Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back

by Douglas Rushkoff

Now includes “The Life Inc. Guide to Reclaiming the Value You Create”

In Life Inc, award-winning writer Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. The resulting ideology, corporatism, has infiltrated all aspects of civics, commerce, and culture—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 Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of Facebook. Life Inc explains 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 important, 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics, History, Politics, Sociology, Business, Philosophy

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Douglas Rushkoff is a New York-based writer, columnist and lecturer on technology, media and popular culture.

Reviews

[David Katzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Corporations are sociopathic entities. They are legal, abstract, intangible entities and yet they have more power in the world, in sum, than actual living-breathing humans. And these entities in-and-of-themselves have no emotions, no feelings and no morality. They do not recognize the difference between right and wrong. They are created for the simple purpose of increasing the entity’s wealth and expanding its reach by any means necessary. A corporation has no use for ethics other than how the marketing department might feel they impact public relations or brand image. Corporate managers can be sued if they take action that affects their fiduciary responsibility to the share price, no matter how ethical their decision might be. Corporations are born to be rapacious and only some degree of public (media and government) oversight prevents them from disregarding all aspects of basic decency.

Despite their cancer-like eternal focus on growth, corporations are in the long run self-destructive. They destroy the very individuals needed to support them and increase revenue. This can be attributed to the natural short-term benefit drive of the stock market. Every quarter, corporations need to show increased profit. Not just profit, but increased profit. Too many quarters of lost value and the CEO is ushered out the door. If you are looking for short-term profits then long-term side effects of any policy are irrelevant. So it’s only natural for oil companies to lie about global warming and fund politicians who deny global warming or even just slow-walk addressing global warming because it will mean a few more years of high stock prices and high returns. That’s a lot of wealth created…at least until civilization collapses due to runaway global warming and no one can afford a car or gas anymore. But hey, that’s not this quarter’s issue and this quarter the corporation needs to hit its numbers. Things that hurt humanity can actually be good for stocks. Water pollution is good because it turns water into a scarce asset class so that people can bottle and sell water and make money from it. Hiding pollution is good because it’s a way corporations can offload costs into the public via health costs versus corporate expenses of clean ups or finding new ways to produce goods that don’t pollute.

Life, Inc is a valuable read that I recommend to anyone who is concerned about the future and how we’ve gotten to this existential crisis point. Rushkoff presents an enlightening journey through the history of the creation of the first corporations, and how government policy and legal precedent has ever since been manipulated by rulers to favor corporations over local small businesses. One of the most interesting aspects to me, that I was unaware of, was how money itself was skewed to support corporations. Rushkoff is not truly anti-capitalist, he believes in the value of local commerce, but he thoroughly shows through a step-by-step process how corporations have poisoned society. And he goes beyond that to show how news media (in its numerous historical meanings), entertainment and advertising has served to create a mindset in culture that corporations are inevitable and eternal, that the only way society could exist is with corporations, and even further to imbue an inherent corporate mindset into the way we as people live.

What is an internalized corporate mindset? Rushkoff gives an example. He was mugged outside his own home in Brooklyn one day and reported the incident on his neighborhood message board (or Facebook group) because he wanted to warn his neighbors to keep an eye out and be careful. Instead of being thanked for the heads up, several neighbors berated him for publically announcing something that might hurt their property values. A home is not a place to have a good life with family. It’s an investment that must be protected and that’s more important than personal safety. Trump is a good example of how a corporate mindset has infected so many people. The man is toxic and a scam artist in every way. He did what he could to pillage the government for personal profit. And yet, he’s beloved by MAGA fans not despite this but even because of it. They see themselves in him, that given the chance, they would do anything they could get away with to get wealthy too. It’s only natural. Cheating is just winning with a different name. That’s also why gerrymandering is perfectly okay, as is installing thieves to watch over votes. Increasing the “value of your stock” is all that matters, and ethics has no place in this mindset.

Rushkoff also points out how “virtual” the economy is. Investments, commodities, derivatives. These things that create wealth are not the concrete things people need to live, they are tools for the wealthy to get wealthier. What is the solution? Unfortunately, while his diagnosis is quite accurate, his cure is rather lackluster. As one might expect when confronting the greatest economic challenge humanity faces. It comes down to…think local. He doesn’t believe much in protests or media activism, which he thinks merely attempt to use corporate tools to fight corporations. And he asserts corporations will always be more effective at using corporate tools (PR, advertising, entertainment, etc) than activists so the activists will in the long run lose this battle. Instead, he says you need to do your best to opt out of corporate business by supporting local currency, local agriculture (CSAs and such) and small businesses. It’s a good idea, but it strikes me as weak sauce. Right now, local currency isn’t sweeping the world as a trend so it seems extremely unlikely that it’s going to suddenly blossom as a way to overthrow corporations and stop the runaway train that is global warming. In fact, we’re still now fighting a rearguard action as the world slides toward more corporate fascism thanks to the Republican party and those Democrats that enable them (looking at you Manchin and Sinema).

No grand answers but it’s worth understanding the issues we face at least and this book is a highly recommended start on that path.

[Aron · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a severe disappointment. I heard Rushkoff interviewed on radio and was intrigued by his talk. Like most people interested in the book and Rushkoff's views, I am strongly opposed to the US corporate culture and economy and I thought I would be reading a well-researched, historical/economic analysis of that system. The book however turned out to be a dilettante's screed.

Let's start with the style. As some have noted the book is poorly edited, does not have a coherent structure and tends to repeat itself. One get the feeling there is quite a bit of padding to make what could have been a long article into a full length book. Worse yet nearly every chapter starts with a first-name anecdote, a common tactic of the self-help books Rushkoff viciously attacks. The purpose of these anecdotes is to humanize the ideas and make them more palatable. But it is quite obvious that while these anecdotes might be based on real events Rushkoff might have experienced or read about, they are made up stories not factual accounts of actual events. This type of writing, besides being patronizing, is essentially a form of propaganda and not intelligent analysis.

Which leads me to the main criticism - Rushkoff's thesis is based on inaccuracies and untruths. He has an argument he wants to make and he fits the facts to match his argument, not the other way around. There are multiple example in nearly every chapter. Let's start with a minor inaccuracy early on, where he confuses debits and credits with assets and liabilities. All "debit" means is the left side of the ledger and "credit" means the right side. The whole point of double-entry accounting is that debits must always equal credits, and if they don't there was an error in entry. This is purely a technical aid in ensuring accurate accounts. Profitable businesses want income to exceed expenses and assets to exceed liabilities, not credit to exceed debit (which latter makes no sense). This criticism may sound pedantic. While accounting terms are complex, if you are going to make major arguments about how double-entry accounting moved us into the world of corporate dominance, at least make sure you are using terms properly!!

Things move downhill from there. The book is riddled with propagandistic arguments. His discussion about Nash and game theory is a good example. Rushkoff can be paraphased as follows: "Nash was crazy, so his rabid support of selfishness is an expression of some lunatic schizophrenia and since game theory selfishness is used to justify the free market, it just proves free market ideology is crazy. Isn't it ironic that Reagan shut down looney bins as part of his cost cutting of big government?" There are ten different logical fallacies in his arguments made in just a few paragraphs (including ad hominem) but it also doesn't match the facts in the real world. Yes it is true that the prisoner's dilemma was first raised at the Rand Corporation and Nash did contribute some math regarding this. But the prisoner's dilemma does not equal game theory (Rushkoff uses the two almost interchangeably). The prisoner's dilemma is not at all relevant to free markets since it is a model where there is zero communication between the competitors and in Smith's classic free market all players have access to all information. In any case propagandists for the free market like Reagan didn't appeal to game theory to justify their arguments. Monetarism and its critique of Keynes is the main idea used in Reagonomics. Finally, most modern researchers agree that the optimal solution of the prisoner's dilemma involves some sort of co-operation strategy and in fact the benefits of altruism in biological and political systems is often modeled via the prisoners dilemma and other game theory models. Rushkoff presentation of this topic is the kind of argument one expects to find in a Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck kind of book, i.e. a propaganda text, not a serious analysis of the topic.

