The Diploma is the Message: Doug Rushkoff Invents a Master’s Program That Matters

Jed Oelbaum:

As you sit back in your Aeron chair, drinking stale office coffee and letting your eyes swim out of focus in the artificial glow of your MacBook, take a moment to consider where you went wrong. You were going to be great! You were going to write a book, or go to law school and represent the poor and oppressed, or something. Face it – it’s probably time to quit your job and do something exciting. Why not go back to school? God knows your job isn’t making you any smarter. The rat race will be there when you get back. And while your stupid friends are slaving away towards their grad degrees in fetid hellholes like Cambridge and New Haven, you could be a pioneering student of the future in the veritable heaven on Earth that is Queens, NY.

City University of New York’s Queens College and digital media theorist Douglas Rushkoff are teaming up to create a Master’s program in Media Studies for the technologically minded, socially conscious upstarts who will define the way we see the world for years to come. “Instead of training people to become marketers or to write the next useless phone app, we’re going to support people who want to see through the media, and use it to wage attacks on the status quo,” Rushkoff says. “This is media studies for Occupiers.”