Vitalis
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:::Life Inc.-The World As Corporation? UPDATED::: - 2009/06/06 22:21
I was stopped in my tracks when I discovered Douglas Rushkoff and his new book "Life Inc."
Particularly well spoken and frank, Rushkoff offers research and people-centred insight into how we got into the global state of a corporatized world and how we can unravel from it while also improving our lives.
"In Life Inc, Douglas Rushkoff presents the unnerving, unbelievable, but ultimately undeniable proof that our world has been overtaken by an absolutely artificial economy.
He shows how our most fundamental assumptions about money and commerce are actually false ones - artifacts of a 400-year-old plan by a waning aristocracy to maintain control of Western Europe. Although the architects of this corporatism have long since passed on, we still live in a landscape defined by their plans and have internalized their values as our own.
Taking on some of the biggest assumptions of our age, this is a book filled with dangerous ideas and rather unspeakable heresies:
Money is not a part of nature, to be studied by a science like economics, but an invention with a specific purpose.
Centralized currency is just one kind of money - one not intended to promote transactions but to promote the accumulation of capital by the wealthy.
Banking is our society’s biggest industry, and debt is our biggest product.
Corporations were never intended to promote commerce, but to prevent it.
The development of chartered corporations and centralized currency caused the plague; the economic devastation ended Europe’s most prosperous centuries, and led to the deaths of half of its population.
The more money we make, the more debt we have actually created.
Most importantly, Rushkoff shows how this moment of financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reinstate commerce and communities based in creating value for one another, rather than continuing to extract it for the benefit of institutions that no longer exist."
Offered here is the interview he gave, with some great images and documentary style video.
Check it out! You'll be deeply entertained and refreshed by this man's thoughts:
http://lifeincorporated.net/
OR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOBWhVe68os
"It all started when Douglas Rushkoff got mugged on Christmas Eve..."
Duration: [9:11seconds]
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