff began writing about the early internet in the 1990s and has since produced more than twenty books across journalism, theory, and fiction. His 1994 book Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace introduced mainstream readers to the early hacker and rave subcultures that grew alongside the web. He went on to popularize the phrase "media virus" in his 1996 book of the same name, anticipating much of how memes and information now spread online. Later works including Life Inc., Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus turned a sharper eye on platform capitalism and the corrosive effects of growth-at-all-costs economics on creativity and community. His 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires drew widespread attention for its reporting on how the wealthiest figures in technology are preparing for civilizational collapse. Rushkoff also writes fiction and graphic novels, including the 1991 novel Free Rides and the Testament series for DC Vertigo. He has produced four PBS Frontline documentaries — The Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, Digital Nation, and Generation Like — that brought his arguments about marketing, attention, and youth culture to a broad television audience. He teaches media theory and digital economics at Queens College/CUNY, founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism, and hosts the weekly Team Human podcast, which extends his long-running argument that the purpose of technology should be to make people more human, not less. His work is regularly cited in discussions of attention economics, algorithmic governance, and the social cost of optimization.