Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 36

Egypt Proves We Need a New Net

published on CNN

(CNN) — For all that the revolution in Egypt tells us about the power of networked media to promote bottom-up change, it even more starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away.

Yes, services such as Twitter and Facebook give activists the means to organize as never before. But the more dependent on them we become, the more subservient we are to the corporations and governments that control them.

Some of us might like to believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that we all have access to an unstoppable decentralized network. In reality, the internet is entirely controlled by central authorities.
Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points.

That's why President Hosni Mubarak's regime had so little trouble shutting down his citizens' networks when he wanted to. One phone call to each of the four internet service providers in his country was all it took. And while we might like to believe that couldn't happen in the United States, we should remember that all it took was a call from Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, to Amazon for the corporation to shut down WikiLeaks' website recently.

Meanwhile, UK's Vodaphone complied with Mubarak's orders first to turn off cell phone use in Egypt, and later to flood cell phone users with incendiary pro-government messages. More virtual ink was spilled in the United States about Vodaphone-partner Verizon's version of the iPhone than on Vodaphone's utter complicity in the violence fomented by the commands it promoted through its networks. Although Vodaphone continues to apologize publicly for its ongoing policy of serving the goon squads of a dictatorial regime, it has also continued to follow that regime's orders.

If bottom-up networks are this dependent on the good graces of top-down authorities for their very functioning, then how bottom-up are they? While in the United States we may have policies protecting free speech and open communication, it is these laws — and not some feature of our internet — that prevent the kinds of censorship we are witnessing in Egypt.

And, as we saw when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the United States, how quickly this very same authority can be used to cut off "enemies of the state" from access and funding.

Good, you might say. We don't want people to be able to connect and communicate about anything at all, do we? Isn't it good to have a circuit breaker somewhere? A trusted authority in charge who can prevent people from saying the wrong things to each other? Perhaps.

But if we believe our society is capable of engaging in the democratic process, we must trust its people to share their thoughts and ideas — their words — directly with one another, no matter how threatening to those currently in power.

The vulnerability of today's communications infrastructure to the whims of the governments and corporations who administrate it makes it an unsuitable platform for this process to occur.

We might better use the lessons of the internet to build a communications infrastructure that cannot be controlled from the top. For while the internet may have been built with an underlying architecture of central servers, corporate-owned pipelines and government-managed indexes, there are many less centralized alternatives, some of which have been used successfully in the past.

Back before the internet, many of us early computer hobbyists networked on something called Fidonet. It was a simple peer-to-peer network where users' computers would just call each other at night through their old-fashioned modems, exchange information and then move on. It was slow — e-mail could take a day or two to reach someone under this scheme — but it suggested a way of doing things independent of a centralized authority.

Today, faced with the limits of the internet, digital activists are reviving such ideas. One of them, "mesh networking," would let people connect simply by opening their Wi-Fi networks to incoming traffic. The inhabitants of an entire city could be connected to one another, without anyone even having an internet service provider. Then that city can connect to another, and so on.

Until we choose to develop such alternative networks, our insistence on seeing the likes of Facebook and Twitter as the path toward freedom for all people will only serve to increase our dependence on corporations and government for the right to assemble and communicate.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Douglas Rushkoff.

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Newsvine Interview

Scott Bukti, of Newsvine, did this email interview with me last week.

When it comes to writing and talking about the internet Douglas Rushkoff has been around the block (or driven his share of miles on the Information Superhighway if you prefer that metaphor). He was an early proponent of the internet, both in books and on television. In preparing for this interview I watched the wonderful documentary Digital Nation, which serves as a good reminder of how frequently he was on media outlets talking about the internet.

Rushkoff coined the term media virus and going "viral," which he talked about in my last interview with him, for the book and documentary Life Inc.

It has been interesting in recent years to watch early internet proponents and authors like Douglas – and, fellow author and technology visionary Sherry Turkle – change tack, to encourage readers to exercise much more caution about their attitude and relationship with the internet.

Scott: What was your goal with this book? What kind of conversations were you trying to start?

