Miami Herald book reviewer Richard Pachter takes “a look back at the best business books of 2009″ and does me a great honor while providing a terrific summary of my intentions:
Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back. Douglas Rushkoff. Random House. 304 pages. 6/15/09
The “operating system” behind the world’s economies and monetary systems is flawed and antithetical to productivity and most other human values. Greed, avarice and (unenlightened) self-interest flourish. So do artificial scarcity, perpetual debt and empty allegiance to the slogans and logos of oppressive corporations. A less elegant and gifted writer might have produced a dour and plodding polemic against materialism and consumerist culture, but Rushkoff’s persuasive prose is a pleasure.
more…
Posted on 28 December '09 by Douglas, under Life Inc. 2 Comments.
Change Observer just posted the first part of a conversation between me and Kurt Andersen, on the economy and just how big an opportunity this crisis might be affording us.
Andersen is smart – really smart – though a bit more sanguine about all that’s going on around us than I am. I think that might be, in part, because he has done so very well at everything he has tried. Maybe that’s a law of the universe, and one I should just follow (rather than letting my misgivings about “success” impede my own path toward it). But that’s a discussion for another day.
Some excerpts:
Andersen: I tend to agree with Doug’s major premises, such as the unsustainability of an economy dominated by financial speculators instead of “value creators,” and the fact that the particulars of our system are the result of human choices rather than immutable “conditions of nature.” And I see the gobsmacking crash and resulting flux as a rare limited-time-only opportunity to significantly update and reform the system and the habits of mind that are its cause and effect. Thus we now have a chance to remake our medical and energy and educational and urban planning systems along vastly more sensible lines. But for all my hopefulness about the possibilities of change — and my desire in some ways for radical reform — as a practical matter I do take as a given our basic market-driven political economy. The decline of manufacturing and the hypertrophied financial and marketing sectors notwithstanding, Doug’s assertion that “very few American businesses actually [do] anything, anymore” seems extreme to me.
Rushkoff: The reason I’m not as forgiving as Kurt, I suppose, is that I don’t see these cycles as weather or earthquakes. I see them as entirely predictable manifestations of the system we’ve adopted. People think they need cars because “how else would I get to work?” without understanding that they only need a car to get to work because the suburbs were zoned, in part, to promote car ownership (or, in most cases, promote real estate speculation). So we look at Europeans and think how lovely it is they get to walk home for lunch, and assume something about America’s geography made this impossible. Does this mean we can get rid of the car suburbs? Probably not. At least not in the short term.
And neither do we just retire the Fed and crash the banks. We can’t go back to the Middle Ages, and we don’t want to. What we can do is promote the development of complementary economic mechanisms. New ways (and old ways) of doing commerce.
more…
Disinfo yet lives. They just launched a podcast interview with me about Life Inc, as well as other matters counter-cultural.
I haven’t been posting a lot of the interviews and reviews of my latest activity – mostly for lack of time. Janine and I have managed to get most of them up in the appropriate sections on this site. But I want to start sharing some of the interesting ones – both positive and negative.
While some reviewers from the Financial Times to Facebook get stuck on the fact that person still living in a first world nation (me) could have the audacity to criticize the process through which colonialism and, later, corporatism exploited people and the planet (if not we, then who?), writers in those regions are much more sympathetic.
Here’s a piece from a business publication, Gulf News, inspired at first by the Colbert appearance – but later by MadMen.
This guy gets it – and he’s writing for a business publication, the Gulf News.
Gulf News
“So after all the bailouts and the restructuring plans, we will be asked to go out there and buy new stuff again – just as we are being asked now to buy old stuff on discount. And so the idea that politicians and business owners are actually able to call on the public to “go out there and support the economy” is a very strange notion.
This is because the economy’s role, in addition to a number of things, is to essentially reflect the interests and preferences of the general public in commerce and trade on one hand and the corresponding entrepreneurial capacity to recognise and service those interests and preferences i.e. demand and supply.”
…more
Just posted this on FastCompany’s new “ethonomics” blog.
However comforting it might be to blame Southern California’s movie industry for unleashing Governor Terminator on the state’s economy, the real seeds of the current crisis were sewn further north, in the seemingly prosperous corporate parks of Silicon Valley. In fact, the dotcom boom and subsequent, inevitable bust are the real causes of our economic malaise. For while Californians were hit first, hardest and most directly by the rise of dotcom-style capitalism, the rest of us are soon to follow.
Put simply, California cannot afford to pay its bills because its tax base contracted at the same time as its investments tanked. Like any of us contending with the double-whammy of lower pay and shrinking portfolios, the state is getting slammed on both income and savings at the same time. Unable to secure credit, the state will instead be forced pay its bills to citizens and local governments with IOUs.
While the pundits point to real estate speculation and bank insolvencies as the chief cause of California–and the nation’s–financial distress, these are both direct results of the late 90’s explosion of computer innovation and Internet proliferation. That’s right: The Internet crashed the economy.
more….
Just did this one on Tuesday evening, for the NY Tech Meet-Up. I was exhausted for this one, but it does manage to explain corporatism as an operating system gone awry.
The brilliant Ann Althouse interviews me about Life Inc on BloggingHeads.TV. Here’s a bit on how regulation actually helps prevent small businesses from competing with the big boys.
