Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 51

Life Inc. Dispatch: Insulation Equation

Life Inc. Dispatch 02:

Insulation Equation

Life Inc. Dispatch 02: Insulation Equation from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Life Inc. Dispatch 01: Crisis as Opportunity

The Life Inc. Dispatch series is a collection of brief videos encapsulating key concepts and ready strategies from Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc for de-corporatizing our lives, abandoning the speculative economy, and rebuilding both commerce and community from the bottom up.

Life Inc. Dispatch 01:

Crisis as Opportunity

Life Inc. Dispatch 01: Crisis as Opportunity from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Life Inc: The Movie

Bigger version and more info at http://LifeIncorporated.net

Vimeo version for sharing on social networks Life Inc. The Movie

Subtitled in Spanish Life Inc. The Movie

Panel on Complementary Currencies

Beyond the Benjamins:

Complementary Currency Systems and Social Interdependence

featuring Alex Gordon-Brander, Charles Eisenstein, and Douglas Rushkoff

Friday May 15, 2009 @ Lila Center

8- 10 pm

302 Bowery @ Houston St., 3rd fl.

F/V, D, 6, R/W trains all nearby

$10 or $5 (students/unemployed/monthly IDP donors)

Money should not keep you away!
Let us know if you can’t afford the cost and would like to attend.
Contact info {at} theidproject(.)com

Life Inc Excerpts

I’m beginning to excerpt the book, on BoingBoing and right here on Rushkoff.com

Here’s the first:

INTRODUCTION

Your Money or Your Life

A Lesson on the Front Stoop

I got mugged on Christmas Eve.

I was in front of my Brooklyn apartment house taking out the trash
when a man pulled a gun and told me to empty my pockets. I gave him
my money, wallet, and cell phone. But then—remembering some-
thing I’d seen in a movie about a hostage negotiator—I begged him to
let me keep my medical- insurance card. If I cou

Life Inc. on Richard Metzger’s Dangerous Minds

Richard Metzger interviews me about my book Life Inc., the economic meltdown, the failure of the mythology of corporatism, and why everything is going to be okay.

Part 1 of 5: www.youtube.com/watch?v=W828_iiC7qA&feature=related

Explanation of Life Inc, the book.

Part 2 of 5: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx_16BecDSY&feature=related

Corporatism - its mythology. Companies are really just debt; let the banks fail.

Part 3 of 5: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaHpApYsmAs&feature=related
Everything will be fine,

Life Inc - excerpts, movie, and BoingBoing

Starting this Monday morning, I’ll be posting on BoingBoing.net as a guest blogger for two weeks. During this time, I will be posting BIG excerpts from the book here at Rushkoff.com.

By the weekend, I will be posting additional excerpts in mp3 form from the upcoming RandomAudio version of Life Inc.

And finally, next Monday morning, we will release the first version of Life Inc: The Movie, right here at rushkoff.com, as well as on YouTube and Blip.tv and anyplace else that will host it.

Stand by.

Hidden Sources: Leary, Harcourt-Smith, and the Real Deal

I just had an enlightening conversation with counterculture heroine/outcast Joanna Harcourt-Smith, on my radio show The Media Squat (this audio stream begins with the Harcourt-Smith interview. To hear the whole show, go to the regular archives page here). She candidly addressed her and Leary’s role in becoming informants for the government, all in the context of Timothy’s imprisonment and Bush-style torture.

I haven’t fully digested everything we spoke about, but thought you should know about th

In Defense of the Dark Ages

When I was in the process of editing my new book Life Inc., my copyeditor pulled a paragraph out, in which I had explained that the so-called “Dark Ages” didn’t exist - that the ten centuries between the fall of Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance had many good ones among them. And that, in fact, the Late Medieval Era - the 10th through 13th Centuries - were a great age of prosperity and economic development.

She yanked the paragraph because, in her words, no one used the term Dark

Stimulus, Ass-Backwards

I just published this essay on Arthur:

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why President Obama’s approach to the economic crisis upsets me so much, so regularly, and I think I figured it out.

His impulse—perhaps as someone with more faith in the power of centralized, top-down decision-making than I have—is to fix our economic problems by supporting existing institutions. In the president’s view, the best approach now is to pump some necessary short-term assets into flagging institutions to help