Douglas: I wanted to change the course of the existing conversation about technology, which puts human beings in such a powerless place. People keep asking "what is technology doing to us?" I want people to ask instead, "what are we doing to ourselves and one another through technology?" I want people to realize that technology is not some part of nature, but a creation of people. These things are made by people, and they have purposes. And sometimes those purposes are not the same ones that we have using them.

Most importantly, I wanted to revive some of the spirit of possibility that accompanied the emergence of these technologies in the 80s and 90s. People who saw the computer as a blank slate realized that software could be written to do anything. Today, people learn software as if it is somehow permanent and untouchable. They don't realize that the computer is less like a magazine with articles and ads, and more like a pad of paper on which you can write anything at all. We just happen to buy ones that are already filled up. If people only understood that computers were "anything machines," they might start to look at the possibilities for the other seemingly fixed systems in the world around them.

You say in the introduction the book consists of "ten simple commands that might help us forge a path through the digital realm. Each command is based on one of the tendencies or "biases" of digital media, and suggests how to balance that bias with the needs of real people living and working in both physical and virtual spaces – sometimes at the very same." Was it hard to limit these to ten? Were there others you wanted to include but you had to cut – or mesh with others? If so what were they?

It was hard to limit to ten, but better than limiting to seven, which the book industry and some psychologist determined were the maximum number that people could hold in their heads. The real reason I did ten – more than the ten commandments – was that humans have ten digits. This is the numeric bias, so to speak, of humans. It's why we do math in "base ten." Digits are digital, in the truest sense.

I had a bunch I meshed – like scale and abstraction, which were originally two different ones. Or anonymity and self. "Social" ended up absorbing a bias about markets and communication. But I ended up happy with the ten I got. People are asking for commands about education, religion, and so on – but those are really more about commandments for particular situations. They want instructions. Media can't really be biased for or against religion, so much as "belief." Biases don't have particular places so much as leanings. That made it easier to limit them.

I asked Howard Rheingold if he had any questions he suggested I ask you and he said I should ask "What connections do you see, Doug, between Life, Inc., and your current work?"

In a sense they are the same book. In Life Inc, I look at the biases of centralized currency and the corporation. I treat them less as particular things, and more as systemic forces that have leanings. They are not neutral players. I wanted people to see through particular corporate players and instead look at the bias of our corporatist system. See the operating system of corporatism as just one way of running the world – not a pre-existing condition.

This insight, for me, came from working with computers. I thought everyone working with this medium would get its open source nature, and then start to see through other supposedly closed systems. But I realized that people – particularly younger ones – tend to accept the software and websites they use at face value, and as givens. As pre-existing conditions. I wrote this new book to go back a step, and apply the insights I got from using new media tools to new media themselves.

I first met you in an online community with Howard Rheingold and I was struck reading your last book, Life Inc., where you seemed to be singing a different tune about the internet (one more mixed). So this part jumped out at me:

"As one who once extolled the virtues of the digital to the uninitiated, I can't help but look back and wonder if we adopted certain systems too rapidly and unthinkingly. Or even irreversibly. But those of us cheering for humanity also get unsettled a bit too easily, ourselves. We are drawn into obsessing over the disconcerting possibilities of technology, serving as little more than an equal and opposite force to those techno-libertarians cheering the Darwinian wisdom of hive economics. Both extremes of thought and prediction are a symptom of thinking too little rather than too much about all this. They are artifacts of thinking machines that force digital, yes or no, true or false reconciliation of ideas and paradoxes that could formally be sustained in a less deterministic fashion. Contemplation itself is devalued."

Does this mean you regret your earlier support of the Internet or just that we should be more cautious about how the Internet is affecting us?

No. It means that the extremism – the back and forth that many of us feel about the promise and peril of digital technologies – it itself a symptom of digital technologies' bias toward polarity and extremism. In the paragraph, I try to share my own polarized experience of this stuff in order to convey that sensibility.

Or an easier way to say would be: sometimes I love digital technology a whole lot. Sometimes I am very upset about it. Many theorists are either much too exuberant and utopian about it, or too pessimistic and fearful. There are very few who hold a balanced view. This is because digital technology tends to invite and propel these extremes.

