Douglas Rushkoff’s Children of Chaos is a very mid-1990s artefact, in which Rushkoff attempts to understand what television, advertising, gaming, rave culture, the early internet and accelerating media saturation were doing to the generation growing up inside them. 

He moves through MTV, Nintendo, Star Trek: Voyager, extreme sports, cyberculture, youth branding and the emerging logic of networked media, arguing that younger people were learning to inhabit complexity differently from their parents. The book is sometimes startlingly prescient and sometimes beautifully, unmistakably 1996. Its future is full of chat windows, remote controls and “data highways,” with the kind of ironic optimism of an era that could see the internet arriving but had not yet watched it eat the furniture.

Originally published in the US in 1996 as Playing the Future, this British edition appeared the following year under the more apocalyptic — and frankly better — title Children of Chaos. It’s useful now not only as media theory but as a time capsule of how the first generation of digital-cultural criticism imagined the coming century.

Edition/Condition: Flamingo / HarperCollins, London, 1997. First UK edition under this title; paperback. Moderate shelf wear, creasing and rubbing to covers and corners, including a crease to the upper front corner. Pages lightly toned but clean; binding sound. Good condition.