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Douglas Rushkoff

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back Hardcover – June 2, 2009

by Douglas Rushkoff (Author)

63 customer reviews

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This didn’t just happen.

In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.

This fascinating journey, from the late Middle Ages to today, reveals the roots of our debacle. From the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self; from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking; from the birth of the modern, self-interested individual to his exploitation through the false ideal of the single-family home; from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of MySpace–the corporation has infiltrated all aspects of our daily lives. Life Inc. exposes why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business.

Most of all, Life Inc. shows how the current financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reverse this six-hundred-year-old trend and to begin to create, invest, and transact directly rather than outsource all this activity to institutions that exist solely for their own sakes.

Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living–the operating system on which we are now running our social software–was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.

Rushkoff illuminates both how we’ve become disconnected from our world and how we can reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and, mostly, to one another. As the speculative economy collapses under its own weight, Life Inc. shows us how to build a real and human-scaled society to take its place.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Rushkoff (Nothing Sacred) offers a shrill condemnation of how corporate culture has disconnected human beings from each other. An engaging history of commerce and corporatism devolves into an extended philippic on how increasing personal wealth and the rise of nuclear families constituted a failure of community—whose services are now provided by products and professionals. While he makes some good points—for instance, about how some laws are now written to favor the rights of corporations above the rights of human beings, and the phenomenon of pro-wealth spirituality as espoused by The Secret, Creflo Dollar and Joel Osteen—he skews wildly off-course lamenting how œbasic human activity... has been systematically robbed of its naturally occurring support mechanisms by a landscape tilted toward the market's priorities. His unsupported and flawed assumption that societal interdependence is a natural or even preferable state for all people, everywhere, his disdain for filthy lucre and joyless recasting of independence as œselfishness will leave readers weary long before the end. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Since the Renaissance, the corporation—the operating system of the market—has formed and controlled people, and Rushkoff describes how it has infiltrated all aspects of American life. In the twenty-first century, we continue to consider corporations as role models and saviors but engage other people as competitors to be beaten or resources to be exploited. The author bemoans extreme networking (called buzz marketing), which makes our personal, social interactions become promotional opportunities and the lines between fiction and reality and friends and market become blurred. Our lives are overextended, and there is no time, energy, or commitment to do anything but work and perhaps consider family. Rushkoff recommends that we fight back by “de-corporatizing” ourselves. His suggestions include thinking locally by participating directly with our neighbors in community activities and using various Internet sites that provide opportunities to contribute directly to a particular school or to extend a “micro loan” to a specific entrepreneur in the Third World. This is an excellent, thought-provoking book. --Mary Whaley

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Product details

Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Random House; Second Impression edition (June 2, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400066891
ISBN-13: 978-1400066896
Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 63 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,310,301 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2168 in Corporate Finance (Books)
- #1353 in Marketing & Consumer Behavior
- #1988 in Business Ethics (Books)

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EthosInFreefall

More Documentation of How Corporatism Has Trumped Democracy

December 31, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

More documentation of how corporatism has trumped democracy and reduced the world's population to slavery to an unjust, hierarchical economic system. Our lives have literally become defined by our monetary productivity and our personhood has become secondary to the sociopathic culture of accumulation of corporatism which has become the global dominant religion. Mr. Rushkoff is an excellent author.

6 people found this helpful

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Shunka Witco

Save the World; Do Your Homework!

June 8, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book should be required reading for all Americans, starting with Corporate Heads, Bank Presidents and all Government Officials. Rushkoff brilliantly traces the roots of our present monetary system back hundreds of years, and makes crystalline clear the reasons that our present way of doing business cannot help but fail. Lucid, engaging and informative, he also offers tips and suggestions to help us undo the trap we've all been building for ourselves for centuries, and helps remove a great deal of the polarizing demonization of individuals or groups of people that has become so commonplace. Read this book, so that we can get on with the business of reversing the death-slide of corporatism and return to a way of life that values all equally and enriches rather than impoverishes.

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greg

A good read

July 25, 2010

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Although it falls short of fulfilling its title, it remains a highly informative, well-researched book. Recommended reading for everyone interested in the full depth of corporate culture and looking for alternatives.

