Life Inc
Book: Douglas Rushkoff. Life Inc. How the world became a corporation and how to take it back. Bodley Head, 2009
= de-corporatizing our lives, abandoning the speculative economy, and rebuilding both commerce and community from the bottom up.
Review
1. Pat Kane:
"When faced with windy laments of civilisational decline, you can always rely on British popular culture to worm its antic way into your brain. Throughout this overstated thesis in praise of bottom-up community against top-down capitalism, I kept seeing and hearing the frightening visages of the BBC's The League of Gentlemen: "We're local people… doing local things".
Unfair, I know. But Rushkoff is so infuriatingly magisterial in this book that you reach, with some desperation, for the nearest court jester.
It's the right moment to read long-view analyses of our commercialised society. Ruskoff's Life Incorporated is as fluent and well-researched as any of his books – but its target is too large, and too badly constructed, to help us much. In a heaving rush of anti-modern sentiment, Rushkoff bundles together vast and complex trends over the last half-millenium – political, economic, scientific and cultural - into a monolith called 'corporatism'.
For him, corporatism isn't just a form of commercial enterprise cooked up by 15th century merchants and monarchs to control and standardise the varied social markets of the early Middle Ages – an account he takes, accurately, from the great French historical masters Aries and Braudel. It's also a kind of permanent civilisational war – abstraction, universalism and individualism, versus the face-to-face, the local and the communitarian.
But like a CGI-generated Transformer robot with a faulty program, the monster's pieces just don't hold together. For one thing, not all universalised standards – a brand which Rushkoff sizzles into many hides, from the first central currencies to the latest "flashy" social network – are as implicitly "fascist" as he suggests.
How about that brutal reduction of our oral traditions known as the printed book? A format so standardised, both physically and in terms of the settled national languages it regularly deploys, that it can convey the new verities of the village to audiences all round the world. Rushkoff deprecates the cultivation of interiority and subjective reflection in almost every realm except the one in which he plys his own trade.
So oppressive is the shadow of this corporate behemoth in Rushkoff's mind that the actual historical forces of resistance to capitalism and imperialism (more boring but more accurate terminologies) end up being downgraded or ignored. The Renaissance and Enlightenment is nailed for being an epistemological hand-maiden to domination by distant, centralising powers – its "clean, universal truths [keeping] people's attention and eyes upward, and off one another": a disconnection that allows David Hume to support slavery and democrats to ignore the rights of women.
But what about Romanticism? With its celebration of the organic and the rooted, its passionate feminists and early ecologists, casting off the "mind-forg'd manacles" of industrial society – and fuelled by all that nasty subjectivism?
Rushkoff's attitude to the labour movement as a corrective to the march of corporations is also, as he might say, kinda weird. He often bundles unions in with other "community-minded" groups, whose hands-on, in-the-streets sociability is swamped and subverted by a miasma of capitalist ruses – everything from housing regulations to self-help courses, never mind the obvious traps of easy credit and ad-driven consumerism.
But again, is this really a battle between local, face-to-face virtue versus universal, faceless vice? Rushkoff undercuts his own argument when he supports industry-wide collective bargaining on wages and conditions. Yes, you could see it as part of the Sabbath tradition of holy days of collective rest – but it's also a continuing modern struggle conducted (at its best) in a supra-local way.
That Rushkoff is a sinner in repentance has been evident from his last few books. He turned spy on the marketing industry that initially feted him in Coercion, urged companies to eschew consultants in Get Back In The Box, even attempted to create his own open-source version of Judaism in Nothing Sacred. But there's something particularly galling about a one-time evangelist of 'cyberia' and 'playing the future' (titles of his earlier books) who decides to wizz all over the current vibrancy of social media.
Yes, it's a battleground between the copyright enclosures of the corporations, and the frankly neo-communist behaviours of users, hackers and convivials – but there is a battle of values going on. One which shapes Californian internet platforms so much that they find themselves being used as tools for Iranian insurgents – their locality becoming our world responsibility, through (guess what?) the robustly universal protocols of the internet. In Rushkoff's Tolkien-esque, Mordor-like vision of corporatism, that simply shouldn't have been permitted.
At the beginning and the end of this book, Rushkoff evokes what's wrong and what's right about the community values of his own upstate New York neighbourhood. With children and wife in tow, the writer has been clearly moved to celebrate the immediate, the friendly, and the love-driven, from the place where he lives and nurtures. No argument there. But such bucolia can't justify Rushkoff's gross misreading of the societal structures of the 21st century. It's an ultimately disempowering account, which makes you feel (wrongly) like a deluded dupe for even trying to engage with current realities.
To paraphrase our friends from Royston Vaisey, "universal people doing universal things" (meaning not just corporate elites, but daily cosmopolitans) have to be part of the progressive picture too."
(IDC mailing list)
Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com)
2. Jonathan Lethem:
"Life Inc. is Rushkoff’s best and most important book. Few texts stand any chance of truly changing your mind, let along saving the world. This is one of them. Rushkoff’s the first to put the economic crisis in its greater historical and cultural perspective, and doing so, he reveals the underlying biases and embedded agendas of institutions we take for granted, from banking and central currency to corporations and even the suburbs.
