Life Inc.

How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

When Rushkoff was mugged in front of his Brooklyn apartment, his neighbors' first instinct was not to offer sympathy but to warn him that his attack would lower their property values. This moment of chilling corporate logic — applied to human suffering — sent Rushkoff on an investigation into how the market came to colonize every aspect of our lives.

Life Inc. is the history of corporatism: how a business model invented in the Renaissance to extend the reach of royal power became the dominant operating system of modern civilization. Rushkoff traces the development of the chartered corporation, central banking, and consumer culture — and shows how each step in this history was designed to suppress local exchange, undermine community, and redirect all value upward.

But Rushkoff also finds reasons for hope. Throughout the world, people are rediscovering local currencies, community exchange, and cooperative enterprise — and rebuilding the human-scale economies that corporatism worked so hard to destroy.

Written with Rushkoff's characteristic blend of history, economics, and cultural criticism, Life Inc. is both a diagnosis of our predicament and a practical guide to building something better.