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.

Then, while Rushkoff was in the process of pulling the book together, a man with a gun robbed him on Christmas Eve, in front of his own apartment. Somewhat shaken by the experience, he posted a note about it on a neighborhood email list, and got a surprising response: some neighbors, concerned about how the news of the mugging might have an impact on their property values, were angry that he had posted where the crime occurred.

"I realized that my neighbors had internalized these sensibilities [associated with corporate capitalism] so deeply that they were behaving like corporations, themselves," he told me.

So he wrote a slightly different book -- about "how the world became a corporation," how authenticity, community, and human intimacy have been compromised by pervasive corporatization and nonstop marketing. The book, Life Inc. includes well and thoroughly researched history of the corporation, which began as a way for monarchs to participate in innovative business models developed by an emerging merchant class, and evolved as a way to organize power around economic engines.

I've been reading Rushkoff's book carefully and thinking a lot about it. He's very articulate and his arguments are compelling. 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.

Corporations bring compelling efficiencies along with them -- an abundance of products for consumption at relatively low cost. Food, clothing, shelter, etc. Sophisticated water systems and plumbing systems. Systems and vehicles for transportation. Money and jobs. Better medical systems. This is all what we call progress, and it feels like success, especially for those at the top or the corporate heap. However, Rushkoff points out, we haven't had many opportunities to consider alternatives, since corporations have controlled media, government and schools. Aren't we completely conditioned to accept corporate assumptions as what's real, inherent and incontrovertible? And, given this power over reality, aren't corporations vulnerable to corruption?

Obviously yes, and Rushkoff offers a wealth of well-researched factoids to suggest that corporations readily abuse power and exploit workers and consumers. That corporations seize and control our very sense of what's real, bend it to their will, driven by greed and focused on profitability above all else. The remedy, he suggests, is "the slow subordination of corporate activity to social activity, and corporate behavior to human behavior." We can use the Internet effectively to "connect those looking to reinforce their sense of hope and connection to others," he says, and "by restoring our connections to real people, places and values, we'll be less likely to depend on the symbols and brands that have come to substitute for human relationships."

Are corporations monolithic, opaque, sinister and all-powerful? While corporations are abstract systems, they are also people, and the cultures and values of corporations can be aligned with the values of the individuals who commit so much of their time and energy to work there. Culture change consultants (like Barrett Values Centre or Momentum Consulting) have systems for aligning corporate and human values. And there are other promising models (e.g. bootstrapping, coworking) for business organization and development, and corporate information flows and hierarchies are being transformed by internal uses of social media (with or without C-level acknowledgement and assent). The corporation of tomorrow may be quite different from today's corporation, and certainly different from yesterday's.

There's a sense throughout the book that corporate evolution is a conspiracy of the powerful to exploit the weaker masses, redefined and dehumanized within the corporate mind-set as abstract statistical entities called consumers. There's just so much evidence to support this perspective (again, the book is very well-researched), why wouldn't you go there? But I'm struck by a contrast I noticed recently. Rushkoff talks about the 1939 World's Fair as a platform for corporate rhetoric, a blast of blatant propaganda supporting the vision of "a consumer paradise -- not a worker reality -- in which machines did all the work and the family could enjoy a world filled with entertainment." Not long after I finished the book, I had a discussion with a brilliant designer and futurist whose ears stood up when the subject of the '39 World's Fair came up. To him, that fair was a great moment in our history, a surge of creative optimism as the world was going nuts. I think the story is always complex, that corporatization has been a good thing as well as a bad thing, and what's important is that we learn from our mistakes. And as Rushkoff suggests, we can hopefully learn to put the statistics aside for now and be "real people doing real things for one another - without expectations" again.

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(Posted by Jon Lebkowsky in Features at 10:55 AM)