In Life Inc , award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff
traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant
fact of contemporary life Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly
adopted the values of corporations that they.re no longer even aware of it

This fascinating journey, from the late Middle Ages to today, reveals the roots of our
debacle From the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self;
from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking; from the birth
of the modern, self-interested individual to his exploitation through the false ideal
of the single-family home; from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of MySpace.
the corporation has infiltrated all aspects of our daily lives Life Inc exposes why we
see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the ultimate
measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business

Most of all, Life Inc shows how the current financial crisis is actually an opportunity
to reverse this six-hundred-year-old trend and to begin to create, invest, and transact
directly rather than outsource all this activity to institutions that exist solely for
their own sakes

Corporatism didn.t evolve naturally The landscape on which we are living.the operating
system on which we are now running our social software.was invented by people, sold to us
as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-
sustaining reality It is a map that has replaced the territory

Rushkoff illuminates both how we.ve become disconnected from our world and how we can
reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and, mostly, to one another As the
speculative economy collapses under its own weight, Life Inc shows us how to build a real
and human-scaled society to take its place.

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