Throughout the books it seems Rushkoff makes stuff up just to prove his point. For example when he talks about coins in the Roman empire he claims money was centralized and the empire fell becaue of debased coinage. Both points are factually wrong. The emperor controlled gold coinage but local currencies were used all over the empire. Debasement of currency was actually the way several emperors propped up the empire in times of economic crisis (and if Greece could do it today it would go a long way to helping them out). The fall of the Roman empire was a quite complex process and to blame it all on centralized currency and its debasement is ridiculous.

Which bring us to this: Rushkoff's arguments are based on gross over simplifications and his totally ignoring facts and events that don't fit or contradict his thesis. Sure the late Middle Ages prior to the plague was a time of prosperity. But it was also a time when trade opened up with the East and the Crusaders' plundered the Muslims in the Holy Land. These two most likely are far more relevant to this period's prosperity as opposed to local currencies. Oh and did I mention the Crusades? To talk of this period as some sort of pastoral utopia is utter nonsense.

I kept on reading the book because I was hoping to find some semi-intelligent discussion of alternatives to corporate culture. Instead, Rushkoff insults and demeans anyone who does things differently than he would like. For example, people who work at non-profits are losers according to Rushkoff because obviously anyone who is talented and "energetic" will go work for a higher paying corporation. The idea that someone might actually take less pay to achieve something important for society just doesn't compute in Rushkoff's mental "operating system." According to him, political action is worthless because government is obviously in the pocket of corporations. Well yes, our government was equally or even deeper in the pockets of corporate elites prior and during the depression of the thirties. Yet FDR somehow managed to make changes which in fact helped millions of people and saved our collective butts in this latest crisis, depite 70 years of concerted effort to roll back all his reforms.

Of course Rushkoff is correct in stating that it's important to be involved in your local community economically, socially and politically. However, that point is so obvious that it is ridiculous someone feels the need to write a book to make it. And it has nothing to do with your attitudes towards corporate control. No matter what your political perspective, you should be out there working to make your local community, school, whatever a better place for you and your family and neighbors.

Rushkoff spends 98% of his book whining about how bad things are (even though in the second to last chapter he says himself that whining is a waste of time). He blames his own failure to fight the "system" (including publishing his book with a big corporation and his bad parenting practices), in other words he blames his own moral and intellectual laziness, on the overwhelming power of corporations to rule our lives. He totally ignores or demeans his (and our) ability to choose alternatives to how we live and act. He also totally ignores how throughout history and geography, most people never had more control than we do over the big things in life. If after all his whining in this poorly argued, poorly thought out book, Rushkoff's best advice is his idea about "Comfort dollars," then one-star doesn't begin to describe how much this books sucks.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I borrowed this book from the library, and towards the end I found no fewer than three abandoned book marks. This led me to believe that many people found this book hard to finish and in many ways I sympathise. The subtitle implies that this book will be a history lesson followed by advice on how to overthrow our inhuman corporate overlords. The former is definitely present; Rushkoff charts the history of the corporation back to the Renaissance. He explains how the corporation became a way for monarchies to rein in the new merchant class and maintain some semblance of centralised control over the new rich. However, the balance of the book is occupied with cataloguing the various evils corporations have done to us over the years (some fascinating, some well-known, some truly hideous) with very little advice offered (the promised ‘how to take it back’ part.) By way of homage, you will find that this long-winded review catalogues some of the interesting parts of Life Inc., but will not offer a recommendation or whether or not you should read it.

If you read Life Inc., it is likely you will be affected by a train of thought Rushkoff himself describes: concern becomes cynicism, becomes despair, becomes thoughts of self-preservation and insulation. The trick is to keep reading after the despair phase and I think that is where my three predecessors failed. Again, I can’t really blame them because the payoff is modest. If you do move past despair, then eerily (or perhaps not-at-all-coincidentally), you will experience the self-preservation phase shortly before reading about it.

The history is fascinating, particularly when Rushkoff takes us back to the Age of Cathedrals. He conjures up images of an idyllic period of European history before the Renaissance, the plague and the rise of the corporation. A time where the working classes enjoyed four days of work, over a hundred public holidays and arguably enjoyed better standards of health and well-being than we do today. There was no reason or sense in hoarding local currency, so businesses invested heavily in their people and physical assets. It’s a compelling view of the late Middle Ages, a period of history that I don’t feel was covered very well in my education and throws some doubt on what we consider to be 'progress'. From there, Rushkoff takes us on to the spread of centralized currency, the abuses of Philip IV and finally the plague. He turns on its head the traditional assertion that the plague led to Europe’s economic collapse, saying that in fact the switch to centralized currency decreased standards of living, started the economic collapse and the plague was the result. It’s an interesting alternative view of history that merits further study, although Rushkoff does not provide much in the way of proof so more reading is required.

Having raised doubts about our interpretation of history, the author also questions traditional economic theory and GDP in particular, pointing out that while things like cancer and divorce increase GDP, home cooked meals and socialising with the neighbours decrease GDP. So what is so great about this GDP thing anyway? And in some less developed nations, it has become clear than an increase in GDP results in a lower standard of living for the majority.

In summary, it’s an interesting book that will make you think and confirm some of your darkest suspicions but unfortunately it’s a bit lacking in answers. I imagine that the sort of people drawn to a book entitled Life Inc. might not find much new in this book, but there’s plenty of people out there that ought to read it. One more thing: don’t forget your bookmark!

[Enrique Santos · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really drawn to this book after reading the excerpts of it on Boing Boing and Rushkoff's own web site. In short, the book is about two things: how people in society came to adopt the values of corporate interests as their own as opposed to vice versa, and just how this trend can be reversed. What I feel the book suffers from is the fact that there is too much explanation of the former, and far less of the latter.

Rushkoff analyzes the role of corporations from as far back as the Middle Ages. From there, he spends a great deal of the book talking about the rise of public relations and consolidation of corporate power that became intrinsically linked with the interests and policies of national governments.

To me, a great deal of this history was a rehash of the most excellent documentary series The Century of the Self (The full series can be found on Google Video). The real gem of this work really comes when Rushkoff begins to talk about the history of currency itself and goes in-depth into the historical use of complementary currencies among communities, and how it is a trend that is picking up once more. His calls for greater community involvement and support for local organizations is also a positive message that seems very practical in today's world.

I highly advise that anyone that reads through this book take Rushkoff's analysis with a grain of salt, at times he seems to brush his view in broad strokes over a situation. So long as you're able to critically analyze his arguments and have the willingness to research further on your own, I recommend this book highly. There are many great ideas and points to consider.

I'm really glad a book like this is giving exposure to a whole lot of these ideas, even if it is flawed.

[Jenn "JR" · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my second book by Douglas Rushkoff this year -- and while still a bit on the stream-of-consciousness and rant side, I found myself agreeing to much of what he says. He's a very widely read person -- and has synthesized a history of the development of corporations and the corporatization of private life. He discusses the history of money and exchange -- and even how people were better off in the Middle Ages (before the plague) and the multiple problems caused by the growth of capitalism and corporations.

