When Douglas Rushkoff was mugged in front of his apartment building
in a posh Brooklyn neighborhood, he did what just about any affluent
white academic would do in response: First he felt guilty for his part
in gentrifying Park Slope and leading his young attacker to a life of
crime, and then he wrote the introduction to his new book, Life
Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It
Back (intro title: “Your Money or Your Life: A Lesson on the Front
Stoop”), citing the mugging as a symptom of colonialism and, therefore,
corporatism. This is classic Rushkoff, taking a personal experience or
opinion and, without any supporting information, exploding it to the
broadest scope possible. His book does not improve from this
inauspicious beginning.
Rushkoff has been a cultural critic since 1994, the author of books
with titles like Media Virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture and Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say. You can find
Rushkoff’s influence everywhere in the alternative media: Most of the
writers who contribute to antiadvertising magazine Adbusters plagiarize Rushkoff’s tone if not his content, and his work has been
published by virtually every countercultural publication worth noticing
over the last 15 years. He even hosts a show called The Media
Squat on grizzled independent radio station WFMU, in which he
gleefully picks apart the corporate media for a worldwide audience.
The problem is that Rushkoff has long since become a parody of
himself, and he doesn’t help his anticonsumerist peers with this
endless repetition of clichés. There is not one worthwhile idea
in Life Inc. Passages frequently veer into unintentional
hilarity as Rushkoff tries to coin a new platitude on every page.
Let’s begin with the clichés: Rushkoff attempts to tie
reality television to one of the hoariest essay tropes of the last 50
years—Stanley Milgram’s 1960s experiments in which subjects
tortured an actor who they believed was genuinely feeling great pain,
simply because someone dressed as a scientist told them to. Milgram’s
experiments are classic Sociology 101 fodder. And Rushkoff can’t even
manage to successfully employ this flashy bit of theater correctly.
Rather than spelling out the connections between Milgram’s experiments
and reality television, he can’t decide whether the contestants or the
viewers are the subjects, ultimately abandoning the experiment entirely
because he’s too busy making the claim that Donald Trump is a
latter-day King Louis XIV. He continually makes tired, shoddy
bumper-sticker allusions to history and other high-cultural
aspirations—”Let them eat blog,” he writes, and you can
practically hear him snickering with self-satisfaction as he
types—but he can’t successfully craft a decent argument.
Consider this passage:
Restaurants no longer have enough tables to give every executive his
own signature location for daily power lunches. People choose their
eateries less by the food they want to eat than the image they want
to project. Kids learn how to be doctors, lawyers, or cops by
watching ER, Boston Legal, or Law & Order and choosing which branded personality to emulate. And like any
outsourcing corporation, the branded personality needn’t know how to
perform any work himself. The brand alone is the capital through
which value from others is extracted.
Where are these mythical overcrowded power-lunch restaurants?
Perhaps in Park Slope? Who are these kids who want to be lawyers
because they watched James Spader smirk his way through a closing
argument on television? How many cops don’t know how to perform their
jobs? What is Rushkoff talking about? He’s too busy following insane
conspiracies to their illogical conclusions to bother making sense: He
accuses a 2008 Mountain Dew promotion, in which consumers could vote
for a new flavor of soda, of “distracting [young consumers] from
democratic participation by getting them to engage, instead, in the
faux populist development of a beverage brand.” Really? Does Rushkoff
know someone who was too flabbergasted by an online vote sponsored by a
soda company to vote in the presidential election? Why didn’t he
intercede on this poor ignoramus’s behalf?
This broad speculation doesn’t help the discourse. Rushkoff scoffs,
“On social-networking sites—where real hugs can never
happen—people compete instead for love in the form of numbers:
How many ‘friends’ do you have?” This saber rattling at Facebook smacks
of get-off-my-lawnism. Real hugs can never happen through books,
either, but that doesn’t stop Rushkoff, slobberingly, from dedicating
Life Inc. “To you, the real people on the other side of this
corporate-mediated connection.”
While Rushkoff whines luxuriantly, other authors are actually
fighting meaningful battles on the anticorporate front. Mark Thomas’s
Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola isn’t
as flashy a book as Life Inc. It received a low-key paperback
original release in the United States, and it didn’t make national
best-seller status like Rushkoff’s book. But instead of airing bloated
complaints against Coca-Cola’s advertising strategies, Thomas actually
travels the world, discovering injustices and unfair business practices
committed in the name of cornering the world’s soda market.
In chapter after chapter, Thomas investigates dubious activities
around the world that can be attributed to the Coca-Cola corporation.
He lists eight trade unionists who have been killed after speaking out
against Coca-Cola, and he uncovers legal agreements that would require
other Colombian pro-labor activists to never criticize Coca-Cola again.
In El Salvadoran sugarcane fields, he witnesses children being forced
to work in clear violation of international child-labor laws. He
interviews citizens of an Indian village whose water has been
stolen—at a rate of just under a million liters a day—from
beneath them by a local bottling plant. With the help of an internal
informant, he levies charges that Coca-Cola deliverymen
are—sometimes by force—removing competitor’s sodas from
neighborhood bodegas in Mexico. And he discovers a church in Mexico
that has incorporated the soda into its rituals, inciting belches that
purportedly push out negative energy.
This is first-rate journalism and first-class advocacy, and if
self-branded anticorporate divas like Rushkoff weren’t so busy grabbing
at the spotlight, perhaps more attention would be paid to Devil and other books like it. Compared to Thomas’s vibrant, globe-trotting
investigation, Rushkoff looks like a fussy Little Lord Fauntleroy,
levying nonspecific charges against an invisible evil that only his
highly trained eye can discern. He has branded himself into
irrelevancy. 
“Most of the writers who contribute to antiadvertising magazine Adbusters plagiarize Rushkoff’s tone if not his content”
Adbusters started years before Rushkoff published his first book you twit.
Doesn’t mean Adbusters’ recent contributors haven’t been writing like Rushkoff, “dude”.
Great review. Rushkoff is just the sort of “liberal” that gives the rest of us a bad name.
Rushkoff is in fact the sort of self-styled “radical” corporations most love. His vapid, non-specific rants appeal mostly to people who treat politics as a lifestyle — people who can’t be bothered to learn the facts of why and how corporations should be opposed. These stylish radicals one day grow bored with their oppositional pose, grow their hair out, take out the nose rings, and go off to become corporate lawyers. Corporations, meanwhile, have made a killing selling them green hair dye, nose rings, and “anticorporate” books.
@4 maybe you didn’t read the book, or maybe you’re looking at it from the perspective of some kind of manifesto? Your rant is the same kind of non-specific bullshit you claim Rushkoff is doing.