Life inc
This didn't just happen.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.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
10mentions
9people
2009–2021years
90% recommend10% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Some people just want to have a decent life and spend time thinking about things other than work.
A few years ago when the first rumblings of "everyone is an entrepreneur" and "be your own brand" and all that stuff with books I read a book called Life, Inc, by Douglas Rushkoff. It helped me realize that the people who thought that living your life like you are corporation comes from a particular worldview that deifies people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the like. It equates that view of life as the best, nay only, way to live and succeed.
Personally, I love programming, and I love other activities. I tolerate some corporatization of myself for programming because it pays the bills. I would never want to be an entrepreneur or run a company. I hate doing all the other stuff that running a business requires.
Not that love being a wage slave, but that I have better things to do with my life than sell my skills.
- > The author is casting aside decades of economic growth, peace, and innovation.
I think Steven Pinker's case for capitalism is strong; still, it may be that a significant portion of that progress derives from "cooking the books" with regard to externalities like ecology, the social fabric, and quality of life. (The fact that things seem to keep getting better on average also obscures the possibility that we're "leaving money on the table" in terms of how much more life could have been improved, in the absence of rent-seeking, perverse incentives, etc.)
The shareholder model in particular does seem to have two layers of moral hazard: one for externalities to the economy/ecology as a whole, and another for short-termism and fixation on valuations/exits rather than sustainable revenue and relationships. A single owner, even if the worst kind of extractive rent-seeker, at least must take responsibility for their choices (including the potential for pro-social principled choices!), as opposed to getting lost in the crowd of "any other rational actor would make this same choice, so I'm off the hook".
Douglas Rushkoff does a good job of examining the other side of the capitalism=progress coin, without throwing out baby with bathwater: https://rushkoff.com/books/life-inc/
- Yeah I think we should, and storing and forwarding is exactly what Holochain does. I think there are different use cases for different tasks. I really like, and use, Scuttlebutt and DAT - which also store and forward data.
Scuttlebutt has been awesome for me to see that a social network can be completely hosted by it’s users.
I think Holochain and Ceptr are here to help us evolve how we work together and do our accounting.
What I love about Holochain's pattern is that it essentially provides a fully distributed, immutable and peer-to-peer crypto accounting framework for barter transactions/sharing work and resources. It does not focus on creating and managing artificially scarce coins (as is the case in the current financial system, and also in Blockchain). It is trying to show us that we are using Industrial Age tools (interest-bearing-debt national currencies), and that instead we could focus on creating peer-to-peer Information Age currencies [1].
Holochain's pattern enables communities to make their own judgements on what value something holds and how they want to account for it. It allows us to build that into a flow language - a currency. This means instead of using a fiat 'medium of exchange' backed by US imperialism and it's military might/control [2] - we create, redeem and destroy currencies based on asset-backed mutual-credit principles that mimic the way Mother Nature works. I think I read somewhere that today over 90% of money in the money system is speculative, and interest-bearing monopoly debt-money has no roots in the real world.
An example of a mutual credit currency could be a currency for seats on a train. When I buy a ticket, my ticket is tied to a certain seat on the train. If I went to Mars, my ticket would be worthless. The ticket is only valuable because the ticket is tied to the train system - to one of the seats available. This makes it asset-backed. Another example would be farmers being able to pre-sell their produce locally, without going through expensive middlemen. They can create currencies that represent their produce (the asset).
The MetaCurrency Project is bringing us a into a world where we have more agency when interacting with the world, using evolve-able peer to peer protocols that can be forked and re-forked, again and again, to better meet the needs of it's users.
They are giving us the tools to see the world with new eyes, and to allow multiple perspectives - instead of one rigid, centrally enforced truth.
Moving towards using mutual credit systems, together with reputation currencies (imagine your ratings on Uber, eBay etc. was hosted by your peer-to-peer community), allows you to build trust together in a way, un-intermediated or hindered by a corporate app and UI. These reputation currencies already exist, yet are contained and held hostage by our current paradigm. Other examples of reputation currencies I can think of are ‘FairTrade’ or ‘Organic’ labeling.
Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip [3] - making it agent centric instead of data centric. It is not anymore about the database in the middle, but about the relationships between peers and their balances/interactions, and the agreements we make together on what actions we are allowed to take in our different apps and networks. Together we can see and improve the app logic and I can bridge between my apps, as I now have complete control over my own data [4].
HoloREA is a project that is using Holochain to build a modular, cooperative and transparent economic supply chain framework. It uses the Resource Event Agent accounting model to enable users to steward and follow flows of economic actions. These relationships are today tightly controlled in corporations. HoloREA aims to create a cooperative web of interactive flows of people, actions and resources.
Essentially, the vision is to reclaim The Commons and give us better tools to steward the world together more peacefully and compassionately.
If you’re interested in this paradigm, a few keywords I've found useful: Protocol / Open Cooperativism (currently we have Platform / Surveillance Capitalism), mutual credit, myth of barter, buddhist economics, social darwinism.
I also like the work of Elinor Ostrom, Bernard Lietaer, David Graeber, Douglas Rushkoff (Life Inc.), Charles Eisenstein, E.F. Schumacher, Silvia Federici, Mariana Mazzucato and Anand Giridharadas.
For technical material: http://ceptr.org
Footnotes/links: [1] https://prezi.com/xmzld_-wayho/new-economy-new-wealth/
[2] “Nixon floated the dollar in order to pay for the cost of a war in which, during the period of 1970–1972 alone, he ordered more than four million tons of explosives and incendiaries dropped on cities and villages across Indochina—causing one senator to dub him “the greatest bomber of all time.”7 The debt crisis was a direct result of the need to pay for the bombs, or, to be more precise, the vast military infrastructure required to deliver them. This was what was causing such an enormous strain on the U.S. gold reserves. Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure “fiat money”—mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be. In that case, one could well argue that U.S. military power was now the only thing backing up the currency. In a certain sense this is true, but the notion of “fiat money” assumes that money really “was” gold in the first place. Really we are dealing with another variation of credit money.” — David Graeber: ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’
[3] https://holo.host/faq/what-is-holochain/
[4] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
- Life Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff
- I recommend Douglas Rushkoff's book "life inc, How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take It Back":
Centralized money has been the means for sucking profit out of local economies since about 1300. Rising income inequality has been an 800 year process. I thought I knew how the world worked, but Rushkoff changed my world view.
- Corporations are defined by a state's laws. A corporate charter is granted by the government. The reason corporations look like feudal societies is that the first ones were formed by feudal lords to harness the power of the merchant class that operated outside the feudal system, essentially granting monopolies. I recommend the first couple of chapters of Life, Inc by Douglass Rushkoff for a good overview of corporate history
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