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 01 – Audio
Why am I asking you to pre-order my book right now?
First, because the book is relatively cheap right now. About ten bucks off at the big distributors. Second, and most important for me and the book, pre-orders determine how many copies get into the stores. And the more copies that get into the stores, the more books will get read, the more radio shows I get on, and the more people find out that there are alternatives to corporatism.
Ironically, perhaps, we are using the corporatized book distribution scheme to promote some post-corporatist ideas. And yes, I promise these ideas will get out there one way or another, either through my radio show, online forums, public appearances, or this blog.
But the book explains the history behind corporate-sponsored crisis in which we have found ourselves: who invented the economic rules we now take for granted, why they did it, how they sold them to us, when we internalized them and, most importantly, what alternative social models we have forgotten in the process.
Please – for the book’s sake as much as my own – consider pre-ordering from one of the distributors listed below.
This put me at the end of a long line of thinkers I’ve long admired: Buckminster Fuller, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Gregory Bateson, Robert Anton Wilson, Abraham Maslow, Ellen Langer, Albert Ellis…you get the idea. It’s hard to accept the fact that I’ve grown up, and that most of the generation of thinkers before me have already moved on. But someone has to carry the torch, and that may as well be all of us.
The lecture has a lot to do with the subject of my upcoming book, Life Incorporated: How a business plan took over the world and how to take it back, which I just finished rewriting last night to include the current financial crisis. It’s the same book, except instead of warning that our corporatist behaviors will soon lead us into a financial crisis, I get to show how it all happened and how to get out. It makes the job of explaining the book or convincing people to read it a lot easier. I’m much less a Cassandra, now, warning of imminent meltdown – and I don’t have to spend as much time doing what might appear to some as naysaying or scolding. We’re all aware that we’re in a fine mess, now, and already interested in understanding what happened and how to fix it.
I tried to make this lecture provocative to the General Semantics people, in particular. General Semantics has over the years limited itself, I argue, to self-help technologies from NLP and psychotherapy to EST and self-hypnosis. All this focus on the self really started back during the renaissance, and coincided with some really dark presuppositions about human nature such as self-interest. And – as I show in the book – these are really just artifacts of corporatism.
The object of the game, I think, is not to change the self (which doesn’t even really exist) but to change the world.
This is not exactly an “I told you so,” but I did tell you so.
My book, Get Back in the Box, looked at how business in America was about to fail because of its dependence on markets over innovation. I argued that only a return to basic competence could rescue business from its impending decline.
Now that most businesses have come to realize that outsourcing is quickly discounted by futures markets, and that balance sheet manipulation and mergers/acquisitions are no substitute for innovation, I think they might be ready to read this book.
Yes, I’d love to sell more copies. But more importantly, I’d love for businesspeople who feel all is lost to recognize that this is such a perfect moment to return to core competency, to remember what it was about their industries that excited them to begin with, and to reconnect with the processes and attitudes that make work fun and meaningful again.
I don’t usually post when a new translation comes out, but the folks at Okultura are special, and have worked long and hard against great odds to get this new edition of Cyberia translated and published. In their words,
Czym jest Cyberia? Cyfrową krainą, w której wszyscy chcąc nie chcąc żyjemy, czy światem wysokich technologii, dostępnym tylko nielicznym informatykom? Rzeczywistością wirtualną czy czymś całkowicie namacalnym, dostępnym naszym zmysłom? Co łączy ze sobą informatyków z Doliny Krzemowej, magów chaosu, konsumentów psychodelików, pisarzy cyberpunkowych, współczesnych psychologów i fizyków oraz twórców i odbiorców muzyki transowej? O tym dowiecie się z książki Douglasa Rushkoffa, pierwszej, błyskotliwej próby opisu cyberkultury, ukazującej jej niezwykły potencjał.
Cyberia to kompendium wiedzy o magicznych, psychodelicznych i anarchicznych korzeniach Internetu, stworzone przez jednego z najwybitniejszych specjalistów od kultury współczesnej, laureata prestiżowej Nagrody im. Neila Postmana. To wędrówka przez różne wymiary cyberkultury – rzeczywistość wirtualną, psychologię transpersonalną, gnozę psychodeliczną, fizykę kwantową, kulturę rave, muzykę ambientową, magię chaosu i hakerstwo – ku krainie, gdzie wszystko jest możliwe. Ku krainie, w której żyjemy.
And as Timothy Leary explained, “Cyberia to fascynująca podróż po obecnych granicach ludzkiego doświadczenia… opowiedziana w sposób, który umożliwia czytelnikowi przeżywanie zmieniającej się co chwila rzeczywistości cyberdelicznego XXI wieku.”
This is unorthodox, but what the heck? I’d rather do some “pull” media than all that “push” stuff.
My next book, Life Incorporated:
How we traded meaning for markets, society for self-interest, and citizenship for customer service,
will be published by Randomhouse in June 2009. We are assembling a reviewers’ copies list now. (Reviewers are journalists who write book reviews for publications.)
While I can’t promise anything, if you email me your name, address, and print/radio/web/tv/blog affiliation, I will put you on the list to get a galley. Press galleys cost a whole lot more than actual books, so if you are simply a reader who wants a copy but can’t afford it, email me and I’ll get something else to you – worst case, a PDF or something.
email your
NAME
AFFILIATION
SNAIL ADDRESS
to rushkoff at rushkoff.com
The complete Testament series, with annotation, is now available in four trade volumes from Vertigo/DC Comics. They’re in stock at most comics shops, and shipping from Amazon or other regular bookstores before the end of the week.
I’m delighted to see them all available at the same time, so that the whole story can be read and comprehended as a single experience. Yes, even the real Torah gets read mostly in weekly portions, but this story – which depicts a near-future plagued by a war over oil and a technologically enabled, viral global currency – definitely works better in book form than it did in individual pamphlets. Plus, DC let me add commentary, explanations, and references to these editions, which really do help readers use the story as a starting place and link to some important but relatively unknown material.
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.
I’m assuming these things are rendered on-the-fly for any author in their database, but when my friend Jeff Gordiner, currently on tour for his fascinating X Saves the World, told me he’d be wearing one of these for his readings, it all made sense in a post-post-ironic sort of way. Especially the fact that it’s on sale…
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...