As for me personally, I still love technology. Like I say all over the book: I am not writing about what technology is doing to us. That's the wrong question. I am writing about what we are doing to one another through technology.

My opinion of technology has not changed. My opinion of people may have changed, however. I am surprised most people would rather remain powerless and unaware of how the world works. I had thought this was the result of oppression. Now I fear this is just the way a majority of people choose to live. So instead of fighting power, I am now more dedicated to making people less afraid of thought. Thinking doesn't hurt. Not that much, anyway. And it's better to see what is happening than to die unaware.

On a related note, one of the biggest ways I've seen the internet affect people including me – and I gather you since you include it here – is this matter of "always being on." Or as you put it in the chapter titled "Do not be always on":

"The human nervous system exists in the present tense. We live in a continuous 'now' and time is always passing for us. Digital technologies do not exist in time, at all. By marrying our time-based bodies and minds to technologies that are biased against time altogether, we end up divorcing ourselves from the rhythms, cycles and continuity on which we depend for coherence."

Do you think this a common problem people have? Do you have advice on how people deal with this? Should they sometimes leave all electronic devices off for a day or something?

I wouldn't tell people to take any particular electronic sabbath or anything. It's a nice idea, of course, and people are welcome to try it. But such a suggestion or prescription wouldn't be in keeping with what I'm trying to do, which is liberate people from the false notion that they are living in reaction to technology. Or that tech is doing something to them that they have to mitigate.

The point of this command – do not be always on – and the chapter itself is to show people that digital technology is biased toward asychronous activity. It exists outside time. This means we get to do digital things in our own time. This was the advantage of email over the telephone. You lose the conversation and the inflection, but you get to answer when you want to.

I look at the problem of information overload and distraction and attention not as problems of technology but problems of the way we use it. If we attempt to live in the same temporal reality as our digital devices, we get really screwed up. And we don't have to.

The simple advice is not to be always on – don't connect yourself to your technologies in some permanent, tethered way. Use them consciously when you want to. It's pretty simple. I get as much email as almost anyone. Upwards of a thousand emails a day. And I do not let them vibrate on arrival. They're over on a server somewhere waiting for me. That's the main trick.

Also you mention in that part I quoted above talk of predictions. While reading this I came across this piece, where you seem to be making predictions about facebook. How does that fit with your comments above? By the way I love your comment about how your first book about the Internet was cancelled by the publisher in 1992 because at that point the Internet was seen as just a passing fad. Doh! While internet social media companies may come and go do you think the internet will be a permanent presence?

I don't think anything is permanent. But I do believe that networking technologies will be around for a very long time. I think they will live about as long as printing has.

I don't like Facebook, and I really don't like Goldman. So when they are working together to do something as universally celebrated as the AOL/TimeWarner deal was in its day, I feel obligated to offer an alternative scenario.

You recently wrote in Why WikiLeaks hackers are a glitch, not a cyberwar: "What the internet lacks today indicates the possibilities for what can only be understood as a new operating system: a 21st century, decentralized way of conducting political, commercial and human affairs.

Could you say more about the new OS, how turbulent the transition will be, and how long you think it will take?

It may be so turbulent that it's not allowed to happen. When I talk of a new OS, I really just mean a new way of doing things.

For the past 600 years, we've been living under a scheme of forced centralization. Kings and Lords got threatened by the emergence of real peer-to-peer economic activity in the late middle ages, and so they made direct commerce illegal. That's why we have corporations and central currency: they were developed by hired financiers of the 11th and 12th centuries to disrupt the rise of the middle class, what they called the bourgeoisie.

Although they had to fight a few wars to keep this going, they managed to maintain control over our economic and social activity – even after the Enlightenment and its revolutions. So it's a pretty well entrenched way of doing things, where people get "jobs" in order to work and spend central currency that they earn in order to get stuff.

Now, we have a peer-to-peer medium that would let people transact directly again, even exchange ideas and methods for doing stuff. We don't have to do everything through Amazon or Murdoch or Wal-Mart or even our government. We can engage directly.