As in his other writings, Rushkoff is passionate about highlighting the dangers of dehumanizing our interactions and of detaching from one's surroundings and community. He seeks to raise awareness of these changes and foster interest in systems and processes that engender communitarianism that will reduce the control of corporations over our private lives.

"It’s not that we have to get rid of corporations or stop working through them entirely, however. They are great for making smart phones, building bridges, shipping crude oil, or developing medical devices. But they’re less effective on the local level, when people might actually be able to serve one another’s needs more efficiently, and in ways that encourage transaction, sustainability, and meaningful employment."

The book starts off fairly strong -- it's got a ton of very interesting historical information, through Rushkoff's particular lens/collection of biases -- but it does tend to slow a bit as you slog toward the end of the book. The last chapter is a bit Pollyanna-ish with effusive, bright exhortations toward acting locally, paying it forward and such.

In the e-book edition that I read, the last 30% of the book is comprised of an afterward by the author where he mentions that readers asked him to be more specific about the kinds of solutions that might make a change. He's added a comprehensive section of the kinds of systems and processes that people have created to connect, share without expectation or cash remuneration and to affect change in their worlds such as babysitting co-ops and CSAs. Or even -- rewriting the law to update the constitution of the US to protect people over corporations -- the full text from Rabbi Michael Lerner is included!

One of the challenges I have with the e-book that I read is that it does not link from the body text of the book to the endnotes at the back of the book. You'd never know they were there -- I'd love for future editions of the e-book to allow the reader to click into the endnotes and return to the original spot. That's the beauty of e-books -- and it's surprising to me that the author or his publisher didn't take advantage of this.

[Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

There have been many good books written recently about the implosion on Wall Street, the massive debt held by Americans, corporations, and the federal government, and the current recession, but few have gone into such depth about the United States and its economic and political discontents as Douglas Rushkoff's 2008 book "Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back." This book explores the history of the corporation from the late Middle Ages through the chartered monopoly of European colonialist powers to corporations being granted the rights of "persons" by an inexplicable U.S. Supreme Court decision. During the past 40 years, corporations have insinuated themselves into every aspect of American life and bought undue influence in Congress and state legislatures. Everything we own was made by corporations, and most Americans are bombarded incessantly with commercials promoting consumption (provided by corporations). As Rushkoff points out, most Americans think like corporations and cannot imagine any other world than the corporate economic system we live under. "We live in a landscape tilted toward a set of behaviors and a way of making choices that go against our better judgment, as well as our collective self-interest. ... In short, instead of acting like people, we act like corporations."

[Kara Babcock · Rating 2 out of 5]

Neuromancer remains one of the most influential science-fiction books I’ve read. It’s the kind of book that influenced me even before I had read it by influencing books and TV shows and movies that I then read or watched. However, it’s not William Gibson’s imagination of cyberspace that sticks with me. Rather, it’s his vision of a future dominated by corporations, one where governments are atrophied entities and one’s life and prosperity are dependent upon feudal loyalties to these transnational mega-corporations. Whereas the initial cyberpunk renderings of cyberspace and virtual reality seem very quaint thirty years on, corporate statehood remains a viable and fearsome proposition.

Life Inc is a non-fiction exploration of the power that corporations have and the means by which they hold onto power and gain more. Douglas Rushkoff looks at the historical antecedents of the modern corporation, exploring how corporatist philosophies developed out of old-style mercantilism. From there, he factors in the rise of individualism in the twentieth-century. Ultimately, he aims to show how corporations are alternatively self-reinforcing and, occasionally, self-defeating, but how our short-sightedness has allowed them to gain more power than they should have.

If I had read this back when I first heard about it in 2009, then I probably would have been more impressed. Since then my feelings about capitalism have changed. Whereas before I was more optimistic about the ability for regulation to rein in the excesses of capitalism, I’ve since become more radical. Now I view capitalism as an inherently unethical system that reinforces inequity, so let’s burn it all down. Rushkoff doesn’t go quite so far—he acknowledges that regulation is unlikely to be effective, at least by itself; but he isn’t in a rush to reimagine our entire system. About as far as he’ll go towards that radical end of the spectrum is to point out that we shouldn’t suffer from tunnel vision. Just because we currently have a centralized currency doesn’t mean we must always have one, for example.

As far as economic arguments go, Life Inc is a little bit all over the place. Rushkoff seems split over a chronological or thematic organization to his argument … so he kind of goes for both. Each chapter is loosely based around a theme, and then from there he delivers a historical perspective on that theme. In some cases this works fine—the first chapter, for example, is very informative. In other cases it can be confusing or repetitive. The book is also extremely American in its perspective and tone. I mean, that’s to be expected—but it’s always amusing, as a Canadian, reading an American’s writing and seeing very plainly the biases that inform it. Even as Rushkoff talks about how people too easily assume that this is the way it has to be, he’s making assumptions based on an American society that has laboured under the myth of the American Dream for over two hundred years.

The book is front-loaded, generally proceeding downhill towards its resolution with ever-dimininshing returns. The last two chapters, in particular, I skimmed. After dedicating a great deal of time to discussing how corporations, and in particular the self-help industry, target people by singling them out as individuals, Rushkoff ironically does the same: “I believe it can. And more important, you can.” And then there’s this gem:

Likewise, each tiny choice we make to take back our world leads to a long chain of positive effects.

Oh, I get it. Power of positive thinking … wait a minute. That sounds awfully similar to the Secret or those other self-help scams you were talking about earlier, Douglas.

Critiquing capitalism is easy. Coming up with solutions is hard. And to be fair, some of these community-minded solutions that Rushkoff includes are probably worthwhile ventures. But again, so much here assumes a kind of homogeneous, middle-class, white privilege in the reader: “You are an upper-middle class white guy with a university degree and a steady but not amazing income. You might be married or about to get married, and you want to make your community a slightly less corporatized place.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is very little fire to this book, because like it or not, Rushkoff has benefitted a great deal from the way our society is currently set up. That’s one of the largest differences between a book written by a member of the dominant group and a book written by someone who has experienced more oppression—both books can be accurate critiques, but one is going to be more dry and academic and the other will necessarily have more passion. Rushkoff delivers a lot of fact and a lot of opinion, but it’s the same kind of opinion I largely have on these things: opinion formed from careful and reasoned judgement and study rather than lived experience. While that doesn’t make our opinions less valuable, I think sometimes it makes them less interesting.

So like I said, if I had read this in 2009, I’d be all over Life Inc. If you are just getting started in questioning capitalism or corporatism, Rushkoff is going to walk you through it. And this is such an important issue. So you could do much worse here.

Nevertheless, there’s just so much that this book isn’t that it could have been. While there are plenty of gems, accurate criticisms, and interesting historical tidbits, you have to wade through a lot that isn’t so interesting to get to them. Life Inc reminded me of all the many reasons I’m not fond of corporatism, and it gave me some fresh perspective on some of the reasons corporations are as powerful as they are today. But it’s a long way from becoming any kind of bible on the subject.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written in 2009 as the disastrous effects of the '08 crash were rippling through the economy and ruining lives through unemployment, foreclosure, etc. A lot of what he says still holds true, but the unemployment rate has since gone down, and things have more or less returned to normal. Still, the new normal is often jobs in the gig economy, which many times offer no benefits and instead are quite uncertain. Good-paying steady jobs are scarce - especially in areas devastated by the departure of manufacturing jobs.

