Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Bodley Head, £12.99
The Damascene moment came, for Douglas Rushkoff, one Christmas Eve. He opens this book by relating how he was mugged in front of his Brooklyn apartment. His understandable response was to post a note on his community website warning neighbours of the incident. The reaction stunned him. Far from being grateful, the locals snarled that he should keep quiet. Didn’t he realize he was publicizing something which might adversely affect property prices? “Had it really come to this?” he mused. “Did people care more about the market value of their neighbourhood than what was actually taking place within it?”
But the revelation can hardly have come as a surprise. Rushkoff is a media theorist of some standing, not to mention an ex-cyberpunk and proselytizer for new technologies. He has been here or hereabouts several times before. His new book is only the latest in a steady stream of outraged looks at the way the world works. And how well he does it. Life Inc describes how the modern corporate system has ruthlessly and steadily reshaped our society to suit its purposes, gobbling up our needs and ideals and then regurgitating them as commodities. Using the new witchcraft of marketing, big business has persuaded us to lust after these commodities – evolving, in the process, into a race of soulless, solitary, greed-filled suckers.
That, in short, is Rushkoff’s thesis. Hardly a blinding new insight, you may say. Many of his examples of corporate evil are familiar – Henry Ford’s approval of Hitler, for example, or Rockefeller’s brutal crushing of trade union power in the early 1900s, or the privileges granted to Halliburton in Iraq. These are woven into the narrative with depressing personal stories (desperate mortgage defaulters signing up for bogus get rich quick schemes, a department store saleswoman reprimanded for helping a colleague). But Life Inc succeeds magnificently in shocking the reader with its relentless barrage of evidence and its revelation of how far our public and private lives are shaped by these bloated megacorps. Rushkoff is particularly good on the way they have striven to turn us into “isolated targets”, slack-jawed and alone before our TVs and computer screens. The book’s end is a let down. Rushkoff serves up a rather thin chapter which urges “sustainable, bottom-up activism” (not a happy phrase). This means joining in local bartering systems and growing your own food. Admirable, but unlikely to disturb the slumber of Donald Trump or Rupert Murdoch.
Andrew Langley
