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. 
