The Meaning of the Epistemological Situation: Reading Douglass Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed with Slavoj Žižek’s A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

Abstract

Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed (2010) presents a set of rules about how to navigate the contemporary, digital world, when considering the sentiments in the book’s subtitle “Ten Commands for a Digital Age.” To be sure, through how he outlines his understanding of the contemporary, digital world, Rushkoff proposes a hermeneutical exercise, dictating an understanding of the human situation. Similarly, Slavoj Žižek’s A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), as a film, aims to confront what is occurring in the world situationally that might not be understood in the human situation itself.