In 1973, consumer debt in the US (comprised mostly of credit card debt) totaled $193 billion dollars. By 1983, that number reached $445 billion, and attained $866 billion in 1993. Want to take a stab at how high that number rose by 2008?

$13.84 trillion.

Now, compare a couple numbers taken from a larger span of time. In 1894, the richest man in America–John D. Rockefeller–earned $1.25 million, which was approximately seven-thousand times the country’s average income. In 2006, James Simons, a typic More...

I may rank books, on average, a bit on the higher side than some others, but trust me — if you're politically progressive like I am, this book deserves it indeed.

Rushkoff has a great paean for truly being ourselves without buying into corporate-driven cults of "individuality." With the rise of social media, this message is more true and more necessary than ever. Rushkoff notes that most "branding" into which we are sucked is driven by corporations.

Corporatism goes beyond that, though. It goes to More...

I was excited when I first picked up Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. I confess I expected it to articulate ideas and feelings I had, hopefully better than I could, and also flesh them out so they were more substantial. Yes, I was doing something I complain others do: looking for opinions that affirm my own rather than challenge them.

In many ways, the book does all that. I also think it’s an important book, at least its thesis is imp More...

Reading this book will upset you in two ways. The first is that much of this book sounds like a rant. Rushkoff's claims are pretty bold and out there and sometimes incorrect. You should still read this book - for the second reason: Rushkoff's claims are very revealing about the way we've all been played in the biggest swindle in life. He shows how every facet of our lives have been molded inside a corporate model. We're more consumer than human. Our values only exist in light of the corporate st More...

Using history and present day events, Rushkoff reveals the delusory world he believes western consumers created to protect centralised currency and the codependent indebted lifestyle it supports. On this end, Rushkoff is repititious about the pervasiveness of the corporate mindset - it's his mantra - he is conspiratorial and bold and his findings though well researched and novel are without depth or further explanation. Atleast when he points out all that is wrong with us he also comes prepared More...

I was really drawn to this book after reading the excerpts of it on Boing Boing and Rushkoff's own web site. In short, the book is about two things: how people in society came to adopt the values of corporate interests as their own as opposed to vice versa, and just how this trend can be reversed. What I feel the book suffers from is the fact that there is too much explanation of the former, and far less of the latter.

Rushkoff analyzes the role of corporations from as far back as the Middle Ages More...

Rushkoff's book may be a little crazy at times, but it is worth the read. The main thing I got from this book was that we shouldn't be built upon "monoculture" paradigm. We need to see that our lives are bigger and more important than economics and that economics can be a tool for achieving happiness, rather than happiness in and of itself. His notion that we are too beholden to bank notes rather than to other systems of transactions is worrisome; not because its crazy, but because it makes sens More...

This book was a severe disappointment. I heard Rushkoff interviewed on radio and was intrigued by his talk. Like most people interested in the book and Rushkoff's views, I am strongly opposed to the US corporate culture and economy and I thought I would be reading a well-researched, historical/economic analysis of that system. The book however turned out to be a dilettante's screed.

Let's start with the style. As some have noted the book is poorly edited, does not have a coherent structure and te More...

There have been many good books written recently about the implosion on Wall Street, the massive debt held by Americans, corporations, and the federal government, and the current recession, but few have gone into such depth about the United States and its economic and political discontents as Douglas Rushkoff's 2008 book "Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back." This book explores the history of the corporation from the late Middle Ages through the chartered monopo More...

So I suppose Rushkoff is at heart a polemicist, and a very good one. This isn't really new material for me-- I read a lot of anti-capitalist screeds, so when Rushkoff references Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, and Deleuze I say "but of course!" And his criticisms of the world of social media, the American cult of the individual pleasure principle, and the corporatization of daily life are my own complaints as well. So on this front, I enjoyed reading him, even if he was preaching to the choir.

It's wh More...

I borrowed this book from the library, and towards the end I found no fewer than three abandoned book marks. This led me to believe that many people found this book hard to finish and in many ways I sympathise. The subtitle implies that this book will be a history lesson followed by advice on how to overthrow our inhuman corporate overlords. The former is definitely present; Rushkoff charts the history of the corporation back to the Renaissance. He explains how the corporation became a way for m More...

Rushkoff writes about two things that bother him:
1. That he got mugged and the people in his neighborhood worried more about the bad publicity reducing their property value than the neighborly / community warning that a mugger might be in the area.

2. That growing up in a poor neighborhood, he felt more a sense of community than when his family moved out to mid-level dwellings in the suburbs... In particular, he mentions his community's barbecues in the city vs. his family's "competitive grilling More...

Did you know that our current currency system (i.e. centralized banks and governments controlling all of a country's wealth) is not the only system people have ever used? Did you know that people in the Middle Ages used a local currency that was based upon the work a person in a community did in a season, and that currency had to be reinvested by the end of the year or it lost it's value? And that the average working person actually did better in that scenario because there wasn't a middle man c More...

This book was quite different from what I expected. Instead of being a history of corporatism, it dealt more with the ways in which corporations manipulate us without us realizing it. There were so many surprising revelations in here, from the ways in which schools were set up(to mimic factories, to produce docile workers), to Henry Ford's influence on Hitler, to building overpasses at 9 feet to keep other races from coming to the suburbs by bus, I found it fascinating. Not only did I learn a l More...

This book teeters on the verge of quite-good-ness, but too much unsupported ranting firmly plants it in mediocrity.