The author says that corporatism - exclusivity, monopoly, and the hold that big business has on government - explains why ordinary people cannot get ahead, while more and more wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few. He explains how corporatism started - royal chartered companies - and how even banking extracts wealth from the masses, which is then controlled by those who head up the big banks.

He gives examples of what suffering communities can do to still function despite the absence of jobs/money - discussions that sounded familiar to me about ten years after the crash, when people were discussing alternative currencies, time banks, and so forth. With the reduced rate of unemployment much of that talk disappeared since people again have money to spend, and credit cards to max out. The advent of the gig economy though facilitated by the universal adoption of smart phones/apps makes this recovery different from past ones in that although there is a low unemployment rate, it masks the precarious quality of employment for many, masks the fact that jobs often don't pay enough to survive on - as costs continue to outstrip wages.

Unfortunately, the book lacks something - either clarity or concision, although much of what he says makes sense, the writing style wasn't particularly enjoyable. I slogged through it. I can't say why this was so - may have something to do with the author's sentence structure, or editing.

Anyway, here are the quotes:

From the Introduction:

"...gentrification does not occur ex nihilo. ...when property values go up, so do the rents.... The residents in the neighborhood do not ... participate in the renaissance, because they are not owners. They move to outlying areas."

"Instead of collaborating with each other to ensure the best prospects for us all.... we act like corporations."

"...instead of "chartered corporations" pioneering and subjugating an uncharted region of the world, it was hipsters, entrepreneurs, and real-estate speculators subjugating an undesirable neighborhood. The... indigenous population simply became servants (grocery cashiers and nannies) to the new residents."

"The mortgage banker...provides instruments that get a person into a home, then disappears when the rates rise through the roof, having packaged and sold off the borrower's ballooning obligation to the highest bidder."

"...the world were..pushing us toward self-interested, short-term decisions, made more in the manner of corporate share-holders than members of a society."

"...there are products and professionals to fill in where family and community have failed us."

"...any vestige of civic engagement or neighborly goodwill has been replaced by self-interested goals manufactured for us by our corporations and their PR firms."

"...an ideology that has the same intellectual underpinnings and assumptions about human nature as...mid-twentieth-century fascism."

"...the managed capitalism of Mussolini's Italy..."

"...the same deep suspicion of free humans."

"Instead of depending on a paternal dictator or nationalist ideology, today's system of control depends on a society fastidiously cultivated to see the corporation and its logic as central to its welfare, value, and very identity."

From Chapter One: Once Removed: The Corporate Life-Form

"...the corporation...first chartered by monarchs..."

"...from the beginning... to suppress lateral interactions between people or small companies and instead redirect any and all value they created to a select group of investors."

"Florence...became the birthplace of the first "limited partnership" firms."

"... the emphasis of business would shift from the creation of value by people to the extraction of value by corporations."

"...the embedded bias of the charter itself: to maintain the central authority of the state while granting monopoly power to the corporation."

"By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, monarchs were unflaggingly catering to the merchant corporations that fed them."

"The East India Company lobbied..for laws that would help it quell any competition from the colonists."

"Laws forbidding colonists to actually fabricate anything from the resources they grew and mined made self-sufficiency or local economic prosperity impossible."

"The American Revolution ... was less a revolt by colonists against Britain than by small businessmen against the chartered multinational corporation writing her laws."

"Thomas Jefferson considered "freedom from monopolies" one of the fundamental human rights."

"...leading industrialists funded public schools--at once gifts to the working class and powerful tools for growing a more docile labor force."

"The anti-Semitic diatribes [Henry] Ford published formed the foundation of the Antisemitism incorporated by Hitler into his book "Mein Kampf.""

"American corporations from General Electric to the Brown Brothers Harriman bank either funded the Nazis directly, or set up money-laundering schemes on their behalf."

"Bernays...like Ford...believed that the masses were too stupid to make decisions for themselves--particularly when they involved global affairs or economics."

"Instead of letting them rule themselves, an enlightened..elite would need to make the decisions, and then "sell" them to the public in the form of faux populist media campaigns. This way, the masses could believe they were coming up with these opinions themselves."

"...get people to believe in corporations as the great actors of civilization, and in consumption as the surest path to personal fulfillment."

"...use television to stoke desires, and factories to fulfill them."

"...consumers ... appetites were ...whetted by commercial television."

"World's Fairs in 1939 and ... 1964... offered ... a benevolent corporation..."

"American-style corporatism would create a bright future for us all."

"...motivate production, stimulate consumption assimilate impediments."

"...our technologies now serve to disconnect us..."

"...customer service...dependency augurs a regression on our part, and a transference of parental authority onto ...corporations that recalls our ancestors' allegiance to emperors and high priests."

From Chapter Two - Mistaking the Map for the Territory

"As the market in property grew...land--and the labor done to it--became more a commodity than a system of interdependence."

"...monarchs hoped to extract as much value as possible from the colonies..."

"The English East India Company ignored...markets [that ] already existed...dissolving local cultures and business relationships..."

"American colonies were permitted to grow cotton, but not to make clothing from it. It had to be shipped to England for manufacture, and then purchased back in finished form."

"...revolution--but to attack a chartered corporation meant facing the army of the empire that underwrote it."

"...the American Revolution was just one of the first in a long series of anti-colonial movements that included the birth of many American, Asian, and African nations."

"...in the late 1940s...Foreseeing the need for a postcolonial world order, the Allied nations sent delegates to a meeting ...in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 to figure out a new global monetary system."

"The U.S. ...free markets and monetary leadership. Everyone else's currencies would be pegged to the dollar, and the world would enjoy open markets, which benefited the U.S., as the economy poised to grow the most. The meeting established the International Monetary Fund, set up the World Bank, and laid the foundations for...the World Trade Organization."

"By accepting the loans...borrower nations would be obliged to open themselves to rules of free trade as established by the international lending community at Bretton Woods. This made them vulnerable to a new style of the same... colonialism. Taking a loan meant opening one's ports to foreign ships, and one's markets to foreign goods. It meant allowing foreign corporations to purchase land within a country, and to compete freely with any domestic company."

"...colonialism...new school uses bank loans, currency, and membership in the international community. The World Bank and the IMF impose policy prescriptions on the nations to whom they lend money, all geared toward opening their markets to the interests of foreign corporations. When they fail to make their ...payments, these nations are subjected to "structural adjustments" that increase the resources they must commit toward repayment of the debt."

"The World Bank...as ... loan shark ...while the IMF plays the menacing debt collector---backed by First World armies and their intelligence agencies."

"...protests...were ridiculed by most American, British, and German media as the work of unfocused, untidy, and uninformed peole, afraid of the globalized future."

"Wal-Mart is leveraging what used to be comparative advantage by sourcing products in China and selling them in the U.S. -- where nothing but credit is produced in return."

"International trade offers a means for businesses to circumvent democratic oversight, regulation, and labor laws."

"Wal-Mart...colonizing new regions for stores amounts to a scorched-earth policy that leaves financial and social ruin in its wake. Wal-Mart monopolizes new territory by pricing items below cost and rendering local merchants incapable of competing. Once the competition goes out of business and the community is dependent on Wal-Mart, the corporation raises prices to more profitable levels."

"...Wal-Mart purchases 85 precent of its merchandise from overseas, and is consistently associated with sweatshop scandals..."

"...erode regional stability and self-sufficiency in order to conduct the long-distance trade at which Wal-Mart excels. ...turns its home territories into colonies, robbing them of their ability to generate value for themselves and creating greater dependence on the colonial empire."

