Life Inc.

How Corporatism Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back

By: Douglas Rushkoff

Narrated by: Douglas Rushkoff

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.

©2009 Douglas Rushkoff (P)2009 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Read this book if you want to understand how the current economic meltdown started 400 years ago, how so much of what you consider to be a natural evolution of daily life was carefully designed to profit a few, and how corporatism has so colonized every part of life that most of us don't even recognize how our lives and fortunes are channeled and manipulated by it. I love that Rushkoff isn't afraid to think big—very big."—Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs

“Ever get the feeling that you're trapped on a hamster wheel of predatory "Corporatism"? An unwitting participant in a system that you didn't sign up for in the first place? What happens when the operating system of this corporate Moloch runs amok? Life Inc is a hopeful, timely call to arms to wrest control of our lives, our sanity and our children's futures back from the corporate agenda. Douglas Rushkoff's best book yet.”—Richard Metzger, author and TV host

“Hand wringing over the state of the global economy? Think again. Douglas Rushkoff explains why this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to remember what matters, and to rethink our economic system so it reinforces our human values. A profound and important call to action.”— Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media

I should've taken the blue pill

What did you love best about Life Inc.?

Here I thought I was living my mundane existence, a productive member of early 21st century society and then, just like that, it becomes apparent I've been something of an acquiescent lab rat in an enormous and complex version of the Skinner Box. I just want you to know Doug, I'm writing this at work when I should be working. Each journey starts with a turn of the wheel.

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

Douglas Rushkoff delivers the entire narrative of his book without sounding above it all. I feels like it did when my 3rd grade teacher Mrs Queen wrote in the margins of my report card that I wasn't working to my potential. Judgmental but enthusiastic about the possibilities.

Challenging assumptions

Douglas Rushkoff has written a wonderfully challenging work about how our everyday lives are affected by the foundational reality of corporations and corporatism. Some will dismiss it as the ravings of a elitist liberal whatever. It is instead the considered reflections of a human being trying to understand the bizarre results of a very undemocratic economic theory.

Accessible Indictment of the Lost American Dream

Other reviewers who accuse Rushkoff of whining and calling everything fascist/nazi are disingenuous or haven't read beyond the first chapter. The author acknowledges the perils of a fascist diagnosis of America, and only makes the connection once, and he's no whiner. In fact, he admirably proposes plausible positive action to take to change the situation, and the situation is dire, as the author outlines in a brief history of the development of the corporation from the colonial era to the present. I agree with other reviewers who find him too pessimistic about the internet. In this part of the book, Rushkoff seems to too strongly delineate between profit and human meaning/value, unable to see how the internet might be both. But in general, this book is excellent, critiquing the commodification of human values and the loss of community in ways similar to academic critical theorists, but in a much more accessible way. Loved it.

I very much appreciated this book

This is such a great book.

I appreciate the author's passionate point of view that corporatism has come to dominate our modern lives. It is slightly depressing...okay...VERY depressing. But the book is wonderfully written, thought provoking, and inspires change (even if just in my own little life).

I like that the author was the narrator, he adds a lot of zest in the telling of the saga of corporatism.

I highly recommend this!

Some Redeeming Qualities

I started listening to this book and thought at first he was an extreme liberal. Then I realized he is not. He is not Conservative either. He is challenging many of the basic assumptions in the world. This is the interesting part of this book. While I don't agree with much of what he says, I did find it fascinating to listen to. He touches on so many different topics. The book is very broad. The author does have this intense fear of authority. While Conservatives would prefer business to control, and Liberals would like the Government to control, Rushkoff doesn't want anything or anybody to have control. His perfect world is the small communities of the middle ages or Brooklyn in the 40s. I think the book is definitely worth listening to. It also presents some interesting information regarding how some companies do business.

Mind blowing book!

Douglas Rushkoff hit it out of the park on this book! It’s an excellent primer for his other books that dive deeper into the dangers of transhumanism and our antiquated economic structures. I highly highly recommend this to anyone who wants to make sense of the world and why our monetary systems function the way the do.

Needs more "how to take it back."

Rushkoff does an excellent job of elaborating the history of corporatism, but misses a field goal with the last chapter. He's problematized our corporate environment but offered too few solutions.

Great content, annoying narration

Have you ever wondered why every "tourist attraction" has a gift shop? Have you wondered why gift shops, stores where you buy useless meaningless trinkets for other people, exist at all? Wonder no more. The answer, according to this book, is the corporatization of every aspect of our lives.

I totally bought into the message of the book-- that corporations are unnatural constructs that have injected themselves into our lives in unhealthy ways. Consequently, they turned us into input/output units, rather than persons who are loving-breathing-running-jumping human beings.

My one big complaint is the narrator. He has a breathless, gasping style with a sense of astonishment that gives the impression that everything is awful and the world is about to end. Other than that, this is a great listen.

Right about corperations; wrong abouth Internet

This book took a critical look at the role of corporation and their effect over the last 500 years. But it's a bit light on what you can actually do to change things. Corporations are myopic and self interested in a way that humans aren't. And they are sucking value out of the world. However, I don't think the solutions he proposes are up to the task of fixing the problem.
He's right in saying that the internet is not a panacea. But he's unduly pessimistic about what's happened to the internet in the last 12 years. The hardcore internet (open, unstructured) has decreased an as a relative proportion of whats going on on the internet, but has increased in absolute terms. The emergence of the user friendly (sometimes cooperate) internet is not a sign that the hardcore one is dieing. As long as we have net neutrality the hardcore internet will be going strong.

A visionary of our times

Douglas Rushkoff is our generation’s visionary of how to reclaim our humanity. As our society becomes the zombie army of thoughtless, material driven consumers, Rushkoff provides context to wake up to the systems that steal our attention time. A must read for anyone with a smart phone, a screen, a credit card and a mortgage.