I was attracted to the book by a radio interview by Rushkoff, in which he mentioned local currency, and its use in history as far back as the Middle Ages, particularly during the Age of Cathedrals... I bought the book primarily to follow this lead, as local currency is a particular interest of mine, and was pleased to see that Rushkoff strongly supports the use of local currency as part of the solution to our delima. I veiw local currency as the ONLY card we have to play that is powerful enough to turn the tide. After all, its the golden rule: whoever has the gold, makes the rules. With local currency, we can make our own rules and break the cycle, and we have a chance to change the big picture. Without it, we're just greenies growing gardens and shaking our fists at The Man, but we're still trapped playing the game by their rules, and the banks, corporations, and marketers will go on vaccuming the world of natural resources and exploiting our every move.

I thought the book's best point is in detailing and documenting the current state of affairs regarding the negative impact of corporatism. Rushkoff does not flinch from revealing the terrible negative impact of corporatism on our society. Second best, is coverage of the deep history of corporations back to the Renaissance, and particularly the surprisingly good conditions of life in the Middle Ages. Inaccurately called the "Dark Ages", and which numerous authoritative sources have begun to call the Not-So-Dark-Ages, or the High Middle Ages, refering to the fact that there was a much higher degree of innovation and far less repressive social structure, and even abundant wealth than we're typically lead to believe. Certainly there was serfdom and fuedalism, but it was not nearly as bad as the crushing absolute slavery that occured in later centuries, nor the blatant dehumanizing exploitation of the labor classes during the industrial age, nor the intricate debt-traps that banks have mastered in recent decades. All brought to us courtesy of corporations. Compared to that, fuedalism seems pretty mild. The High Middle Ages is a period well worth studying for anyone interested in sustainability, self-sufficiency, local currencies, and community cooperative ventures.

The book's only weak point is that it spends the majority of its time focused on explianing the problem. We know there's a problem, enough already! We want to hear the "how to take it back" part. The author's proposed solutions are barely mentioned until the final chapter, a mere 25 pages, with little detail. Given the title, I was hoping for more. Also, the legal status of Corporate Personhood, which lies at the heart of corporatism, is not mentioned even once, nor is the role of debt and usury (and the history of bans on usury) covered. All these relate strongly to the issue of corporatism.

I still recommend the book, and Im glad I bought it and enjoyed reading it...even though Im already well-versed on the topic, there's lots of interesting new information. The work is completely referenced, which makes it a good source of leads to follow.

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Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

What can we possibly share with our peers in Life Inc.?

June 15, 2009

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

The book starts with a telling anecdote: the author, Douglas Rushkoff got mugged on Christmas Eve in from of his Brooklyn apartment, and instead of getting sympathy, he was basically urged to shut up by local residents, afraid as they were that the incident would damage the reputation of their neighborhood, i.e. reduce the value of their home. "When faced with a local mugging, the community of Park Slope first thought to protect its brand instead of its people," Rushkoff writes. The anecdote is Rushkoff's starting point to analyze how, since the Renaissance, "the market and its logic have insinuated themselves into every area of our lives." He argues that they mediate every single aspect of our existence, disconnecting us from everything that surrounds us. The book is quite expectedly somewhat controversial -- yet may also be one of the most inspiring recent books for entrepreneurs and innovative marketers.

Chapter after chapter, the author recounts how charters disconnected us from commerce, how by mistaking the map for the territory, we got disconnected from place, how the real estate business disconnected us from home, public relations from one another, consumer empowerment from choice, a unified financial architecture from the meaning of currency, big business from the creation of value - and how many of our attempts to combat corporate power are likely to disconnect us even more. "Brands were invented to substitute for the real connections we had to people, places and values."