"...the vast majority of American, and , now, European counties have succumbed to or even welcomed their own colonization by international branded retail stores."

[SALEM · Rating 4 out of 5]

يبدأ الكاتب بقصة عن حضوره لجريمة سرقة بالاكراه كان في محل بقالى في احدى شوارع مانهاتن. ثم يكتب تدوينة مفصلة عن الحادثة و عن مشاعره المضطربة. ثم يذكر عرضا عنوان هذا المحل.

تأتي للكاتب ردود على التدوينة معربة عن ضيقها من نشره لعنوان المحل و الشارع الذي حدثت فيه الجريمة لأن ذلك "سيخفض قيمة العقارات في المنطقة" لأن الشارع سيتم وصمه بانتشار الجريمة فيه

يدرك الكاتب ان هناك خطب ما حصل للبشرية نتيجة لوضعها لحسابات المكسب و الخسارة فوق كل اعتبار بشري آخر و من هنا يقرر كتابة هذا الكتاب و كيف بدأتالشركات و كيف بدأت في السيطرة على كل مناحي الحياة من حولنا....

كيف بدأنا نرى في الشقة ، فرصة للاستثمار العقاري و نراقب اسعار البيع و الشراء في المنطقة للتأكد من ان سعر الشقة يزيد مع الوقت... في حين ان الشقة بالاساس هي مكان للسكن (بمعنى الراحة و الاحتماء من العالم الخارجي) و ليس مشروع هادف للربح !!!

كتاب ممتع لمن يبحثون عن تتطور الحياة التي نملكها اليوم عبر تغير الأحداث التاريخية المتلاحقة

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those who control history control the future and in Life Inc. Douglas Rushkoff makes his mark on our future by detailing the history of Corporate Capitalism as the political and economic reality of the modern world. After evolving over hundreds of years into its current form, Corporate Capitalism is now taken so thoroughly for granted that few even question the basic mythology behind it. Rushkoff was jarred into this revelation after being mugged outside his home and being told by neighbors to keep quiet because it might hurt property values. His fellow homo sapiens were becoming dispassionate economic actors instead of human beings. The unquestioning behavior towards the value system of Corporate Capitalism is compared to waking up with Microsoft Windows on every computer, and every computer you've ever known.While nations and economies thrived using alternate models of economic transaction, the course of history has resulted in our particular economic arrangement. Rushkoff succeeds in tracing a clear and coherent history uncovering how arbitrary the rules of the modern economic game truly are.

As corporations gained power in the Colonial era they changed places into 'territories' and people into 'labor', solidifying the power of the state to grant monopoly power to the corporations. Ultimately, everything and everyone could be colonized for profit, fueling European colonialism and establishing corporatism as the basis for a new continent. This new classification of human interaction created a value system that extended to every aspect of human life. Rushkoff draws a distinction between the division of labor and specialization of labor, in doing so he reveals a major flaw in our valuation of specialization. We would think a society of trained merchants, managers and laborers are more specialized than one of self-taught artisans and inherently entrepreneurial shop-owners but managers didn't want to hire highly skilled labor which could demand higher wages. The managerial classes standardized processes as to hire the least qualified and most replaceable laborers around. This activity favored generalization instead of specialization: the basis for the modern education system. A modern education system designed by people like Stanford professor Ellwood P. Cubberly created a curriculum to produce "mediocre intellects" for a docile citizenry. The model for this education was one of the factory where, "the raw product (of children) are to be shaped and fashioned according to the specifications laid down." My own thought is that by creating a population of generalists, we create individuals that have no specific knowledge, no actual ability to create a tangible good or to experience the inherent pleasure of such creation. This is an insecure individual and one with an inherent fear of survival imposed on them by the scarcity in a compounding interest based monetary system.

Even the original American Revolution was one against corporatism, as the Tea Party slogan of "No Taxation without Representation" was primarily about Britian's tax laws which removed barriers to trade and allowed the East India Company to destroy the colonial economy. The irony is that our modern Tea Party movement shares the same angst as the original one but without the clarity of understanding the connection between Corporatism and their frustration. In the United States, corporatism was held mostly in check until the landmark 1886 decision of Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Company. This case established the ability for corporations to claim all the rights of personhood granted under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, a law ratified to ensure the rights for former slaves. Over the next 25 years 307 14th Amendment cases went before the US Supreme Court and 288 of them were brought by corporations. With this as a precedent, money became equivalent to speech, so corporations could obtain their 1st Amendment right to free speech by spending money. Since 1944 when the US set the rules of the global economic game with the Bretton-Woods agreement which established the US Dollar as the global reserve currency, the policy of Corporatism has been international. We've dragged the rest of the world along, yielding a race to the bottom as municipalities and then nations competed to offer corporate handouts for attracting major companies. We've demolished local economies and land with the scorched earth policy of Wal-Marts and other big boxes.

The corporation has built a mythology so transcendent it has disconnected us from the world of true science, technology, ecology and thought. As Rushkoff notes, "Corporatism depends first on our disconnection. The less local, immediate, and interpersonal our experience of the world and each other, the more likely we are to adopt self-interested behaviors that erode community and relationships." We become the rational dispassionate economic man the corporations need us to be for their survival, and in doing so we become ever more dependent on their services, confirming in our own minds a subconscious subscription to the ideals of the system. We were told the perfect society is one we could own a stake in, through owning a home and a car and our own piece of suburban perfection. As Walt Whitman wrote, "A man is not a whole or complete man unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on." This was a directed goal because it was the burden of home ownership which, "chained a man to the factory where he worked." A focus on home ownership drove a seperation of classes and produced much of the wealth disparity in the US today.

Ultimately, the myth that we are all free to compete for the great prizes the free market has to offer prevents us from conferring about the value of the system itself. Divided and conquer, as a people but mostly as a mental environment. And so we are stuck with branding instead of the relationships we used to have with real people and their craftsmanship. We are piled in droves towards others with similar brand loyalties and the public discourse is standardized by using the media to speak to "individuals". We've removed everything of value from its context and in doing so we've removed the sense of awe that is a product of its uniqueness. Even the quest to find our place in the world while recognizing the power of being human has been co-opted by a spirituality that is derived from corporate values. From L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz where Dorothy could have whatever she wanted as long as she believed, to the modern obsession with The Secret, we've developed the purist spiritual expression of consumerist culture: a disembodied other delivering whatever we want when we want it.

A questioning and curious mind is culled with the depravity of modern intelligensia as dominated by the de-facto standards of a corporate value system. Surely there must be more to this world? Fear not, economists have explored it and found, as in Freakonomics, that maximized utility is surely the primary drive behind human actions. Malcom Gladwell offers spiritual and intellectual comfort for modern persuasion professionals with advice to classify our fellow humans for finding Tipping Points and harnessing snap judgements with Blinks. When we think Wal-Mart succeeds because it is efficient, it only does so because it has access to speculative markets beyond the reach of local shopkeepers. In reality, the Fortune 500 are just names on huge piles of debt. Adam Smith and his invisible hand were regulated by the pressures of neighbors and social values, not abstract speculation on derivatives and demolished trade barriers.

In the modern era corporations became giant externality generating machines, displacing liabilities as fast as possible to increase profits and our natural world suffers. Yet, the primary discourse regarding economies treat them as a natural system, ignoring that it is itself but a man-made system imposed on an ecosystem. Fiat currency has become the operating system which runs this game but has faded to the background so that we no longer think about. We can only think of one system of money despite the existence of many others throughout history. The most valuable piece of Life Inc. are the historical accounts of jealous monarchs which outlawed local currencies based on tangible grain stores in medieval towns to regain power through their coin of the realm.