That is, until Comcast or whoever decides they don't want us using our conduit that way, or net neutrality is no longer maintained.

Both of the sites I write for have regular discussions about a topic you discuss at length in the book, namely the debate about whether people should be able to post without revealing their real or full names. Can you summarize your thinking on this?

People should be allowed to do whatever they want. That includes making sites that don't permit comments from people who haven't registered. Conversations work better when people own their own words. In a few cases, such as dissidents speaking out against dictators, identities are better kept secret. That's what Amnesty International and Wikileaks are for.

But the comments section on a blog? Moderate the @!$%# out of it. There's a whole lot of anonymous losers out there who don't want to promote good conversation. They want to feel their impact. And the easy way to feel one's impact is to be an @!$%#.

You must decide what is the purpose of your conversation space, and then run it accordingly. If it's to help people vent their frustration by making cruel remarks to people, then give them that space. If it's to promote a meaningful dialogue, then keep them out.

People will tend to be less intentionally harmful if they have some identity at stake when they are posting. Even a pseudonym in which they have invested their time can be as important to them as their real name.

I just watched the PBS program you helped make, Digital Nation. Would you encourage parents to watch that, in addition to reading your books, so they know what their kids are up to? What other advice do you have for parents of kids growing up online?

I guess that show is a good way in for parents and educators. It's put together from the PBS perspective, which is one of a lot of concern. It's a good show, and I'm in it, but it's not really my story or my own perspective. It has a lot more to do with worrying about what all this tech is doing to our kids than looking critically at the structure and function of these technologies.

So sure, it's a great introduction, and it meets parents where they are right now. My books are less about sharing that sensibility than my making constructive advice about how to contend with these challenges. I'm much more present and forward in Program or Be Programmed. It is not reportage, like the documentary. It is an argument.

What was it like being part of Psychic TV?

Totally fantastic. I would have kept doing it, I think, if I didn't have a family. At least on some level. But it's hard to do a road trip in Eastern Europe for three months while you have a two-month-old at home. It just seemed self-indulgent to play music for no money when I went and started a family.

As for the experience itself, it's hard to describe. It's a bit like psychedelics, I suppose. The vibe of PTV was pure joy – even in the dark stuff we sometimes played. So it was a matter of connecting with the other people in the band while we played. Channeling something together and then passing it through to the crowd. Then taking what they brought – whatever it was – and channeling it back through each other.

There's a whole lot of darkness in the world these days, and playing in the band felt a bit like doing energetic cleansing.

But the actual doing was so much fun. Six little happy faces sharing the joy of playing music together. It's like the music becomes your collective body. All you can do is nod at each other as it happens.

Conceptually, it's all about cut-and-paste. Except instead of doing it literally with samples, we played in certain modalities that imitated different sounds and styles from various psychedelic genres. And then tried to make it sound like rock and roll again.

I like your observations about social media companies and others not getting that, as you put it, "Our digital networks are biased toward social connections – toward contact. Any effort to redefine or hijack those connections for profit end up compromising the integrity of the network itself, and compromising the real promise of contact."

I also like this statement "The anger people feel over a social networking sites ever changing policies really has less to do with any invasion of their privacy than the monetization of their friendships.
What would you say if one of those companies tried to hire you as a consultant?

Who, like Facebook? If Facebook hired me, I'd tell them they might consider making the Facebook user the real customer. Currently, the user isn't the customer; the user is the product. Facebook users are being sold to the advertisers and market research firms, who are the real customers.

This is short-sighted even business-wise. The economy is going down. People aren't buying stuff. Advertising can't support the entire universe because there's got to be *something* being advertised. When you start seeing advertisements about advertising, that's how you know we've really reached the very end of the cycle.

So I'd advise Facebook (if they paid me a ton of money, mind you) to put the users first, and think of services they could sell to people. This whole thing of giving away social services to people in return for their identity is just not good. It means the social services will all be geared toward making us fit for the slaughter by the company's real customers.

