Although the title of this book would seem to promise another critique of the practices of specific corporations we do business with every day (often for a lack of alternatives), Rushkoff is after much bigger game: Life, Inc. is a critique of how a way of doing business became a way of life.
Rushkoff begins by tracing the rise of the chartered corporation from its roots in Renaissance Italy alongside the simultaneous rise of central currencies, without which the corporation as a way of doing business could not have become so widespread and influential.
Rushkoff’s primary critique shows how these two trends have supported one another over the centuries to disastrous effect: the corporation, with its biases towards hoarding in place of generosity, and self-preservation at all costs, has benefitted immensely from the replacement of local currencies — which kept local value plowed back into the local economy — with central currencies, which are designed to extract value from those local economies and allow that value to be hoarded and invested elsewhere. This has resulted in the weakening of local economies and community bonds, to the benefit of corporations.
But Life, Inc. is most devastating as a critique of the way the corporate mindset — remember, that’s greed in place of generosity, and self-preservation at all costs — has come to infiltrate our personal lives. It is such the dominant mode of doing business that we have come to think of it as the only way of doing business, and it is so dominant a perspective that it influences the way we behave towards one another in daily life, encouraging us to act in narrow self-interest and to shun community.
While the book sometimes made me despair, Rushkoff also showed how these trends can be resisted: with careful purchasing decisions, with the establishment and use of local currencies for local transactions, and — perhaps the hardest of all — with the conscious decision to avoid “acting like a corporation,” by putting community ahead of self when appropriate, and getting to know your neighbors.
