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 [...]
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advertising,
capitalism,
consumerism,
corporatism,
culture,
douglas rushkoff,
industrialism,
life,
life inc,
marketing,
money,
society,
sustainability
This is a more positive followup to yesterday’s post, trying to work out what the key idea or shared ethic might be for London’s economy. I’ve already expressed doubts about the “transporation hub” idea here and here. It isn’t a bad idea to beef up London’s transportation capacity as one specific part of a broader plan, but [...]
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capitalism,
cities,
constructive capitalism,
creative capitalism,
culture,
generativity,
humanism,
life,
livability,
new economy,
substance,
sustainability
My work on the LdnBeta thing really exemplifies my “learning is personal, knowledge is social” mantra. I’ve been putting an awful lot of time into it — which would seem to be a great personal loss — but it’s gratifying be stretched a little. As per Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory it’s great (for a change) to have Direct [...]
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altruism,
anticapitalism,
capitalism,
change,
cultural evolution,
ex industrialism,
industrialism,
metaphors,
post-industrialism,
selfishness,
selflessness,
society
The ideas from my last post grew out of a line of thought I’ve been running for a couple of weeks and alluded to a few times before. The gist is that capitalism and socialism/communism share a few core assumptions. They’re two varieties of industrialism. They came of age at the same time, with reference to [...]
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capitalism,
communism,
economics,
exindustrialism,
ideology,
industrialism,
socialism
As part of the Earth Hour discussion, today’s Globe and Mail has a comment piece on computers and energy use that generated some insights into the relations between socialist and capitalist attitudes. The problem isn’t so much your computer, the greater concern is massive server farms that store and route the world’s information. According to [...]
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capitalism,
earth hour,
ecoconscience,
energy,
enviromentalism,
google,
organizations,
socialism
As I was reading about the radical cultural and organizational changes at Cisco (“Revolution in San Jose,” Fast Company, December/January), I found some great insights into my questions about how ‘socialist’ our large corporations tend to be. Regardless of their possible relevance to political-economic theory, the changes at Cisco are fascinating in and of themselves. Cisco was once the largest company [...]
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capitalism,
cisco,
compensation,
economics,
markets,
motivation,
organizations,
socialism,
sociology
Great insight from Matthew Yglesias: The thing about this is that if this were generally true — if the CEOs of the Fortune 500 were brilliant economic seers — then it would really make a lot of sense to implement socialism. Real socialism. Not progressive taxation to finance a mildly redistributive welfare state. But “let’s [...]
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capitalism,
organizations,
socialism
When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, I bade my men on board and loose the hawsers. Then they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars; so we sailed on with sorrow in our hearts, but glad to have escaped death though we had lost our comrades. A famous, and [...]
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capitalism,
crisis,
economics