I love your last point – that too many Americans are not interested in being programmers so much as just using programs. What do you think should or could be done to change this? A return to computer classes that focus directly on programming

Yeah. It'd be great for them to be exposed to computers, even for just a few weeks. Most kids won't have to learn full-on programming. But it would be such a powerful experience for them to know what a program is, and that people actually make choices about what computers do. I think kids in about fourth grade should be shown computers. It's really easy and fun. Just around when they learn their first algorithm – long division – they should be introduced to programming.

Then later, when they take a class in "computers" in high school, they won't just learn Microsoft Word and Excel. They could still take secretarial courses if they're interested, of course, and learn those programs the way people learned shorthand and typing a long time ago. But they should be able to take classes in high school where they learn computer languages. Kids should be able to find classes that help them understand that computers aren't just born, like carrots.

And even if schools don't follow my advice voluntarily, they'll be sure to try to implement some classes in coding once a bunch of Chinese hackers take down Chase. Only then it might be too late.

Thanks again to Douglas for this interview.

Incidentally, I was sent to computer camps in the 80s – I wrote here about the atari camp – sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/2008/08/27/1794051-my-fortunately-short-life-as-an-aspiring-computer- and the focus was on programming in BASIC. When I realized most programming happened in other languages I lost interest. Plus I was convinced atari computers were the future and bummed when I was the only student who didnt receive an atari but instead was given a PC. shows what i knew – maybe it was good i did a career change

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Rushkoff Drops Memetic Bomb on Pivotcon

MemeHacking were the only ones to pick up on the memetics I was attempting to dish out near the end of a spanking I gave marketers at Pivotcon a couple of months ago. And I actually do have the answers to the questions he raises at the end. I just don't have time to get them down on paper right now.

At PivotCon 2010, Douglas Rushkoff made some extremely cogent arguments about why brands cannot go viral on social networks — even when there's plenty of activity on companies' websites and Facebook pages — and why it's pointless to try to push brand concepts (such as mascots) around as memes in the expectation of driving actual product sales.

This talk is exceptionally amusing both for its venue — he's at a branding conference talking about social media — and for the fact that he opens the talk by saying, essentially, "you think you're talking about what's happening, but you're not." He managed to rankle more than a few career marketeers who oversimplified his message to mean "marketing is evil"; the mild antagonism to this particular audience inherent in his message did not go unnoticed by PivotCon organizer Chris Shipley who made no bones about the reason they decided to schedule his talk dead last.

But beyond its entertainment value, Rushkoff's message provides historical perspective on the concept of a conversation and what is entailed — that is, the transmission of ideas — and his ontology draws increasingly, as the talk progresses, on memetics.

Memes, he says, are traded and spread for many reasons, but largely because they embody information that is useful. (One must put aside entirely the question of what is True, since, for example, many superstitions can be considered useful by many people for many years.) Rushkoff explains the social world as a non-fictional playground for the interchange of "facts" that may or may not replicate, depending on many fitness factors.

Companies often inflate their brands into elements of storytelling in an effort to engage the consumer in a dialogue about that story, rather than about the content of their product. "The Keebler elves were invented to stop people from thinking about where Keebler cookies were made and how… to protect the consumer from the reality of what it really is," said Rushkoff.

But "on a social network, people want to share information that someone is going to actually value." NOT, he argues, a brand image.

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Ten Things Musicians Can Learn from Program or Be Programmed

From We All Make Music:

In an age of digital downloads, virtual instruments, and social-media fandom, everybody, musicians especially, must learn how technology is controlled. People who fail to do that run the risk of leaving themselves open to manipulation — i.e., to being controlled.

That anxiety-stoking thesis is central to a new book by Douglas Rushkoff, who besides being a prolific author and longtime observer of digital life, has played keyboards in the experimental industrial band Psychic TV.

The book – Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age – describes in detail how the software that powers digital technology both shapes and informs human existence. And the book's lessons, taken one command at a time, provide useful advice (some functional, much philosophical) to working musicians.

To provide a clearer sense of what Rushkoff means, we've created a chapter-by-chapter cheat sheet to his book. This isn't a replacement for the book, just a test run of Rushkoff's thinking. Despite their pithy titles, the individual commands of Program or Be Programmed are a lot denser, and have a lot more to them. Each "translation" provided below is but one key lesson to be taken away from the given chapter.

