So RandomHouse has agreed to do a paperback version of Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back.

I’m going to add an extensive “resources” section to the end, with contributions from people and organizations who are succeeding at that challenge.

But they also want to retitle the book. Maybe to something more specific, or at least more evocative. Most people think the book was called “Life” as it is.

So, I am opening this quest up for collaborative frenzy. Help?

The book is about the way value creation and exchange has been legally monopolized by corporations and central banks – as well as how this dehumanizes us. It concludes with ways to take back peer to peer value exchange, and collapse this corporotacracy in the process. Click on the movie above for the 9-minute gist.

But I need a new title – ideally a better one, that will interest more people. Capitalism: A Love Story was a much more accessible title than Life Inc, for example.

If you come up with a title that works, I’ll give you something – like a bunch of books and credit – as well as my thanks.

Miami Herald book reviewer Richard Pachter takes “a look back at the best business books of 2009″ and does me a great honor while providing a terrific summary of my intentions:

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back. Douglas Rushkoff. Random House. 304 pages. 6/15/09

The “operating system” behind the world’s economies and monetary systems is flawed and antithetical to productivity and most other human values. Greed, avarice and (unenlightened) self-interest flourish. So do artificial scarcity, perpetual debt and empty allegiance to the slogans and logos of oppressive corporations. A less elegant and gifted writer might have produced a dour and plodding polemic against materialism and consumerist culture, but Rushkoff’s persuasive prose is a pleasure.

more…

I’m doing a “live” appearance in Second Life, this Sunday evening at 9p Eastern, for CopperRobot.

We’ll be talking about Life Inc, especially in the context of how people create value on the net – and whether there’s a way for any significant number of us to make a living at it, anymore.

If you don’t go to Second Life, you can also watch it as live video on the web.

Finally, a newspaper review that really does get what I was going for. I’m still holding out for a NYTimes review – even a pan would be nice. (I’m not exactly sure why they’ve passed on this book so far, when they reviewed other less significant books I’ve written.)

But this one makes up for it, and reminds me that it’s only been out a few months and anything can still happen. I’m scheduling some talks and other events to help promote DIY culture and bottom-up activism. More on that very soon.

Corporations and the concentration of power
LAURA SLATTERY

BOOK REVIEW: Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back by Douglas Rushkoff Published by The Bodley Head, priced £12.99

BEING MUGGED at gunpoint is never going to be a pleasant experience, but for Douglas Rushkoff, his trauma was made all the weirder by the reaction of his neighbours.

E-mailing his local parents’ group to tell them a mugger was targeting that part of Brooklyn, New York, Rushkoff thought he was doing the responsible thing – hey, he might even get some sympathy. Instead, the responses were angry. How dare he mention the street where the crime had happened? Didn’t he know what that was going to do to their property prices?

Life Inc, The Movie, is now available with Portuguese subtitles. Translated by Jose Murilo, from Brasilia.

Here’s my favorite review of Life Inc, so far. Maybe it’s enough to get Rachel Maddow’s people to notice the book.

What I like about the reviewer’s approach is that he gets the book is not about particular corporations or CEOs being evil. I didn’t write a typical critique of corporate activity at all, but rather an analysis of the real reasons corporations and central currency were developed, and why these mechanisms can’t help but operate the way they do today. It’s not a matter of making corporations behave better – it’s a matter of seeing how their most basic structure and function were designed to extract value from people and deliver it to centralized institutions.

Thank goodness for DailyKos. Here’s the review in its entirety. The link and discussion are right here.

I’m on DailyKos tonight to chat about the book and related subjects. 8pm Eastern, at dailykos.com

This Corporate Life
by Devilstower

Here’s a nice piece from the Wall Street Journal on complimentary and bottom-up currencies, including a terrific last third on Life Inc and my local success story, Comfort Dollars.

Jon Lebkowsky, of Fringeware fame, just wrote an insightful piece on Life Inc and its underlying premise.

At WorldChanging.com

There’s no doubt that corporate form really has been foundational in organizing our perception of the world, more deeply generation after generation, and it’s not surprising that global citizens of developed and developing nations organize their thinking around those patterns. When we talk about “developed” and “developing,” we’re talking about corporatization — the extent to which the corporate model has taken hold, or you might say has colonized a particular locale.

more…

Doug Rushkoff had set out, as he told me in an interview on the WELL, to write one kind of book -- "about money as a medium, and the way centralized currency and corporate capitalism were accepted as given circumstances of business, rather than inventions of particular people at a particular time."

Rushkoff, who's made a living as a writer, thinker and speaker who tries to step outside culture and see more clearly the patterns and processes at work, was ready to question fundamental assumptions about money and economies, and look for solutions to problems we all sense but barely understand -- cycles of boom and bust, polarization of economic and political thinking (which are inherently linked), and how commitment to abstract concepts can make humans less human. Also how people can unthinkingly (or other-thinkingly) accept and follow cultural notions that actually undermine sustainable futures.