So when I saw him on Bloggingheads recently discussing his new book "Life Inc," I was surprised at how my immediate gut response was that he'd devolved into a conspiracy theorist and unrepentant crackpot. This just doesn't seem right. Here's some more info if you want to go away and decide for yourself:
Now the basic premise of the book:
Corporations have taken over every aspect of life, invading even our personal lives and the ways we relate to one another. These corporations have destroyed our economy and left us feeling alienated and powerless. Our sense of individuality has ceased to be based on our true essence but on the brands and consumer choices we make. His solution is that we need to abandon those things that force us to live our lives as consumers and start working locally to rediscover authentic human behaviors that allow us to exchange value through old-fashioned face-to-face conversation and interaction. He advocates alternative forms of currency in order to break the government's monopoly on trade and asserts that the spiritual good of local communities trumps all other concerns.
So at one level this is just college educated, left leaning hipster boilerplate. But on another level I've learned to get nervous when writers assign agency and intentionality to abstractions, transforming them into faceless, evil cabals. We say that corporations do this or that, but isn't it important to keep in mind that corporations are run by people? That the mistakes and overreaching of industry are the mistakes of people serving the interests of their stock holders? And isn't it equally problematic to suggest that consumers are not rational actors who perhaps chose suburbia, banality, and alienation from their fellow man in order to serve their own self-interest? Isn't the dirty secret of life the realization that on the whole, people are pretty lame?
OK, I don't want to be some sort of libertarian shill. I'm not David Brooks. I'm not here to defend Patio-Man. I want Rushkoff's analysis to stand. It's just that at this point it feels flimsy.
Now he gets more specific and detailed. He highlights two distinct historical moments when all this began and so we can judge him solely based on the facts:
- First, he identifies the late middle ages as a key period when monarchs were consolidating their power and inventing the nation state. During this period monarchs took control of their nation's wealth through monopolies and corporations. More importantly the invention of the coin of the realm meant that in order to do commerce you had to do it in ways that served the interests of the king and his corporate minions.
- Second, he sees the post-WWII era as a time when the government used the infrastructure of the suburbs to break-down the military relationships of all those bands of brothers and reintegrated them into society as passive individuals and consumers. If the economy went bad again, those guys were dangerous. They could organize, riot, or even rebel. On the other hand, if they're all living in exile in Levittown, buying washing machines and new cars, they're self-interest is that of the government and the status quo.
What history tells us is that big centralized organizations tend to fail over time and that innovation and action happen at the margins and the fractures and the weak points of society. Opportunity and value come when groups or individuals find niches that the larger society hasn't filled. The systems of organization that live inside the walled city are conservative by nature and therefore slow and unresponsive to societal change. That's why the rise of Microsoft surprised IBM and Microsoft has been unable to respond efficiently to Mozilla, Google, iTunes, Twitter, etc. If corporations were so all powerful we'd still be driving cars from General Motors and buying shares in the East India Company to finance our mortgages.
All that being said, I'm eager to read the book so I can really sink my teeth into what Rushkoff has to say.