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Laura Flanders GritTV

Starting tomorrow, I'll be doing monthly commentary/conversations with the fabulously brilliant Laura Flanders on GritTV. If it goes well enough, I might try to ramp up the frequency, but even five minutes a month with Laura is sure to generate new synapses in yours truly.

We decided on a conversation over a commentary for precisely that reason. I can always "deliver" a commentary that I prepare in the quiet of my own mind – but making it part of a conversation ends up yielding more than the sum the parts. This is what these internets were made for.

The Facebook Panopticon

So everyone is up in arms about Facebook's latest effort to serve its assets (us) up to its customers (the advertising industry). The new idea, already in practice, is called "Sponsored Stories." It lets advertisers pull content from your posts, and use it in ads that show up on your friend's pages. So instead of getting a generic Starbucks ad, you'd get an ad that replays one of your friend's posts – "I just got a Tall Latte at Starbucks" or "my MINI really got me out of the snow this morning."

What does it mean? Likely nothing, as the feature could conceivably be pulled once people complain – as it happens with so many other Facebook innovations. Of course, they'll only pull back so far, keeping some element of this technology and marketing policy intact.

What's so pernicious about this one, as I see it, has less to do with its impact on the ads' viewers than on the ads' unwitting creators. As I explained to Annalee Newitz for her article on the subject, the thing that's spooky here is not just that advertisers can get leverage by using the comments of "real people." It's that our behavior as consumers is itself being retrained. We are to feel like we are living in the ads.

Whether or not any of our comments is actually chosen, it could be. It's like a panopticon, where the surveillance is all that is required to change
our behavior. Those of us who remain on Facebook are now ever closer to identifying completely as consumers, trying to please the corporations observing our behaviors.

And even if they pull the whole Sponsored Stories thing right now, we still know they are watching.

Program or Be Programmed Interview on Wisconsin Public Radio

Here's a nice hour-long interview from Wisconsin Public Radio, 1/21/2011.

Anne Strainchamps talks with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff about his strategies for living right in the digital age. Guest: Douglas Rushkoff, adjunct professor of media studies, NYU and the New School University. Technology columnist, "The Daily Beast." Author, "Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age."

States Join Corporatism Tango

Lawmakers leaked to the NYTimes this morning their intent to find a way for States to re-organize their debts under something much like bankruptcy.

The problem is that State's pension and healthcare insurance obligations are so high that they can't pay for the essential services they need to provide, like schools and roads. So, like GM on the brink of collapse a couple of years ago, they are looking for a way to reorganize those debts. That means finding a way of not paying them.

If only States could go bankrupt, then the federal government could step in and change all the rules, just like they did with GM. A judge could simply decide how much of what people and companies are owed will actually get paid. Municipal bondholders get this percent of the face value of their bonds, state employees get this fraction of the pension, the asphalt company gets this percent of the invoice it's owed, and so on. And the Fed could simply print the money to pay these debts, or the US Treasury loan the money.

The good thing about it is that with all these debts effectively shifted to the past and handled by some kind of "bad" state (just like the "bad" GM took all the bad stuff so that the "new" GM could flourish unburdened by debt and useless assets) the new state could then move on fresh and clean. And that would be good for me, personally, in the short term. I've got no pension, no municipal bonds, and no contract with the state. I do have a kid in kindergarten, and I'd love for the public schools to stay solvent.

The bad thing about it is that everyone owed money by the states in question would get the shaft. Union workers, retirees, and so on. Chances are, municipal bondholders would not have their bonds reduced the way GM bondholders did, for fear of setting off a market panic and compounding states' problems. But bond values would drop, anyway, as investors and pension funds flee for fear of what could happen. (Which means the way to "play" this crisis would be to buy munis after they drop, when their interest rates skyrocket – simultaneously getting out of cash, which will be printed by the fed to pay the states' debts.)

