Two years ago Douglas Rushkoff had an unpleasant encounter outside his Brooklyn home. Taking out the rubbish on Christmas Eve, he was mugged — held at knife-point by an assailant who took his money, his phone and his bank cards.
Shaken, he went back indoors and sent an email to his local residents’ group to warn them about what had happened.
“I got two emails back within the hour,” he says. “Not from people asking if I was OK, but complaining that I’d posted the exact spot where the mugging had taken place — because it might adversely affect their property values.”
That, he says, was more shocking than being mugged. He was spurred into action.
A New Yorker with a short crop of curly hair and dark eyes, Rushkoff made his name in the 1990s as the author of a series of books that examined the intersection of technology and popular culture, including Media Virus — in which he minted the concept of viral marketing, where the internet is infected with contagious advertising — and Cyberia: Life in the Trenches, which documented the weirder corners of online life.
Along the way he also coined the now-popular idea of “digital natives” — youngsters who gained a distinct advantage over their parents because they had grown up in a world of computers and electronics. But after two decades of documenting the hi-tech counterculture, Rushkoff realised he had a new subject: the mess we’re in. Life Inc, his new book, tells a story of an economic and social collapse 500 years in the making.
“It isn’t just about this crisis, it’s about a much bigger process,” he says, when we meet in the back room of a San Francisco conference centre (he has just delivered a barnstorming talk on why the stock market is a dangerous beast to a room full of stock-obsessed internet executives). “It’s the process through which we internalised values and built a physical landscape where there are towns and roads that support this sort of corporatised, disconnected existence. It’s about why the Dow Jones is the metric we choose to measure our health.”
His thesis is that centuries of corporate influence have turned us into a world of isolated, individualistic people pitted against each other. It’s familiar territory for the followers of Naomi Klein or Joel Bakan, the author of The Corporation, a damning examination of modern business. But Rushkoff’s ideas are more complex.
He tracks back our economic system to the Renaissance, when the first corporations were born. Initially created as an attempt by the aristocracy to control — and profit from — the actions of the merchant class, corporations slowly became more powerful, setting up new codes that encouraged people to stop producing things and start buying.
“People exchanging value with one another directly is the thing that got outlawed 500 years ago and then, over the centuries, got turned into a weird, messy thing that we look down on rather than a wonderful thing that we should look up to.” Over the course of history, he argues, the notion of local production and trade has been erased in favour of a centralised, globalised culture.
“It’s almost that what the church did to sex, government and corporations did to transactions,” he says. “We think of money as dirty, but it’s corporations that are dirty, the whole notion that we need them is dirty.”
Rushkoff is rake-thin, and has a twitchy, nervous vigour, busily taking notes, checking his phone, constantly moving backwards and forwards in his seat. It is no surprise that he is full of verve: after a few years on the sidelines, Life Inc is a return to his best form. In it he takes swipes at advertising, pop psychology, public relations, suburban life, the dotcom boom, reality TV and many of the things we take for granted. And yet, he says, it’s too easy to blame other people for what has happened to us all: in order to win our lives back from consumerism, we need to start pulling together again.
“When push comes to shove and our corporations fail us we begin to look to our peers for support,” he says. “We’re going to have to start doing favours for each other, working with each other … and then we’ll start to see that it’s more fun, more meaningful and cheaper.”
The book’s anger is tempered by sad stories that illustrate Rushkoff’s thesis of disillusionment: among them the tale of Charles and Sandra, a middle-aged couple from New York desperate to recover from a series of seemingly random financial calamities. In their quest to make life better, they are sucked into the world of get-rich-quick seminars — spending money they don’t have to try to win back money they don’t really need. In Rushkoff’s view, Charles and Sandra are victims of corporations and governments that have spent decades inculcating people into being commuters and consumers. But they are not just victims: they are also willing conspirators in a cycle that promises everything and delivers nothing.
Life Inc supposes that the only way to eschew the corporate world is through communal action. People need to reconnect with each other to create real value again. “The part I’m optimistic about is people who genuinely want to get back to doing something. It’s OK to just make a living. Why is that wrong?”
Surprisingly, given the strong conservative streak running through his arguments, one of the ways he thinks we can reclaim our lives is through the internet. “There’s an irony in it,” he admits. “In attempting to sell more goods to more people in less time, [corporations] ended up putting a device in our hands that let people connect with one another directly.” He refers to the “Craigslist phenomenon” — the classifieds website that makes it free to post adverts and has, as a result, become woven into the fabric of urban America.
“The amount of value that Craigslist has allowed people to create for one another is pretty remarkable,” he says. “I’m renting a little office near my house, and I’ve got to find someone with a truck. What else am I going to do? I go to Craigslist and find someone there. It makes me tremendously optimistic.”
He revels in the idea that this resembles the trade and bartering before the Renaissance — before the corporate world took hold and delivered us supermarkets, megastores, multinational banks and heavy debt. But while he believes fiercely that the internet harbours a revolutionary power, he is keen to stress that the online world shouldn’t do more than supplement the physical world.
“If you’ve got a rare form of cancer, then connecting with people online is the only way you’re going to find a support group — there’s no one else in your town or your country who’s got whatever that is,” he says. “If you’re trying to make your local school better? You might be better off using the internet to find out where and when are we going to meet to do this.”
Rushkoff says he started working on the book more than four years ago (although getting mugged brought the project into sharper focus). Back then, friends and acquaintances scoffed at his predictions that the housing bubble was going to hurt a lot further down the line. “It’s a little sad,” he says. “I wrote the book in the future tense, and then when I was editing I had to put it in the present, and then — in the last draft — I had to put it in the past.”
The upside of delayed publication, if there is one, is that his arguments seem more compelling now — and people are less likely to view him as a crackpot counter-culturalist. Still, he can’t be immune to the system he decries: after all, he’s got a book to sell, right? Rushkoff laughs. An advocate of what he calls “fractal activism” — favouring a host of sprawling, disorganised, personal protests over organised campaigns — he says he’s hoping the ideas in his book become common property so that, like a Wikipedia project on every street corner, many people can build something of value in their own lives by contributing their time.
“I’m not Naomi Klein,” he says with a grin. “Not only am I not capable of spearheading a movement, I don’t believe in movements. What I’m trying to do is encourage people to take the steps they need to take, in their communities and cities and towns.” – guardian.co.uk