The system that we have created for ourselves through a "six-hundred-year-old-business-deal" is a "progress" that translates into a loss. The book reads like an inexorable dispossession of connectedness to people and our environment, and like a sobering appendix to the five ages of man that Hesiod outlined in Works and Days in 700 BC. From one tectonic shift to the other, we have landed ourselves in the Age of Simulacra: "Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, and mortgages became derivative instruments;" we depend on brands and ad-agencies for our self-presentation and identity; our "positive thinking" and self-confidence result from intense packaging efforts and "corporate-enabled self-improvement." We can buy Disneyland souvenirs in any shopping mall without ever having been to LA. Spiritual centers, from Esalen to the Omega Institute, are well-oiled businesses, and our speculative economy has deprived us from the ability to perceive the value we create or to even create value. Even the buzz and word-of-mouth is now mediated: "In Apple's earlier days, Macintosh enthusiasts could be counted on to go into CompUSA stores when new products were released and demonstrate their benefits to consumers. But today's brand enthusiasts are paid spokespeople, faking their loyalty for money. It's big economy. New firms such as Buzz Marketing and industry groups like WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association now conduct word-of-mouth campaigns on a scale unimaginable before." So much for our friendly social sites!

The book is phenomenally well documented and provides fantastic insights into some of the roots of the current financial debacle. The way the story is recounted is fascinating -- even if you may have questions about the angle taken by Rushkoff. One can argue that while it may be true that local trade using local currencies did foster more interactions between people and a thriving economy between the eleventh and thirteenth century, and that "real people did the best when prosperity was a bottom-up approach," the idea that the corporatist economy initiated by the Renaissance also initiated a downward spiral that all subsequent innovations only enhanced feels somewhat simplistic at times -- along with the assumption that mankind has somehow strayed from a better stage to a worse one. In the end, the evaluation of what connected/disconnectedness may depend on the frame of reference. Plato/Socrates fought the Sophists's ability to brand anything as a result of their disconnectedness from the essential, the realm of Forms and Ideas.

The book is also an insightful approach to the history of the United States, full of interesting reminders. Mirroring the techniques of the railroad barons of the century before, GM crafted the legislation that made highways federally funded and controlled - and idealized suburbs. Yes, Teddy Roosevelt, fighting corporations, may have been more progressive than FDR when the latter endorsed the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) that changed the perception of mortgages (from a stigma to a plus), but ended up empowering appraisers as they assessed the quality of neighborhoods (and this to the detriment of Jews and blacks). The magic of PRs in the country has a unique ability to reframe or gloss over history. PR artists such as George Creel and Edward Bernays enabled Woodrow Wilson, who had run for reelection in 1916 on the platform that "he kept us out of the war," to persuade everybody "to make the world safe for democracy" a year later. In the same fashion, it's stunning how fast we forgot that IBM sold punch-card tabulators to the Nazis, that GE partnered with Krupp (a German munition firm) and that GM and Ford, which already controlled 70 percent of the German automobile market, retooled their factories to supply Nazis with war vehicles. As I say that, I can only suggest that you read a few foundational books in the history of marketing persuasion (of which many currently successful marketing books are spin derivatives), mentioned by Rushkoff, especially Edward Bernays's Crystallizing Public Opinion, Public Relations or Propaganda. While at it, also read Larry Tye's book, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations. Also consider another classic: Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders or The Status Seekers. Also, Douglas Rushkoff has written several other interesting books. One of them,MEDIA VIRUS - Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, is the origin of the expression "viral marketing."

The last chapter of the book, "Here and Now," subtitled "The Opportunity to Reconnect," is in fact better than any marketing book, and may give you great ideas of companies that can make a difference. As the author reminds us in the previous chapter, PayPal's original plan was to offer an alternative payment service. True, the business model changed as Paypal activity was perceived as a violation of the banking laws. But you may have other ideas... and it's when they read scouring, abrasive books that entrepreneurs invent new rules -- and eventually might pave the way towards a new economy, or creatively revisit Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. "Like the founders of America, who may have differed on almost everything else but this," notes Rushkoff, "Smith saw economics as characterized by small, scaled, local economies working in interaction with one another."

129 people found this helpful

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Brandy

Great read!

April 22, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I bought this book for a consumer culture class. I reads like a book, not a textbook and it's very interesting. I actually plan on keeping this after the class ends.

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Rodrigo Silva

A New Perspective

November 11, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

A whole new way to see our modern day to day economic interactions. Rushkoff traces a very clear historical line of how the economic world is arranged today, and why are we so disconnected from our neighborhoods, fact that plays in favor of big centralized corporations.

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Pages with related products. See and discover other items: currency market, currency markets, currency of the world

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