As the Corporate Capitalist systems which have driven economic reality and moderated human life continue to break down, Life Inc. provides a guide to understanding that our species has survived and thrived in many alternative economic arrangements. This is a powerful book which dispels an unconscious acceptance of the corporate value structure and outlines a path towards returning to authentic human interactions once again.

[Sean Goh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read his later book (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus) for a more developed thesis.
The one found here is still quite raw and repetitive. Still, there's stuff that is phrased well. Probably not going to read anymore of his upstream books anymore.

___________
Corporatism depends on our disconnection. The less local, immediate and interpersonal our experience of the world and each other, the more likely we are to adopt self-interested behaviours that erode community and relationships.
This makes us more dependent on central authorities for the things we used to get from each other; we cannot create value without centralised currency, meaning without nationally known brands, or leaders without corporate support.

Unlike comparative advantage, externalising costs is not about giving people the jobs they do best, or using land in a manner consistent with natural climate and topology. It's more a matter of giving the lowest-paying and most dangerous jobs to people who don't have the means the complain-or who are so far away that we couldn't hear them if they did.

Railroad barons and real estate speculators realise the synergistic nature of transport and property. Hence the suburb, whose spread was accelerated by the automobile.
But these cars needed a highway network. So GM lobbied the government, saying roads were a national defence issue.
According to senator Gaylord Nelson: 75% of federal transportation spending has gone towards highways, while 1% has gone towards mass transit. Public funds were used to render public space more accommodating to the most private of vehicles.

The housing bubble had little to do with buying pressure, and everything to do with an excess of capital looking for people who might borrow it. Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt.

The more abstract our relationship to home and hearth, the more dependent we became on metrics such as real estate appraisals to gauge our happiness and social situation. The real estate map became the territory.

Researchers observed that shortly after entering a mall, a person's expression went blank. The jaw dropped, the eyes glazed over and the shopper's path became less directed. This phenomenon, named the Gruen transfer, was defined as the moment a person changes from a customer with a particular product in mind to an undirected impulse buyer.
Places such as the Strip in Las Vegas or New York's Times Square create the Gruen transfer in an outdoor environment, with the flashing lights and massive screens.

Public relations was invented by corporate publicists to present "facts" to promote corporate interests to individuals through the national media-and thus direct the group mind.

By removing something from its original context or setting, we kill the sense of awe that we might attach to its uniqueness. The pilgrimage to the work of art and the specific location where the encounter takes place makes for a sacred event.

The idea is to catch consumers when they are most vulnerable to trying something new- to adopting a new myth. This tends to happen along with a major life change or loss: marriage, the birth of a baby, a life-threatening illness, the death of a parent or spouse, menopause and so on. Like an opportunistic cult or a pump sizing up teenagers at a bus station for signs of parental abuse, he sizes up psychological groups for their vulnerability to a new brand pitch, then tells corporations where and how to focus their efforts.
In a similar way, organised religions target freshman college students during their very first weeks away from home, hoping to draw lapsed members back with promises of moral certainty, a return to simpler times, or even safe, God-approved sex.

On the voyeuristic nature of reality TV: "ordinary people... without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. But who grants us permission to delight in the pain of others? Who absolves us of the attendant guilt? Why, it's the sponsor, whose ad for a national, wholesome brand interrupts the proceedings at just the right moment and bestows on them its seal of approval.

By eliminating any possibility of allegiance between employees , the store ensures that any loyalty will be paid upwards instead.

The principles of the intentionally corporatised workplace are not embedded in the human genome, nor is self-interested behaviour an innate human instinct. Is anything, it is the other way around: a landscape defined by the competitive market will promote self-interested behaviour.

The real, "first" Renaissance was a period of bottom-up prosperity and abundance facilitated by the coexistence of multiple currencies. The latter Renaissance was really just the end of the plague.

For every thread of the social fabric worn bare by the friction of modern alienation, the market has risen with a synthetic strand of its own.

Most of the Fortune 500 companies are just names on mountains of debt.

The problem of all this outsourcing isn't simply the loss of domestic manufacturing jobs, however painful that might be to those in factory towns. The bigger problem is that outsourcing companies lose whatever competitive advantage they may have had in terms of personnel, innovation or basic competency. During the dog food poisoning crisis in 2007, when companies were asked where they were sourcing their dog food from, many couldn't answer. They had outsourced their outsourcing to another company in China.

The evolution of the internet recapitulates the process through which corporatism took hold of our society. Eyeball hours served as the natural resource that became a "property" to be hoarded. People and groups became "individuals" all with their own web pages and Myspace profiles to be sold to market researchers. Computers - once tools for sharing technological resources - mutated into handheld iPhones that reduces formerly shared public spaces to separate bubbles of private conversation and entertainment.

We cannot market our way out of corporatism. While joining a big cause or a national political campaign may feel good for a moment, it can easily turn immediate, local, and actionable problems into great big abstract ones.

Real people doing real things for one another - without expectations - is the very activity that has been systematically extracted from our society over the past four hundred years through the spectacular triumph of corporatism. And this local, day-to-day pleasure is what makes us human in the first place.

[William Wren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited when I first picked up Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. I confess I expected it to articulate ideas and feelings I had, hopefully better than I could, and also flesh them out so they were more substantial. Yes, I was doing something I complain others do: looking for opinions that affirm my own rather than challenge them.

In many ways, the book does all that. I also think it’s an important book, at least its thesis is important: that corporatism has so ingrained itself in our lives, in our very thinking and seeing, that we’ve become corporations ourselves. At least, we see the world through corporate defined eyes. Whether others agreed with this idea or not was irrelevant, in a sense. I thought it important to see the world from this perspective because we seldom stop and think about why we live and think as we do and what its meaning might be.

But the book’s tone undermines all that. As Publishers Weekly puts it, “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.”

Each chapter starts well, but a strident, proselytizing tone soon creeps in and it is off-putting, to put it mildly. I also found myself questioning some of the interpretations and conclusions. If the book were a Wikipedia entry, I think there would be a number of places where the note, “citation needed” would appear. In some cases, there were supportive footnotes but in others, no – they were just conclusions Mr. Rushkoff drew having interpreted information a particular way.

Overall, the book is pretty humourless and annoyingly earnest. And that means the book’s good points – its research, the information it provides, its fundamental argument – all get lost in its obvious politics.

There is Mr. Rushkoff’s fundamental argument about the focus on the individual moving us away from the idea of community. It appears reasonable except when it’s put almost exclusively in terms of a kind of a corporate conspiracy to separate us and transform us. Are there no other possible reasons for the individual focus? For the disappearance of community? Have we lost the notion of community or is the idea of community a much broader one? I know many people who would find the elimination of communities a dubious assertion. And I’d question the example of unions as community (some seem pretty corporate to me). I think Mr. Rushkoff’s definition of community is a very limited one.

I suppose I’m saying there is an imbalance in the book. There is also the unstated belief in some kind of golden age when we had it right, whatever “it” is. It feels as if the argument was decided upon then material was gathered to confirm it, rather than explore whether or not it held water. The book becomes more polemic than anything else.

My biggest frustration, however, is in the feeling that what is of value in the book is lost by the tone and approach. When young people (or anyone) worry about personal brands, when corporations and everyday schmoes are involved in charities as ways to support their brand or when (to use Mr. Rushkoff’s example) we’re more concerned about our property value than our personal safety … surely something ain’t right?

