America's first open-source novel.
Last year, Douglas Rushkoff posted his second novel, Exit Strategy, on the world wide web and invited readers to come annotate it. Over a thousand people from around the world (the UK, Australia, South Africa, etc., and a disproportionate amount from Croatia) participated in the project by adding their own footnotes.

Exit Strategy is an "open source novel. Structured as a "found text," its central premise is that the manuscript was written in the very near future, then hidden online and discovered after 200 years. Because society has changed so much, an anthropologist has annotated the text for his 23rd-century contemporaries.

Now Exit Strategy is available in print, and Soft Skull Press is including Rushkoff's favorite 100 annotations from his reader-participants. (Rushkoff will be donating his royalties to charity.)

An allegory of the story of Joseph, Exit Strategy is the tale of a young hacker named Jamie Cohen who, betrayed by his posse, ends up as the right hand man of one of New York's most powerful venture capitalists. He becomes part of a plot to launch a new online program capable of hypnotizing web users into passionate consumers and investors. But his hacker buddies have also developed their own new networking tool—"Teslanet"—which could make the Internet, and the NASDAQ pyramid itself, absolutely worthless. Jamie must decide who his friends are, and how to execute his own exit strategy from the market madness. Meanwhile, his hallucinations of brokers turning into bulls—real bulls—are loosening his grip on reality. Or are they?

Although the book takes place in the near future, the text itself only "surfaced" online in the 23rd Century. The entire text is annotated with footnotes so that terms like "Microsoft" and "NASDAQ" make sense to the future reader who, presumably, lives in a world beyond such things.

Rushkoff is the author of Coercion, Playing the Future, The Ecstasy Club, Media Virus!, and Cyberia. His radio commentaries air on NPR's All Things Considered, and his monthly column on cyberculture is distributed through the New York Times Syndicate and appears in over thirty countries. Rushkoff lectures about media, art, society, and change at conferences and universities around the world. He hosts and writes documentaries for PBS, Channel Four, and the BBC.

Rushkoff's award-winning FRONTLINE documentary "The Merchants of Cool" was one of the most watched and talked-about documentaries of the year, and his interactive mini-series, ASYLUM, will be airing on the BBC next spring.

He has served as an adjunct professor of virtual culture at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program for the past four years, as an Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture, on the Board of Directors of the Media Ecology Association, and as a founding member of Technorealism. He is a Senior Fellow of the Markle Foundation, and a Center for Global Communications Fellow of the International University of Japan.

He regularly appears on TV shows from NBC NIGHTLY NEWS and FRONTLINE to LARRY KING and POLITICALLY INCORRECT. Rushkoff writes for magazines and newspapers including Time, The Guardian, Esquire, Paper, GQ and The Silicon Alley Reporter, and developed the Electronic Oracle software series for HarperCollins Interactive.

Rushkoff is on the board of several new media non-profits and companies, and regularly consults on new media arts and ethics to museums, businesses, governments, and universities.