Life Inc
How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Douglas Rushkoff was mugged outside his apartment on Christmas Eve, but when he posted a friendly warning on his community website, the responses castigated him for potentially harming the local real-estate market. When did these corporate values overtake civic responsibilites?
Rushkoff examines how corporatism has become an intrinsic part of our everyday lives, choices and opinions. He demonstrates how this system created a world where everything can be commodified, where communities have dissolved into consumer groups, where fiction and reality have become fundamentally blurred. And, with this system on the verge of collapse, Rushkoff shows how the simple pleasures that make us human can also point the way to freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rushkoff (Nothing Sacred) offers a shrill condemnation of how corporate culture has disconnected human beings from each other. An engaging history of commerce and corporatism devolves into an extended philippic on how increasing personal wealth and the rise of nuclear families constituted a failure of community whose services are now provided by products and professionals. While he makes some good points for instance, about how some laws are now written to favor the rights of corporations above the rights of human beings, and the phenomenon of pro-wealth spirituality as espoused by The Secret, Creflo Dollar and Joel Osteen he skews wildly off-course lamenting how "basic human activity... has been systematically robbed of its naturally occurring support mechanisms by a landscape tilted toward the market's priorities." His unsupported and flawed assumption that societal interdependence is a natural or even preferable state for all people, everywhere, his disdain for filthy lucre and joyless recasting of independence as "selfishness" will leave readers weary long before the end.
