Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back
by Douglas Rushkoff

* ‘Something has gone terribly wrong. We are deep in the thrall of a system that no one really likes, no one remembers asking for, yet no one can escape. It just is. And the minute it seems as if we can put our finger on what's happening to us or how it came to be this way, the insight disappears, drowned out by the more immediately pressing demands by everyone and everything on our attention. What did they just say? My phone is vibrating’.* In Life Inc Douglas Rushkoff offers a timely, provocative and urgent look at the origins and nature of the modern corporate system, a world in which everything can be commodified, a closed system that conquers not through exclusion but total inclusion. Under current conditions market forces have achieved a nightmarish triumph – everything, including dissidence, is assimilated.* Life Inc tells the story of how we got here and, more importantly, how this value system now perpetuates itself. Rushkoff reveals the process through which media conglomerates conceive and assimilate everything from teen icons to online communities, and replace anything resembling civic engagement with yet another consumer choice. His goal is nothing less than to give us the view from outside of the hermetically sealed shopping mall in which we spend our lives.

Reviews

Douglas Rushkoff is one of the great thinkers, and writers, of our time.
Dr. Timothy Leary 

Douglas Rushkoff is damn smart. He understood the digital revolution faster and better than almost anyone.
Walter Isaacson 

The brilliant heir to Marshall McLuhan.
 (New Perspectives Quarterly)

There are few more important subjects in the West today than the corporaticization of public and personal space and few writers as well-suited to the subject as the always insightful and provocative Doug Rushkoff. A terrific contribution to an urgent debate.
Naomi Wolf 

This is an urgent book, essential reading about an important topic you've probably never considered before. Like all great books, it will open your eyes to a whole new way of thinking. I hope that everyone gets a chance to read it, before it's too late.
Seth Godin, author of Tribes 

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 colonised every part of life that most of us don't even recognise how our lives and fortunes are channeled and manipulated by it. Rushkoff is going to be attacked as a communist, but that gets his point wrong. Look at his references - he has meticulously documented his argument. I love that Rushkoff isn't afraid to think big - very big. He took on the media more than a decade ago. Then he took on Judaism. But now he's chosen a larger target - the corporation.
Howard Rheingold author of Smart Mobs