For more information about Douglas Rushkoff’s book, “LIFE INC. How The World Became A Corporation And How To Take It Back” check out lifeincorporated.net and the LIFE INC. 9min movie
The LIFE INC. Dispatch = Brief weekly videos encapsulating key concepts and ready strategies from Douglas Rushkoff’s LIFE INC. for de-corporatizing our lives, abandoning the speculative economy, and rebuilding both commerce and community from the bottom up.
You can also download an MP3 audio file of the Dispatch: Life Inc. Dispatch 02 – Audio
I’ve got another new piece posted over at Arthur Magazine. Here’s how it starts:
I’ve received a ton of great email and response from this week’s piece on letting the banks die and letting the market go down another 70 percent. My commentary also generated some confusion, though, so I’d like to clarify and expand on a few points. (I’ll do this again on WFMU Monday evening, when I’ll have the opportunity to take some calls and actually converse.)
First off, and I can’t stress this enough: Commerce is good. Commerce is not the problem. Monopolies are.
A friend passed on this link to me of a post by a Cato commentator. He’s arguing that buying local food is, counterintuitively, not such a great thing for the environment.
Here’s his main logical technique:
A tomato raised in a heated greenhouse next door can be more carbon-intensive than one shipped halfway across the globe.
Right. By the same logic, trees grown locally that are used to make clubs to kill children are worse for child welfare than ones grown by child slaves. Indeed, people can do terrible, environmentally irresponsible things locally that outweigh the benefits of having done them locally.
But: doing agriculture locally brings all those effects close to home. When agriculture is being done in your backyard, all of a sudden you notice the methane gas produced by feed lots, the erosion caused by poor soil use, and the run-off from poisonous fertilizers. It’s a lot harder to do bad agriculture locally than it is to do it somewhere far away, where it’s actually performed by little brown people whose cancers matter to us less than our own. In fact, the grow-local farmers I know are moving closer to biodynamic practices that only grow foods in the correct seasons, anyway. No heated tomatoes.
These seemingly sensical counter-intuitive arguments are a technique; they are not information. They are devised to reframe and trivialize the debate. You’ll find them created to argue against progressive taxation, against addressing climate change, and against almost anything that challenge the illogical logic of the market.
My point: When reading a counterintuitive argument, check the logic first.
“We begin to have to talk about ordered retreat from some areas of Britain because it becomes impossible to defend,” he said. “There’s no choice here between adaptation and mitigation, we have to do both.” That’s what Professor Bob Watson, UK chief adviser to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told the Guardian today.
He was hoping to look at scenarios closer to a rise of 2 degrees celsius, but realize that this was an unrealistically optimistic projection. In fact, the rise of 4 degrees would likely lead to a cascade of other factors and subsequent further increases. But even a modest rise of 4 degrees in the near future yields hundreds of millions of deaths and requires major movements of people, the abandonment of coastal cities, and more.
Once you start looking at the adaptation scenarios, adjusting the impact of a 4-degree increase starts to appear inhumane. Can we just write off such large segments of humanity and play ‘triage’ with the food supply? It may seem heartless, but without such planning, the casualties will be far worse. Does planning in this way amount to admission of defeat? Perhaps. So while a small number of government officials and private sector workers attend to the task of setting up our administrative capabilities for climate change disasters, the rest of us can work on containing it as best as possible.
The most gratifying thing for a writer or thinker is to see other people implement his ideas – and in ways he didn’t imagine himself. Here’s a post on MediaEnvironment, applying Get Back in the Box to Treehuggers:
Since this week we’ll be looking at strategic communication in the context of environmental media and business, I thought I’d spend this post looking at these forces through the prism of a wonderful book called Get Back in the Box by noted writer, lecturer, theorist Douglas Rushkoff of NYU. The main premise of the book is that business is so obsessed with out-of-the-box thinking and increasingly interruptive marketing that they have become divorced from what Rushkoff calls their “core competencies.” In other words, they don’t actually do the thing they do. Instead of pouring money into research and development companies divert funds to strategic campaigns or hire outside consultants to reimagine their enterprise rather than actually trying to make something good and useful – something that has value and solves real needs. In terms of environmental media, treehugger seems to be a textbook example of an online mediaspace that embodies the power of what Rushkoff calls “social currency.” Treehugger has been wildly successful because it offers a place where passionately involved members can go to pursue a common interest. Treehugger content itself, to use Rushkoff’s words, is a “medium for interaction.” Treehugger marketing and strategic communication may have helped their awareness level, but it was Treehugger’s own competency as a marketplace for interaction, education, and subtle activism that made it valuable to people. Treehugger is a good website and that’s why people visit it. That seems naively simple, but it’s a surprisingly elusive concept for many in business to grasp.
January 21 - Brooklyn, NY. Talk for ETSY, 7p February 1 - The Webb School, Bell Buckle Tennessee. February 2 - Frontline Digital Nation premieres, 9pm PBS March 12 - SWSX, Austin TX more...
