Life Inc.
I have a strange relationship to Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, Life Inc. How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back.
It started when one of his staffers invited me to join him on his New York City radio show, Media Squat. That’s simple enough. At the time the PLENTY was awash with media coverage and we were all getting interviewed a lot. I said what I always do when it comes to telling our stories. And that is: “Happy to.”
And I also said I wanted a copy of Life Inc. for the library, and I was told, “No problem.”
I did the interview and forgot about it, until one day months later when I was shoveling out my email stall and I realized I had never received a copy of the book. I was disappointed to hear, “Sorry, we ran out of review copies.”
And so I forgot about it again.
Until one day at Chatham Marketplace when the Rushkoff staffer’s Mom bumped into me at the till and said, “I have something for you.” I was in a hurry, she was going to be awhile checking out, I didn’t really have time for this interaction, so she handed me her car keys and said, “it’s in the back seat.”
I couldn’t resist the notion of opening someone else’s car, so I dashed out to the parking lot, and there was a hard bound copy of Life Inc., a little worse for wear after obviously spending some time on the humid back dash.
I was delighted, tossed it on the ever growing “to be shelved pile” in the library, and forgot about it.
Until I received an email from Rushkoff asking me to contribute to his paperback edition-due at the end of February. Happy to. Gulp. My own manuscript for Industrial Evolution is also due, and I am behind, and I have no business taking on other writing projects at this point in time.
I dashed off a piece on our project, grabbed my unread copy of Life Inc., and gave it a read over nine days of sailing in the Virgin Islands. Normally I can’t read on a sailboat. Normally it makes me seasick. But I couldn’t stop reading Life Inc.
It’s a riveting history of corporatism laced with keen insights into media, money, time, and the relationship between people and products. I was fascinated. It turns out Ruskoff has written ten books, won a ton of awards and is a towering New York intellectual.
What worried me as I read on was his ability to clearly outline the gloom and doom of the human condition. And I became leery of the “Happy Chapter” to come. After all, the subtitle is “How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back.” I kept waiting for the “take it back” part. I’m a fan of David Korten-another anti-corporatist like Rushkoff-but I tend to dispense with the whole genre because I don’t know what else to do-other than form corporations to do what needs to be done. After all, on our project we have a “C” corporation which is a co-operative, an “LLC” corporation which is supposed to make money even though it never has, a “501(c)3″ corporation, and a handful of other corporations ranging from “sole proprietorships” to “partnerships.” As one who has spent his entire life incorporating, I don’t really know how to change the world without doing so.
As I approached the end of Life Inc., the opportunity for the big solution chapter grew less and less, and I was terribly worried that a great read was going to leave me heartbroken-like so many “Energy and Society” books do.
And I was shocked to see in the last chapter that Rushkoff’s solution is basically us. He talks about trading CSA shares for web development, and implementing local currency, and reclaiming vacant lots for food production. I was stunned. I need to re-write what I sent him for his paperback edition.
It was wild. He didn’t mention our project by name, but as I write this I realize the whole book was about us. Just as we have been turning our backs on the “virtual” economy, the one Michael Shuman refers to as “TINA,” and redoubling our efforts at meeting our needs with local commerce and community, Rushkoff was writing a book about it.
It was remarkable. I feel like I’m giving away the ending. Life Inc. is a keeper. A must read.
I will get the book into the library by the 18th.
February 22nd, 2010 at 3:50 pm
I agree that Life Inc. is a seriously good read. Douglas Rushkoff has been my hero since I saw The Merchants of Cool on Frontline.
Being familiar with consumer culture and the grasp that the PR industry has on us, I still found this book to be insightful. It also made me really happy to be in Chatham County – a place where we are spending a lot of our time on the last chapter.
March 9th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
I could not get through this book. If anyone wants a free copy, just stop by. Here is the review I posted on Amazon.
-T
I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend. Luckily, our friendship is strong enough that it will survive this mishap.
This book, well, at least the chapter I forced myself to read, is horrible.
One current concern of mine is health insurance. I run a corporation and last year our premiums went up 27%. At that rate they would double every four years. I think one of the major problems with the health insurance industry is that it is run like a corporation, with a goal to maximize profits, when it should be run to maximize wellbeing.
I thought this book might be written in that vein. I was wrong. The main premise is: all corporations are evil.
I take offense to this, mainly since I run a multi-million dollar corporation and I believe we not only take care of our shareholders, we take care of our employees (who happen to be shareholders) as well as our clients (since taking care of our clients is the best way to maximize profits).
Granted, I only read through the first chapter, but isn’t that the chapter where the author is supposed to state his thesis and grab my attention?
After a rather decent Introduction, Chapter One starts off with a history of corporations. When someone is lecturing me on history, I really, really insist on footnotes. Where are you getting the information you want me to accept as fact? Knowing where the author gets their information helps me determine its validity as well as to judge the conclusions drawn from it.
He starts off with a short history of the chartered corporations of the 16th and 17th centuries and then states “locking in place a set of corporatist priorities that to this day have not significantly changed” (page 9).
What? In North Carolina, anyone with $125 can file Articles of Incorporation with the Secretary of State. How does that compare with monopolies controlled exclusively by royalty? While modern corporations may have the same desires concerning profits and markets that chartered corporations did, the similarity pretty much ends there.
The author also seems to make a big deal about the “limited liability” granted to corporations. He seems to forget that back then when individuals incurred debt they could not pay they went to prison. The bankruptcy protections granted to corporations are one of the reasons I started one instead of a sole proprietorship. I can’t understand why he views this as a bad thing.
One thing that is desperately in need of a footnote comes on page 15 where he discusses the rather well known anti-semitism of Henry Ford. He then goes on to claim that “American corporations from General Electric to the Brown Brothers Harriman bank either funded the Nazis directly, or set up money-laundering schemes on their behalf”. Comparing corporations to Nazis pretty much invokes Godwin’s law, but without context one doesn’t know what to make of this statement. My understanding is that if American corporations wanted the war effort to fail, they could have made that happen, but since that is in conflict with observed reality I have a hard time accepting that all corporations are fascists.
Where he really started to lose me was when he describes the invention of double-entry accounting on page 10. He states that it “only mattered insomuch as they kept the credit side of the balance sheet bigger than the debit side”.
Ahem – the debit side is the asset side. He basically just stated that corporations were ordered to maintain their liabilities to be greater than their assets.
Maybe this was just an editing mistake and not due to the fact that the author can’t do research. Well, no, on page 11 he states that corporations “were appreciated solely for their capacity to enhance the credit column of the ledger back home”. If he doesn’t understand the basics of double-entry accounting, which he introduced to the discussion, what else doesn’t he understand?
Look, applying corporate motives to everything is a bad idea. To have corporations that are “too big to fail” is a bad idea. If you are too big to fail, then the system is broken and that entity should be broken up until it is no longer “too big to fail”. But to say the idea of corporations is bad on the whole is a gross oversimplification.
Some people watch things like Fox News because it does little to challenge their preconceived notions of reality. If you have already decided that the root of all evil in this world lies in corporations, then you’ll love this book. If you want to have a real discussion about how to address the issues that misapplying “corporatism” to all aspects of life creates, you’ll have to look elsewhere.