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Douglas Mark Rushkoff (born February 18, 1961) is an American media theorist, writer, professor, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, documentarian and podcaster. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems, his critique of technocapitalism, and his call to retrieve our humanity in a digital age.

Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media theorist and is known for coining terms and concepts including viral media (or media virus), digital native, and social currency. He has written fourteen books on media, technology and culture, as well as several novels and graphic novels. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for The New York Times Syndicate, as well as regular columns for The Guardian, Arthur, Discover, and the online magazines Daily Beast, and TheFeature.

Rushkoff is currently Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at the City University of New York, Queens College. He has previously lectured at The New School university in Manhattan and the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he created the Narrative Lab. He also has taught online for the Maybe Logic Academy. In 2012, Rushkoff was declared the sixth most influential thinker in the world by MIT Technology Review and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, following Steven Pinker, David Graeber, Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, Thilo Sarrazin, and Richard Florida. On March 9, 2026, Rushkoff announced that he had been confirmed as a permanent member of the Club of Rome.

Early life, education and works

Rushkoff was born in New York City, New York, of Jewish heritage to Sheila, a psychiatric social worker, and Marvin Rushkoff, a hospital administrator.

Rushkoff graduated from Princeton University in 1983. He moved to Los Angeles and completed a Master of Fine Arts in Directing from the California Institute of the Arts. Later he took up a post-graduate fellowship from the American Film Institute. He was a PhD candidate at Utrecht University's New Media Program, writing a dissertation on new media literacies, which was approved in June, 2012.

Free Rides, Rushkoff’s first book, in 1991, commissioned by film producer Patrick Wells, was a compendium of ways to alter consciousness without drugs. Rushkoff’s contention was that it was the states of consciousness, and not the chemicals themselves, that made psychedelic culture so threatening to mainstream society.

Mass media theorist

Rushkoff emerged in the early 1990s as an active member of the cyberpunk and the cyberdelic movements, developing friendships and collaborations with people including Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Paul Krassner, Robert Anton Wilson, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, Genesis P-Orridge, Ralph Metzner, Grant Morrison, Mark Pesce, Erik Davis and other writers, artists and philosophers interested in the intersection of technology, society and culture.

Cyberia, widely acknowledged as the first book on cyberculture, was inspired by the San Francisco rave scene of the early 1990s. The initially planned publication was scrapped, however; in Rushkoff's words, "in 1992 Bantam canceled the book because they thought by 1993 the internet would be over." It was eventually published in 1994. Among other things, the book documented the role of psychedelics in the development of the personal computer and associated networking technologies, and warned of the potential for business interests associated with Wired magazine to “hijack” the net from the more countercultural interests celebrated by cyberpunks, artists, and writers associated with Mondo2000.

In his book Media Virus, Rushkoff coined the term “viral media,” using the Rodney King tape as the first example of a new media form: an unprofessional media artifact that nonetheless spread throughout the “datasphere” (another Rushkoff term), caused an ideological contagion, and eventually led to riots in a dozen American cities. Rushkoff analyzed media phenomena from Madonna and Michael Jackson to computer viruses and Beavis and Butt-Head as examples of mutating viral forms, dependent on “hidden agendas in popular culture” for their transmission and reproduction.

The datasphere as a concept in Media Virus was popularized by Rushkoff as advocate of cyberpunk culture and open-source solutions to social problems, in the 1980s. He approached the datasphere as the "circulatory system for today's information, ideas and images", understood as "our new natural environment". Rushkoff's conceptualization, centered in media theory, was deployed to explain how 'media viruses' – ideas that capture public attention – rapidly spread. As such, Rushkoff's datasphere invokes ideas of information flow, rather than being focused on structured data and its analysis.

Soon after Rushkoff published Media Virus in 1995, as his books became more accepted, and his concepts of the "media virus" and "social contagion" became mainstream ideas, Rushkoff was invited to deliver commentaries on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and to make documentaries for the PBS series Frontline. Rushkoff was disappointed, however, that his book was received most enthusiastically by marketers, who employed the ideas for what became known as “viral marketing.”

In 2002, Rushkoff was awarded the Marshall McLuhan Award by the Media Ecology Association for his book Coercion, and became a member and sat on the board of directors of that organization. This allied him with the "media ecologists", a continuation of what is known as the Toronto School of media theorists including Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman.