Douglas Rushkoff is working on a new book. Get Back in the Box is one of the few books on innovation that made sense to me, so I’m looking forward to this one. Rushkoff, like the fantastic Ronald Wright, knows his history, so he can explain not just where we are but how we got here.

Something has gone terribly wrong.

Unquestionably but seemingly inexplicably, we have come to live in a world where the market has insinuated itself into every area of our lives. From erection to conception, school admission to finding a spouse, there are products and professionals to fill in where family and community have failed us. Commercials entreat us to think and care for ourselves, but to do so by choosing a corporation through which to exercise all this autonomy.

Born in the Renaissance, necessitated by the Industrial Age, powered by workers, paid for by consumers and eventually sold back to us as shareholders, today’s faceless fascism – what Mussolini called “corporatism” – is a closed system that conquers not through exclusion but total inclusion. Everything, even dissidence, is assimilated. And in the process, life itself is reduced in its complexity, unpredictability, and intrinsic value.

Instead of depending on a parental dictator or nationalist ideology, the system of control to which we have succumbed depends on a society cultivated to see the corporation as central to its welfare, value, and very identity.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Books\, People\, Politics\. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.