Just finished perusing Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back.
Note the villain is “corporatism,” not simply corporations. Even corporations themselves are victimized; they get tilted into self-destructive acts by decision frameworks that benefit nobody — only roughly satisfying some people’s abstract sense that “the market decides” (when in fact the market is usually corrupted by asymmetries and regulatory privileges).
Rushkoff’s greatest area of strength is that he sees and articulates important nuances, knows the answers will not be simple (or even possible from an abstract level), and points out that often the best of intentions tend to perpetuate the problem even further:
We’d each like to launch a national movement, create the website that teaches the world how to build community from the bottom up, develop the curriculum that saves public schools, or devise the clever antimarketing campaign that breaks the spell of advertising once and for all. But these ego trips are the artifacts of the strident individualism we were taught to embrace. The temptation to save the whole world — and get the credit — comes at the expense of steps we might better take to make our immediate world a more fruitful, engaging, sustainable, and satisfying place…
The problem with audacious solutions is illustrated by examples such as the fact that big charitable foundations can only donate so much money at a time so most of it gets invested — which feeds back into the corporatist system that’s doing the harm in the first place.
Rushkoff ends with some positive suggestions for making society more localized and human — e.g. using more local and complementary currencies — but I can’t help wondering if those suggestions would have been most effective five or ten years ago and now we need to dig a little deeper into the popular psyche.
The underlying idea seems absolutely correct though: we need to think much more in terms of social ecology, less in terms of market economy.
I mean, I’m not “against” the market economy — what I’m against is defining our very lives by it.
I have a feeling the best practices (see: I can’t help using corporate language) will eventually be as nuanced and counter-intentional as the worst have been. Head-on assaults won’t work. We’ll have to master Jujitsu.
For example, while it might be assumed that biotechnology is part of the problem, it isn’t simply biotechnology that’s to blame, it’s the corporatisation of biotechnology. I wrote some very optimistic things about science a few weeks ago and I believe that cultivating a science-mindset (at least among those who are inclined to that) will be one important aspect (out of many) for making things better.
(Note as well that Rushkoff’s agent is John Brockman, uber-agent of the science community.)
Corporatism can be infuriatingly frustrating to think about, but we should recognize and be grateful for how many positive resources we have at our disposal. The web, for example (as Rushkoff points out). There are tremendous opportunities and endless reasons to be hopeful…
Besides, if it was easy, it wouldn’t be life.
