Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

• Publisher:   Random House
• Number Of Pages:   304
• Publication Date:   2009-06-02
• ISBN-10 / ASIN:   1400066891
• ISBN-13 / EAN:   9781400066896

This didn’t just happen. In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it. This fascinating journey, from the late Middle Ages to today, reveals the roots of our debacle. From the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self; from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking; from the birth of the modern, self-interested individual to his exploitation through the false ideal of the single-family home; from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of MySpace–the corporation has infiltrated all aspects of our daily lives. Life Inc. exposes why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business. Most of all, Life Inc. shows how the current financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reverse this six-hundred-year-old trend and to begin to create, invest, and transact directly rather than outsource all this activity to institutions that exist solely for their own sakes. Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living–the operating system on which we are now running our social software–was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory. Rushkoff illuminates both how we’ve become disconnected from our world and how we can reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and, mostly, to one another. As the speculative economy collapses under its own weight, Life Inc. shows us how to build a real and human-scaled society to take its place.

The historical perspective provided by Rushkoff is excellent. Much of the book is well documented with good references and sources, but he falls plague to what I feel is dicey journalism at several points. For example, he uses the example of an interaction with a supposed doctor from a big name Ivy League school who's "business card he's lost and noone can remember at an event". Seems to me that if you can't find out who he is or document his actual participation, you should leave out his sensationalist comments. Towards the end of the book I began to get the feeling that the "what you can do" section was going to fall disappointingly short, and it did. His kudos to Lawrence Lessig's creative commons license was great, but why didn't he publish his book under a CC license? His anti corporate manifesto totally bombed when he harped on the "moderate" view of "I have a mortgage and bills to pay too", and thus I can't act like a human but must stay in corporatist mode for a while more. I liked the concept, I liked the detailed description of how we got to where we are, but he should have left it there.

If you would like to read something that will actually make you think and rethink and then want to talk and discuss with everyone you know - buy this book!!

This book is a very well written history of money. Before reading this book, I had never truly questioned the modern concept of money. I strongly recommend this book to anyone wanting to know how and why we ended up with an economy that cycles between boom and bust.

This book explains the origins of money, historical economic systems and how our current American economic condition came into being. The writing style is engaging and easy to understand. I highly recommend this book to anyone curious to know exactly what their money supports and interested in being a catalyst for change in their local economy. A definite eye opener.

LIFE INC: HOW THE WORLD BECAME A CORPORATION AND HOW TO TAKE IT BACK comes form an award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker and scholar who shows how corporations have become the dominant fact of modern life - including their values systems. A world history traces the evolution of the idea of corporations and their effects on individual and national financial and values developments. The idea of corporations has been artificially created and promoted and is largely a myth, Douglas Rushkoff maintains. The result is a dangerous disconnection from reality. Any business collection needs this.

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