Douglas Rushkoff: Life Inc.
How the world became a corporation and how to take it back.
From the site: In Life Inc, Douglas Rushkoff presents the unnerving, unbelievable, but ultimately undeniable proof that our world has been overtaken by an absolutely artificial economy.
He shows how our most fundamental assumptions about money and commerce are actually false ones - artifacts of a 400-year-old plan by a waning aristocracy to maintain control of Western Europe. Although the architects of this corporatism have long since passed on, we still live in a landscape defined by their plans and have internalized their values as our own.
Taking on some of the biggest assumptions of our age, this is a book filled with dangerous ideas and rather unspeakable heresies:
- Money is not a part of nature, to be studied by a science like economics, but an invention with a specific purpose.
- Centralized currency is just one kind of money - one not intended to promote transactions but to promote the accumulation of capital by the wealthy.
- Banking is our society’s biggest industry, and debt is our biggest product.
- Corporations were never intended to promote commerce, but to prevent it.
- The development of chartered corporations and centralized currency caused the plague; the economic devastation ended Europe’s most prosperous centuries, and led to the deaths of half of its population.
- The more money we make, the more debt we have actually created.
Most importantly, Rushkoff shows how this moment of financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reinstate commerce and communities based in creating value for one another, rather than continuing to extract it for the benefit of institutions that no longer exist.