Life Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff
The Moment: Your therapist tells you to own up
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Life Inc.
by Douglas Rushkoff
It's taken 450 years, says Douglas Rushkoff, to get us into our current socio-economic predicament (he blames the East India Company, for starters). And it'll require some serious soul-searching to get us out. In Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back, the onetime Gen-X chronicler and longtime techie argues that Americans have traded in hard work and common sense for greed and instant gratification. If society wants to reshape itself to better serve humanity, argues Rushkoff, Americans should start supporting local economies (and not the local Wal-Mart).
While his well-informed critique of material culture (read: corporate culture) is supported by stories ranging from social documentaries to personal anecdotes, his criticism of technology is somewhat surprising. He lampoons YouTube for promoting heavy-handed consumerism, even though he himself has written many enthusiastic books about tech culture, including Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids.
Despite the book's finger-pointing, Rushkoff spends just as much time proposing how Americans might work and live "better" (like supporting local farmers markets, public schools and charities). He also makes a case for cutting back on goods (presumably not books, right?) and re-evaluating how we view the world: Do you think of your home as an investment or a place to live? Is the Internet just another place to do business or a cultural movement?
Life Inc. is a major theoretical departure for Rushkoff, who's been making us think about how we were connected all these years. Instead, he's examining (gloomily, at times) why it is we're so disconnected and the effect corporate greed is having on our world order, speculative economy and personal lives.
Random House, 304 pp., $26, June 2
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