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to the complete version of this, read by the author (whose high voice adds to the overall peevishness of the work) and found it very interesting and engaging throughout. Rushkoff takes the corporation and holds it up to scrutiny. He loosely traces its history, along with that of money (as we commonly use the term), and interweaves this with a free-flowing discussion of culture and community through the centuries. The corporation is evil, he seems to believe, and the source of much that is wrong with the world. Actually my feeling is that his real target is greed in all of its forms. Like most leftist intellectuals (and I'm not one of their opponents btw) he dislikes arrogant, greedy corporations and idealizes small, intertwined communities that are relatively free of big business.

I probably would have given this four stars except that my hunch is that Rushkoff plays a little fast and loose with the facts. I am not a historian and I didn't check any of his assertions, but he makes a lot of them, some of which seemed half-baked to me. There is much about this book that is attractive and engaging, however. There are a lot of good anecdotes, some of them springing from the author's own experiences, and a lot of asides (bravo for taking a swipe at Malcolm Gladwell who really makes some wild assertions). He covers a lot of ground and shifts between topics, but does so smoothly. The ideas are all grounded in history or contemporary reality, and things never get boring or pedantic.

Rushkoff is no theorist. No, in actuality he is a a complainer - and that is not bad. Someone should complain about things that are not right, and there is much to legitimately bemoan about our current corporate culture. It concentrates wealth in the hands of a very few, and it stealthily sells people lots of ephemeral junk. But Rushkoff's view fails to take into account the sad facts that greed and abuse, as well as goodness, can take place on both large and small scales. In fact the victim of such behavior in a small community may have very little recourse and nowhere to turn, whereas in a big, modern society there are always other options. The author has something to offer along the lines of offering ways to resist corporate dominance, such as his idea of bringing back the pre-Renaissance practice of using local currencies for certain kinds of transactions (since the corporate octopus has the money system rigged to benefit itself), but for the most part his stock of suggestions (the take it back part) is pretty slim.

Rushkoff is also a good non-fiction storyteller, and a sincere one. I liked hearing about salespeople in jewelry stores, and average folks at get-rich-quick conventions headlined by Donald Trump, and how Starbucks refused the request of the leader of Ethiopia to use his country's name on their coffee because they wanted the branding benefits for themselves. Rushkoff utilizes these narratives (and many others) in support of an attractive and idealistic vision. I would certainly read/listen to more of his critiques of contemporary society.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I may rank books, on average, a bit on the higher side than some others, but trust me — if you're politically progressive like I am, this book deserves it indeed.

Rushkoff has a great paean for truly being ourselves without buying into corporate-driven cults of "individuality." With the rise of social media, this message is more true and more necessary than ever. Rushkoff notes that most "branding" into which we are sucked is driven by corporations.

Corporatism goes beyond that, though. It goes to government-corporation interlocks, which shouldn't be surprising to true progressives.

When we not only have holding companies controlling holding companies, as in the run-up to the Depression, but we have outsourcing companies outsourcing some of their own outsourcing, we should look carefully at the corporate "patriotism" of buying from American-owned companies, too, Rushkoff says. (And, yes, in the wake of Mitt Romney, you read that exactly right — companies that specialize in outsourcing jobs to places like China outsource some of their own outsourcing!)

That said, Rushkoff did have some new information for me on the way money systems are controlled in our modern world, vs. parallel local and long-distance money supplies that existed centuries ago. Related to that, he invites us to rethink just how good the High Middle Ages, i.e., the trecento and quattrocento, were, and to think about what we might learn from them.

The "solution" isn't unplugging. The solution is, whether in cyberspace or meatspace, to examine the messages we're being given and why, and act accordingly.

And, part of is carefully examining just how deep those corporate messages run. To illustrate that, Rushkoff starts the book with scenes from a wealth seminar he attended, where people were supposedly being given "the secret" of how to get rich on repossessed houses, etc. The tragedy of tragedies was that many of the attendees had recently lost their own homes, often on subprime mortages, but were still suckers for the same marketing that had hooked them before.

[Raluca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kings created corporations, corporations created governments, replaced communities and isolated us under the guise of independence and self-sufficiency. We now express our identities through brands and media channels. Centralized money is biased towards accumulation rather than investment, bringing everything to a standstill. Hell, it even half-caused the plague in the Middle Ages! And if we try to solve world problems, that's 'cause corporations have taught us to think too highly of ourselves; a more reasonable goal would be small-scale change in our neighborhood.
That's the summary, more or less. I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it raises very interesting, mostly well-argumented points about how capitalism and consumerism created or crept into every aspect of life. Also, the stories from get-rich-quick conferences are absolutely chilling. On the other hand, it almost completely ignores any positive aspect of the stories it tells; "coming from" Harari's balanced and nuanced Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, I really felt the difference. There's also an irksome current of "you fools, allow me to show you the truth while mocking you" in the text, and the one chapter of "we can still fix it, kind of" after 8 chapters of "we don't even realize how doomed we are" did ring a bit fake.
Or maybe it just ruffled my feathers because it blames businesspeople (and marketers in particular) for all that is wrong with the world. I somehow feel obliged to recommend it to my students.

[Andrew]

So I suppose Rushkoff is at heart a polemicist, and a very good one. This isn't really new material for me-- I read a lot of anti-capitalist screeds, so when Rushkoff references Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, and Deleuze I say "but of course!" And his criticisms of the world of social media, the American cult of the individual pleasure principle, and the corporatization of daily life are my own complaints as well. So on this front, I enjoyed reading him, even if he was preaching to the choir.

It's when he fields solutions that he runs into problems. The solutions he suggests are community-building, specifically non-corporate enterprises. Which are beautiful and valuable, but ultimately, I'm rather skeptical that they will do anything to combat a totalizing corporate reality. Something tells me an injection of class analysis would provide a broader range of remedies to a stultifying corporatism.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

(I listened to the Audible edition, read by the author.) Tremendously insightful, and enormously challenging to our most fundamental collective assumptions about the way the world works. I was not able to wrap my brain around everything Rushkoff had to say, so I'll probably need to listen to it again. Also, it's hard not to get demoralized while listening to Rushkoff tear down one institution after another and expose the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to correcting the flaws in the system. He offers some hope at the end, but it takes real resolve to listen and try to absorb everything he has to say. I recommend the book highly, but only if you're ready to have your whole worldview turned inside out and upside down.

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rushkoff's incredible critique of capitalism and corporatist values. A lot to digest, and although not always scholarly enough for some readers it was perfect for me. From medieval history to the concept of competing currencies, it's not the usual left-wing book. The system does indeed need to change.

Reads very current and everything that's happened in the past few years confirms Rushkoff's conclusions more than ever... I'm looking forward to reading Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus next.

[Cullen Haynes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very timely, provocative and urgent look at how our world has been etching towards a corporatised structure.

In a rather humorous anecdote on the capitalistic side of human nature, the book opens up with award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff being mugged outside of his apartment on Christmas Eve.
After deciding to post a friendly warning on his community facebook page, instead of warmth, pastoral care or concern, the responses quite vehemently castigated for potentially harming the local real-estate market; the worth of the area was of more paramount important rather than the health and wellness of residents.

Rushkoff deep dives into how corporatism has become an intrinsic part of our everyday choice, opinions and lives. He demonstrates how this system created a world in which almost everything can be commodified, where communities themselves have slowly evolved into consumer groups and where the realms of reality and fiction have become fundamentally blurred.

