Listen to the Copper Robot interview with Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. We talked about the central themes of his book: How we’ve allowed big companies and consumerism to take over all facets of our lives, and what we can do to take back our personal connections and communities.
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I started the interview by asking Douglas about the incident that opens the book: “I was taking out the garbage in front of an apartment we really couldn’t afford the rent on and I got mugged–at gunpoint, the whole thing,” Rushkoff said.
The apartment was in the affluent Park Slope section of Brooklyn.
“I went back and posted what happened to what was supposed to be a nice, lefty parents list, the Park Slope parents list. I posted what had happened and where it had happened. It was on Christmas Eve, even.
“The first two e-mails I got back were off-list, from people who were angry that I had posted the location of where I had gotten mugged, because they thought this could negatively affect their property values. And I was really struck that these people cared more about suppressing any conversation about crime in their neighborhood, and the effect it might have on the brand value of their real estate, rather than having an honest conversation about what we need to do to make our neighborhood safer.
“It made me realize that people had internalized the values of corporations. It wasn’t just that corporations — Wal-Mart and Starbucks — were opening up too many places where we lived, but that we as people were starting to behave as corporations ourselves, caring more about the short-term asset value of our property rather than the places we lived as experiential homes for human beings.
“I wanted to look at the process by which we had assumed corporate values as individuals.”
How did we get here? Rushkoff says it goes back centuries, to the end of the Middle Ages, when the new merchant classes started creating wealth through trade, creating a period of affluence unrivaled for many centuries. People had so much wealth that they used the excess to build vast cathedrals.
But the aristocracy was losing out in the new order, and so they cooked up a plan to hang onto their power. They granted trade monopolies to some of their merchant friends, centralizing currency and economic power. This corporate system is the one we still have today. Big companies take wealth from the edges and keep it for themselves, Rushkoff said. They sell us junk food and home entertainment systems that make us fat and sedentary, and then sell us healthcare to solve the problems created by our unhealthy lifestyles. They lobby government against public transportation, and sell us cars to get around. They manipulate government regulation to keep small businesses from competing.
How do we unravel that situation? One way is for people start small, work locally, and create value with their neighbors. “It’s very easy to join a movement,” Rushkoff said. “I think it’s a lot simpler and more effective to just start doing the things you want to do. You are going to come up against laws and things that get in your way very fast.”
For example, Rushkoff said he joined a community agriculture group where he lives in New York. He found they couldn’t grow enough chard–they were not allowed to use one of their fields for chard, because they had to use it for corn or else pay a penalty. They went to lawmakers to get the law changed.
Similarly, a group in Ohio wants to put solar panels on houses, but found the power monopoly had enacted a law preventing people from supplying their own power. The Ohioans had to go to the state legislature to get it changed. Other neighborhoods are working to get bike lanes created on public roads.
“I think the way to take it back is not to try to operate on a corporate level. They’re at a disadvantage on the local level, they’re at the giant, abstract, central government, media and lobbyist level. Let them have that. We can take back the real world, and slowly but surely drain them of their revenue by doing things for ourselves.
“I get letters from people in places like Lansing, Mich. They ask me things like ‘How can we get a corporation to come here and give us jobs? How can we get a bank to come here and reinvest in our community?’ And what I keep telling them–and it sounds idealistic but it’s actually just very realistic–if you’ve got skills, and you’ve got people with needs then you’ve got the basis of a real economy. That’s all an economy is.”
We also discussed the value of the Internet in creating wealth, the limitations of open source, the scariness world of being someone who’s trying to make a living making books or music or any content that can easily be digitized, the need for a new social contract that allows digital content creators to get paid, and Rushkoff’s ideas for his next book.
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Tamra is a real-life Broadway performer, who starred as Cosette in “Les Miserables.” (No fooling. The real Broadway, real New York. Isn’t that fantastic?)