Rushkoff really works the manner of a historical philosopher, but without any off-putting jargon or air of self-reference you’d fear encountering within the discipline–he’s writing for his readers. His fundamental gesture here is to reexamine the very meaning and use of the world-concept “corporation.” You’ll never use it again unthinkingly, nor consent to its automatic use in any conversation that’s meant to be halfway serious.
In Life Inc. we’re given a concise and acute history of corporatism, from its origins as a way for feudal lords of the Late Middle Ages to maintain their monopolies on power, to its present expression in finance industry bailouts–consistently revealing things we take for granted as inventions with purposes that may not be serving us today. In Rushkoff’s persuasive account, our acceptance of corporatism as a given leads us to internalize the values of corporations as our own. We use metrics like the GNP to measure our health as a nation, treat people as competitors or marks to be exploited, and the planet as a resource to be extracted. Each Wal-Mart purchase further bankrupts the local community, alienates us from our neighbor merchants, and makes us less likely to attend the PTA meeting.
Life Inc. is a book to give your uncle the disenchanted union organizer, and your other uncle, the soon-to-be-disenchanted Tea Party activist. Rushkoff goes beyond the left/right dialectic to show how both political parties suffer from a dependence on highly centralized solutions and an unhealthy marriage to corporate interests that know no national allegiances." (http://rushkoff.com/2011/01/18/jonathan-lethems-amazon-review-of-life-inc/)
Discussion
Author's Motivation
Douglas Rushkoff:
"I began the book about a year before the mugging incident. Originally, my purpose was to look at the economy from the perspective of a media theorist. And in doing so, I became amazed by a few things:
1. People seemed incapable of recognizing that the money they were using was just one kind of money, with very particular biases. They were relating to Federal Reserve notes as if it were the only kind of money that ever existed or could ever exist. And they seemed completely unaware of how money loaned into existence by a central bank demands that businesses and the economy grow at the rate of interest rather than some connection to supply and demand.
2. Debt had become our nation's biggest product — and it doesn't actually create any value. It's ultimately an extractive force. I always understood how our economy could support a few people who do nothing but speculate on the economy — but I was having trouble understanding how the economy could support more speculators than value creators.
3. It seemed that very few American businesses actually did anything any more. Many companies were calling me to help them communicate their brand values more "transparently" to consumers — but transparency would mean opening the companies to observation and participation. This is plainly impossible for companies that don't actually do anything. I was amazed by the dog food scandal, in which people called their dog food companies to find out if their manufacturing had been outsourced to the plant in China responsible for the poisoning. American dog food companies could not answer their customers' queries, because they just didn't know. They had outsourced their outsourcing to yet another Chinese company. They didn't even do their own outsourcing.
4. And finally, like any media theorist, I was intrigued by the fact that most people accepted the rules of our particular market as the market — as a pre-existing condition of nature, rather than a very particular marketplace developed at a particular moment in time by particular people, for reasons that may or may not be relevant or applicable to our current economic priorities.
These factors combine to make a simple deconstruction of what happened and how it happened appear to you, Julie, like an anti-corporate diatribe. I'd argue it's because these institutions seem so necessary, so much a part of nature, that merely considering their origins as human inventions is almost sacrilegious. I got really interested in just that phenomenon. Sure, people bemoan the second Starbucks opening on the same block, but that's just a question of aesthetics, for the most part. At least, as they understand it. So complaining about it is pointless venting.
Understanding it—the economics of what it means to work for a Starbucks instead of owning a local coffee shop—is very different. So I would hope to distinguish my work from, say, the movie The Corporation or Ben Barber's book Consumed, which either personify the corporation or (in Barber's case) complain about the "puerile" culture that results.
All I wanted to do was show how we got here, how this way of life was sold to us in the 20th century by the very same folks who originally saw fascism as a great idea, and why I believed it to be economically unsustainable. Remember, now, every chief economist of every major investment firm or bank I spoke with insisted that the economy was sound, and that it was bound for increasing expansion. And none of them knew what I was talking about when I asked them about the biases of the money we use. "There were other kinds of money?" they all asked, amazed.
So it was in this context that I got mugged, posted what had happened to a mailing list and got attacked for announcing the street on which it happened; people thought it would hurt the asset value of their real estate. That gave me an opportunity to realize how deeply these values had been internalized. People cared more for the short-term asset value of their houses as property than the long-term value of their houses as homes as part of a neighborhood. This simply made it even more important for me to look at the way we had become corporatized ourselves. It's not about blaming Wal-Mart. It's about looking at the way we think and act. So rather than railing against corporations (I explain why it must not be done three or four times in the book), I insist we simply understand the process through which we adopted the underlying logic of corporatism as natural law rather than a construction.
Then the crash happened — when I was about halfway through the book — and I was freed to go a bit further, and look at the next stage: the crisis is actually an opportunity. It helped everyone see this unsustainable (or even anti-sustainable) economic system more clearly, and liberated me to begin exploring the ways we can reclaim and revitalize value creation over mere value extraction." (http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=9877)
More Information
Webcasts
Long:
Short:
- Crisis as Opportunity, http://vimeo.com/4914283
- Insulation Equation, http://vimeo.com/4952627
- Money as Debt, http://vimeo.com/5021110