Corporate Dominance of Every Aspects of Our Lives Is Suffocating us

Are we all corporate shills? That's the thesis of Doug Rushkoff's provocative new book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back.

Rushkoff, the new media theorist who came up with the term "viral media" in the early 1990s to describe how advertising concepts replicate in the virtual world like fast moving viruses, is now arguing that the corporate values of business, profit, and consumerism have so infected our lives that we are no longer cognizant life can be lived any other way. We are victims of a dysfunctional societal relationship -- one that has come to seem so normal we are almost incapable of processing of how screwed up it really is.

The corporation, one might say, has gone viral.

Rushkoff's epiphany came via a Christmas Eve mugging in the leafy brownstone liberal Brooklyn enclave of Park Slope. When he turned to a local parenting listserv to tell of his experience, his virtual first responders did not offer sympathy. Instead, they castigated him for publicly naming the block where the crime occurred, for fear it would damage local real estate values.

"It's as if the world itself were tilted, pushing us toward self-interested, short-term decisions, made more in the manner of corporate shareholders than members of a society," Rushkoff writes. "The more decisions we make in this way, the more we contribute to the very conditions leading to this awfully sloped landscape."

The corporation developed in the Renaissance, as royal governments attempted to hold onto their power and wealth in the face of rising capitalist merchant class tide. Corporations, in a sense, even founded the United States; We forget that colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth were not simply go-it-alone adventurers and religious zealots seeking wealth and religious freedom, but were sponsored by chartered business enterprises.

The corporation's most recent heyday occurred post World War II, where government officials, desperate to avoid another calamitous economic depression and violent upheaval, instead convinced Americans of the value of consumerism and business to save our lives. We are now living with the results of that decision. Everything from the deserted and boarded up main streets of our small suburban towns to the winner-take-all financial economy of bloated bonuses, banking crashes and flat-out fraud is the result.

So what to do? Rushkoff argues the answer is within all of us. Think local, think small, think about your community as a collection of individuals in need of help and support, not a temporary real estate investment. In the end, his message has much in common with another cri di coeur of 21st century American life, Sam Lipsyte's 2005 novel Home Land. In his marvelous speech near the end of the book, Home Land's narrator/protagonist Lewis Minor tells his fellow high school alumni how to live their lives, which includes many of the points Rushkoff hits on in his non-fiction jeremiad. "Don't expect a goddamn handout from the very people who have worked so hard to hijack your opportunities …Have faith. Take stock. Take five. Never surrender. Live to fight another day. Better a dead dog than sleeping all the time."

AlterNet sat down with Rushkoff recently to discuss how the corporation became us and what we can do to recover.

Helaine Olen:  How do we internalize corporate values?  How does it happen?

Doug Rushkoff:  It happens over time. What happens is corporations like automobile industry have a need for roads or the energy industry has a need for regulation that doesn't let people use solar. So they go to government and get laws written that change -- they get laws written to get the things they want.  So they basically steer the rail road through the real estate that they want to own or the automobile industry wants more people to use cars, so they get their guy in to be Secretary of Defense and he builds roads for cars and develop suburbs that require people to use cars to get to work.  The next generation that grows up with things being that way, thinks that things just are that way.  So the way we internalize corporate values is by assuming that the rules that are in place are pre-existing conditions of the universe rather than rules made by certain people at certain times.