Douglas Rushkoff is one of those writers I imagine my own work resembling. We have a lot of the same ideas and sentiments: fairly critical of business and marketing but not in a simple anti-capitalist way.
Get Back in the Box has a fairly central place in my bibliography. His documentaries for PBS Frontline, The Persuaders and Merchants of Cool, [sorry, update: he had one last month too, The Most Wired Place on Earth] are well worth watching.
His newest book is called Life Incorporated: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back. He begins with a story in which he was mugged. After the incident he posted an account on a community message board. He received no thanks in return; instead he got complaints about lowering the property values in their gentrified Brooklyn neighbourhood.
He suggests we have conditioned ourselves to think like corporations with brands and balance sheets to protect, rather than people. The original title was “Corporatism.”
Even now, as we attempt to dig ourselves out of a financial mess caused in large part by this very mentality and behavior, we turn to the
corporate sphere, its central banks, and shortsighted metrics to gauge
our progress back to health. It’s as if we believe we’ll find the answer
in the stream of trades and futures on one of the cable- TV finance
channels instead of out in the physical world. Our real investment in
the fabric of our neighborhoods and our quality of life takes a backseat
to asking prices for houses like our own in the newspaper’s misnamed
“real estate” section. We look to the Dow Jones average as if it were
the one true vital sign of our society’s health, and the exchange rate
of our currency as a measure of our wealth as a nation or worth as a
people.This, in turn, only distracts us further from the real- world ideas
and activities through which we might actually re-create some value
ourselves. Instead of fixing the problem, and reclaiming our ability to
generate wealth directly with one another, we seek to prop up institu-
tions whose very purpose remains to usurp this ability from us. We try
to repair our economy by bolstering the same institutions that sapped
it. In the very best years, corporatism worked by extracting value from
the periphery and redirecting it to the center—away from people and
toward corporate monopolies. Now, even though that wellspring of
prosperity has run dry, we continue to dig deeper into the ground for
resources to keep the errant system running.
That’s from the Introduction, which he posted on his site and at BoingBoing (where he is guest-blogging) a couple of days ago. Here’s a video interview where he outlines his argument.
Apparently there’s going to be an online movie released on Monday. I don’t know what that means but I’ll certainly be there to see it (maybe I’ll try out my fancy new multimedia box by embedding the video up-and-on-the-right when it’s available).
Hat tip: William Harryman.
Update: the 10 minute movie is up at book’s official website. I’ve embedded it above.
I’m also thinking of doing a kind of book club for this, as an experiment. Let me know if you’re interested.