For any of this orderly bankruptcy-style debt reorganization to happen, however, states would have to get the law changed. They are considered "sovereign," which means as corporations they are not subordinate to the federal government, so they can't be re-organized from above. The current dialogue is a way of preparing the pubic for the eventual reality of state bankruptcies, and testing which sort of re-organization language and structure will be least threatening to our perception.

Jonathan Lethem's Amazon Review of Life Inc.

Jonathan Lethem on Life Inc.
Amazon Review:

Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Lethem has also published his stories and essays in The New Yorker, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times, among others.

I once sat astonished in the audience at a conference on business law and copyright and watched as Douglas Rushkoff stood on stage and patiently, even gently, explained to a group of record company executives, who'd paid for the privilege of hearing him speak, why it was simply time for them to stop trying to rescue their industry. "You don't make anything of value," I believe he told them, with a tone of humane explanation. Ever since that moment Douglas has been one of my personal heroes, and I've been a most attentive reader of anything he cares to put between covers, knowing that his combination of a cold eye and a warm heart is guaranteed to astonish and embolden my own thinking about what's possible in the world–about what's possible to enact in the space between one human being and another. I don't exaggerate when I say he takes the potentially dry notion of 'public advocacy' and shifts it into the realm of epiphany, and art. That puts him with few living writers–Lewis Hyde, perhaps, and the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. Yet Rushkoff is perhaps even braver, or anyway lighter on his feet, working without the protection of any sort of ivory tower. He occupies the ground of our most immediate perplexities, and his reports of what he finds are breaking news.

Life Inc. is Rushkoff's best and most important book. Few texts stand any chance of truly changing your mind, let along saving the world. This is one of them. Rushkoff's the first to put the economic crisis in its greater historical and cultural perspective, and doing so, he reveals the underlying biases and embedded agendas of institutions we take for granted, from banking and central currency to corporations and even the suburbs.

Rushkoff really works the manner of a historical philosopher, but without any off-putting jargon or air of self-reference you'd fear encountering within the discipline–he's writing for his readers. His fundamental gesture here is to reexamine the very meaning and use of the world-concept "corporation." You'll never use it again unthinkingly, nor consent to its automatic use in any conversation that's meant to be halfway serious.

In Life Inc. we're given a concise and acute history of corporatism, from its origins as a way for feudal lords of the Late Middle Ages to maintain their monopolies on power, to its present expression in finance industry bailouts–consistently revealing things we take for granted as inventions with purposes that may not be serving us today. In Rushkoff's persuasive account, our acceptance of corporatism as a given leads us to internalize the values of corporations as our own. We use metrics like the GNP to measure our health as a nation, treat people as competitors or marks to be exploited, and the planet as a resource to be extracted. Each Wal-Mart purchase further bankrupts the local community, alienates us from our neighbor merchants, and makes us less likely to attend the PTA meeting.

Life Inc. is a book to give your uncle the disenchanted union organizer, and your other uncle, the soon-to-be-disenchanted Tea Party activist. Rushkoff goes beyond the left/right dialectic to show how both political parties suffer from a dependence on highly centralized solutions and an unhealthy marriage to corporate interests that know no national allegiances.

I recently wrote about the great John Carpenter movie, They Live, which concerns itself with magic sunglasses that translate the corporate signage all around us back into the raw propaganda it really is at its root: a set of commands to WORK, CONSUME, SLEEP, OBEY. This book is those glasses, a lens for seeing deeper into the world you occupy, the commitments you've chosen, the money in your wallet. Read Life Inc. and you'll want to start organizing a local currency in your neighborhood, I promise you.

Me, Losing It

I lot of people have been asking for this one, so here it is.

I gave a talk last year at a conference that turned out to be less about social media than social marketing. I got really tired of listening to brand managers talk about their "Twitter strategies," and by the time my closing keynote came around, it felt like I had watched the corporatization the net recapitulated over the course of the afternoon. Thus, this rant, expressing the core themes Life Inc. in twenty minutes.

(I had meant to embed the video above, but the company sponsoring the embedding insists on embedding their entire player – which takes up the whole page, debilitating all other functionality. Not a good embed strategy, fyi…)