Our Corporatized Lives

On Christmas eve, media theorist and social critic Douglas Rushkoff was taking out the trash in front of his Brooklyn apartment when he was mugged at gunpoint.

He posted his experience on an e-mail list for Park Slope parents, and immediately received angry letters from neighbors. They chided him for naming the street where the mugging took place – because it might bring down the property values. This was before real-estate crashed last fall.

It got Rushkoff thinking – when did we go from caring more about the market value of our homes than the well-being of our neighbors? Why do we equate our assets with our worth? In other words, when did we start internalizing corporate values, valuing competition for seemingly fixed resources over connection and collaboration with others?

Douglas Rushkoff’s new book is Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. Rushkoff joins us from the studios of WBUR in Boston to describe what rebuilding the global economic structure should look like.

BoingBoing: Read the introduction to "Life, Inc."