AlterNet: Are We All Corporate Shills?

Are We All Corporate Shills?

By Helaine Olen, AlterNet. Posted August 7, 2009.

Author Doug Rushkoff argues that business, profit and consumerism are so dominant that we can't imagine living any other way.




Are we all corporate shills? That's the thesis of Doug Rushkoff's provocative new book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back.

Rushkoff, the new media theorist who came up with the term "viral media" in the early 1990s to describe how advertising concepts replicate in the virtual world like fast moving viruses, is now arguing that the corporate values of business, profit, and consumerism have so infected our lives that we are no longer cognizant life can be lived any other way. We are victims of a dysfunctional societal relationship -- one that has come to seem so normal we are almost incapable of processing of how screwed up it really is.

The corporation, one might say, has gone viral.

Rushkoff's epiphany came via a Christmas Eve mugging in the leafy brownstone liberal Brooklyn enclave of Park Slope. When he turned to a local parenting listserv to tell of his experience, his virtual first responders did not offer sympathy. Instead, they castigated him for publicly naming the block where the crime occurred, for fear it would damage local real estate values.

"It's as if the world itself were tilted, pushing us toward self-interested, short-term decisions, made more in the manner of corporate shareholders than members of a society," Rushkoff writes. "The more decisions we make in this way, the more we contribute to the very conditions leading to this awfully sloped landscape." ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/141828/are_we_all_corporate_shills/

Thanks

K & R

Good point.