One should, of course, take this book with a pinch of salt, however with this system on the verge of collapse as per Rushkoff, he offers his own insights as to how simple pleasures that make us human can point the way to freedom. Think Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden', for the modern day.

Look after one another and happy reading all.

CPH

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with most of what Rushkoff had to say. In fact, sometimes I believe he didn't go quite far enough in his argument. Corporations have bankrupted America--fiscally, socially and nutritionally. One major purpose of a centralized government is to rein in the power of corporations. Our government has been in the thrall of corporations long before I was born. Every bit of progress that we might make in healing our bodies, our environment and our social networks will be made in opposition to the corporate powers that be. The first step is to understand how they have taken over our life. This book will help.

[molosovsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grandiose Lektüre, auch Dank ausführlicher Anmerkungen und Quellenangaben. Massig Hinweise auf weitere Bücher gesammelt, vor allem zur Geschichte des Geldes, des Währungswesens und der Unternehmensgeschichte. Rushkoff arbeitet deutlich heraus, wie sich im Lauf von Generationen viele ›pragmatische‹, systemische Entscheidungen im Verbund mit ideologischen Voreingenommenheiten aufsummieren können zu einer Gesellschaftsform, in der rechtliche Fiktionen mehr Macht und Möglichkeitsraum einnehmen, als natürliche Personen.

[Geraldine Dwlf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Living in the US, the role big corporations play in society is undeniable. In an ordinary city you’ll need your car to go everywhere (due to successful lobbying of the car industry to create suburbs and highways) and almost all restaurants/shops are chains because they get acquired by the big corporations eventually (or they disappear).
Our economy is set up in a way that favors corporations, and they have to create maximum value for their shareholders - which often translates into outcomes like more pollution, lobbying for less regulation, less overall happiness (but hey at least the completely random KPI of GDP is still increasing).

I found the content of the book interesting (clearly from all the notes). However, the way the book was written, felt very cynical to me, it was quite data-packed and no real solutions were offered.

[Tippy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A banks' credit schemes fail, we authorize our treasuries to print more money on their behalf, at our own expense and that of our children. We then get to borrow this money back from them, at interest."

Okay. I'm going to write about this one chapter at a time because there's too much in here to wait until the end.

Introduction: Loved the opening story about getting mugged, reporting it, and getting bitched out by his neighbors for "reducing property value." It was a great illustration of one of his central points; that houses are an investment now, not a safe haven (he later discusses the desire for this bit of isolation as well) or a shelter. I also did not know about the McDonald's ads playing on emergency speakers in school buses.

Chapter 1: Half way through this, I was thinking about putting the book down for good. I was convinced by my husband to try one more chapter and I was glad that I did. This chapter is really just an overview. He goes into more detail in the following chapters. I need details, so this chapter didn't do much for me. I did find it interesting that Abraham Lincoln fought on behalf of the Illinois Central Railroad and later used his connections to travel cheap and keep the costs of his presidential campaign cheap. I don't know that he had this in mind when he was fighting for them, however it's an interesting connection. It always reminds me...be careful of the toes you step on, and visa versa. Here he also talks about Henry Ford's anti-Semitism; I did not realize the extent of it.

Chapter 2: Mistaking the map for the territory. Starts off discussing Trump's Wealth Expos and who's participating in them, as well as the overall goals of transferring bad land investments. Goes into the myth of Henry the Navigator and likens him to modern day CEOs, as he actually issued a charter that prohibited sailors from going past the Cape of Bojador without permission, allowing the monarchy to have access to gains from ship merchants. His quote defining a CEO: "a dry-land monopolist praised for his seafaring adventures." LOL. In this chapter, he discusses the IMF and world bank, noting that colonialism already left these countries broke to begin with, then they were offered loans with the many conditions including that the nations must be open to things such as allowing foreign corporations to own land within a country, and are not allowed to restrict certain goods from being imported or resources from being extracted. Of course, this leads to privatization of utilities and such. He points out that increasing GDP does not mean a better life for the people of a nation and gives several examples. He likens "free trade" to colonialism, and makes a well-written, fairly convincing argument, bringing historical context to current day policies. He talks about the flaws of subsidizing and "winning" the rights to host a large scale business. While I agreed with his sentiment, I feel he left out information that could have made his argument clearer.

Chapter 3: The ownership society. He goes into more detail about the ideology of home ownership.

And here's where I get lazy. This book described, in detail the disconnect from (chapter subtitles): commerce, place, home, one another, choice, currency and value. One of my favorite anecdotes was describing a mountain dew ad that allowed you to "vote" on one of their pre-approved designs. Ha! He discusses the value of local currencies and getting value back to the periphery instead of just "funneling it up." (He does explain in detail how a centralized bank and commerce on a large corporate level demands that money keeps growing for individual businesses.) He provides a few good examples of how this has worked previously and currently. Four stars because there were a few times where I really wanted him to elaborate on a detail when he just casually throws it out as an assumption; even when I agreed with his point, it would be nice to read how he reached his conclusions. This book is basically a long, well written and thought out rant. The author has grown a lot and developed his writing style substantially since writing coercion 10 years ago.

[Ashryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. I'm sure this is inspiring for people who haven't been paying attention, but I just found this to be more of the same old... It's tiring to be constantly reminded of how evil everything is and how everything is going to shit. It's so tiring it leaves me stunned into immobility. I would have enjoyed this more if the 90% of the book that was devoted to how awful hopeless everything is was swapped with the 10% devoted to what we can do... Tell me what is working. Sad as some may find it, I don't find the idea of spending my free time growing veggies or coaching soccer any more appealing than being a wage slave...

Guess I'm not in the right demographic for this one either.

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

Factual inaccuracies aside, how can a person be this one sided? Of course there's a lot of scamming and bullshit in general in the modern world but when you support your arguments with farcical claims like how people were better off in the 10th century without any caveats do not expect anyone to take you seriously. You are blinded by your hatred. At one point the author claims corporations were the cause of witch burnings and the plague. A lot of mental gymnastics, all so as to avoid any responsibility for your actions. For shame.

[Alex Ott · Rating 4 out of 5]

extremely eye-opening and pretty depressing. tracks the history of how corporations came to be, then posits and proves of how the corporate ideology has become pervasive in our culture, from the food we consume to how we present ourselves on facebook to even the systems we create to fight corporatism. spends too little time on possible solutions, but the few suggestions are interesting and novel. a must-read.

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has an interesting focus, how corporations rule our lives despite it being an outdated (think medieval). It also not only explains the problem but also the solution, which is a breath of fresh air from the nee sayers. However, the authors solution only works if you live in the US, which frankly got annoying. Being so US centric blinds the theory to the fact that the solutions might work if it's implemented around the globe.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

The whole book is a relentless attack on capitalism. The author believes that we have all been brain washed by corporatism that we can only think of things in money terms. He proposed that we use informal credits with each other. This is possible in small towns but hard in big cities. One also wonder how taxes can be paid for public services like policemen, teachers and firemen.

Overall a disappointment.

[Pax Analog · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sound framing of almost 600 yrs. of corporatism. Points up pre-Renaissance bottom-up economic health before the long era of top-down monopolistic exploitation. I'm drawing on this for a rumination of collective Shadow for this period. Recommend A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark as a companion text.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book everyone needs to read. It articulates ideas that I've been forming about corporations over the last couple of years. It's pro-capitalism while being anti-corporatism and points out the biases of a central currency vs. a local one. A fantastic, easy-to-read and mind-opening book!