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How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
Random House
June 2009
On Sale: June 2, 2009
304 pages
ISBN: 1400066891
EAN: 9781400066896
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
This didn’t just happen. In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker,
and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went
from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant
fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most
Americans have so willingly adopted the values of
corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it. This fascinating journey, from the late Middle Ages to
today, reveals the roots of our debacle. From the founding
of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the
self; from the invention of central currency to the
privatization of banking; from the birth of the modern,
self-interested individual to his exploitation through the
false ideal of the single-family home; from the Victorian
Great Exhibition to the solipsism of MySpace–the
corporation has infiltrated all aspects of our daily lives.
Life Inc. exposes why we see our homes as investments
rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the
ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just
another place to do business. Most of all, Life Inc. shows how the current financial
crisis is actually an opportunity to reverse this six-
hundred-year-old trend and to begin to create, invest, and
transact directly rather than outsource all this activity
to institutions that exist solely for their own sakes. Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which
we are living–the operating system on which we are now
running our social software–was invented by people, sold to
us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and
ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining
reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory. Rushkoff illuminates both how we’ve become disconnected
from our world and how we can reconnect to our towns, to
the value we can create, and, mostly, to one another. As
the speculative economy collapses under its own weight,
Life Inc. shows us how to build a real and human-scaled
society to take its place.
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