The Good: Douglas Rushkoff's main ideas are very interesting. For one, he maintains that not only have corporations inherited the earth, but we the people have even adopted a corporate mindset and values as our own (corporatism). We can only relate to our economy through which global chain store we choose to spend our money. We can only relate to each other and our own identities th More...

Meh. I'm sure this is inspiring for people who haven't been paying attention, but I just found this to be more of the same old... It's tiring to be constantly reminded of how evil everything is and how everything is going to shit. It's so tiring it leaves me stunned into immobility. I would have enjoyed this more if the 90% of the book that was devoted to how awful hopeless everything is was swapped with the 10% devoted to what we can do... Tell me what is working. Sad as some may find it, I don More...

This book traces the history of the corporation back to its origins in the late Middle Ages. Monarchs of the period often had an excess of power, but not enough cash to fulfill their many ambitions. By granting certain businesses monopolies in exchange for a percentage of their profits, they were able to raise considerable sums of money at no risk to themselves. From there Rushkoff covers many examples of corporate influence over our culture and everyday lives such the destruction of local econo More...

Excellent book, giving the history of how a decentralized free market economy was usurped by the monarchy in the early Renaissance through the creation of two monopolies: the chartered corporation and central currency. The biases and the power created by these two monopolies have had tremendous effects on the ways society is shaped, and the more power corporations have in a society, the less healthy the communities are. It's really worth ready just as a history of economics. The only downside is More...

I loved the beginning of this book (particularly the intro story that explains the inspiration, as it were) and I loved the final chapters. The rest of the book was (to my mind) too much explaining of how fiat currency and corporate culture have ruined our lives. Fiat currency and corporate culture have a lot to answer for, but they weren't unmitigated evils and they didn't operate in a vacuum. I would have preferred that he spend more time on the excellent material at the end, dealing with obst More...

There really aren't many new ideas in this book that you can't find in Rushkoff's writings online. He does flesh out the history of corporations and centralized currency in more detail, but that still only fills a portion of the book. The rest of the book is filled with "rants" about how corporatism is destroying community and the civic institutions that we need to function as a society. This portion is thin on fact and chock full of anecdote, so it reads more as preaching to the choir. The sect More...

I've wanted to read this for a while, the subject matter intrigued me. I'm not sure how applicable it is to someone who lives in Australia (not that I'm trying to say we're in any way better than America when it comes to money matters, we just have far less captial to throw around for starters). The seminars that sound like a cross between a conference and a faith healing seminar sound horrifying, and the work practices adopted sound borderline inhumane. America: Great place to visit, but live? More...

Ever since reading The Vegetarian Myth I've been wary of, well, books with opinions. Especially opinions on how I should live my life. Facts can be really easily manipulated and unreliable sources can be cited in order to make it look like an author has a position of authority (ha), and I have not done my homework on Life Inc. to check its reliability. That being said, it was right up my ally. It confirmed opinions I already held and also forced me to think about our society in ways I hadn't. I More...

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back is a book that spawns out of the author's experience being mugged outside of his doorstep in an modestly-upscale neighborhood in Brooklyn. Rushkoff found, when he told his neighborhood association about the experience and need to promote safety, that the responses were concerned about his speaking up about the incident and promoting a poor PR record of the neighborhood, not the actual safety of the neighborhood. From that, Rus More...

Those who control history control the future and in Life Inc. Douglas Rushkoff makes his mark on our future by detailing the history of Corporate Capitalism as the political and economic reality of the modern world. After evolving over hundreds of years into its current form, Corporate Capitalism is now taken so thoroughly for granted that few even question the basic mythology behind it. Rushkoff was jarred into this revelation after being mugged outside his home and being told by neighbors to k More...

We live in a world where we are besieged by corporate imagery and rules, whether we are working for one, with one, or through one. These financial institutions don't exist, but they are given the same rights as a living, breathing person. Everything we own is "branded" with logos, and every transaction we make is intermediated by a company taking a small fraction for a service that is, according to the ads at least, supposed to make our lives better, but is ultimately the result of a series of d More...

With an opening that begins with a conversation about Park Slope, NY real estate, Rushkoff ponders and explores how our society has evolved in the service of corporations and corporatism. His observations are rooted in a deep scholarship as shown by the extensive footnotes that follow the main text.

This book is a real wake-up call on how much of our freedom and autonomy we're willing to give up in the pursuit of capitalism at all costs and is a lively contribution to our current political dialog More...

Thought this was quite an interesting read from the origins of corporatism dating back to renaissance through developments up to the modern day. The middle section of the book covered a very similar ground to Adam Curtis' 'Century of the Self' documentary, but what I really found interesting was the final section of the book which dealt with the problems and biases built into our current centralized currencies, and his exploration of local "complementary" currencies (ideas I can totally use in m More...

(I listened to the Audible edition, read by the author.) Tremendously insightful, and enormously challenging to our most fundamental collective assumptions about the way the world works. I was not able to wrap my brain around everything Rushkoff had to say, so I'll probably need to listen to it again. Also, it's hard not to get demoralized while listening to Rushkoff tear down one institution after another and expose the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to correcting the flaws in the system. H More...

I was extremely impressed by the painstaking research involved. This book has really opened my eyes to the constant bombardment of corporations and how they are inextricably linked to government. I was hoping the solutions he offered at the end would be more lengthy, but what he did include was enough for anyone to take and run with. They should require this book every high school economics/government/psychology class.