Douglas Rushkoff, who started his book writing career with Cyberia, an overview of cyberculture, back in the 90s, and then made the word “meme” popular with his Media Virus book, diverted away from his criticism of the advertising world and got into some graphic novel/comic book projects, which looked at Judaism and how that religion (and I’m going to say most religions) got diverted from their original intent by men who decided to take it over and manipulate it to serve a small group of powerful people rather than the people themselves. In the case of Christianity, think televangelists.
Apparently (I have not read the book), Rushkoff has now taken on corporate culture. It’s not that he is against corporations. Generally, Rushkoff tries to always remain positive by avoiding dead end criticism and instead promotes the positive and healthy. So, in this case, he is not against corporations he is for more possibilities, more diversity — which corporations work to eliminate.
This idea makes sense, and personally I wonder why I would need to read the book. Corporations want a monoculture, because that would maximize profits. Instead, we should be doing things ourselves and buying locally and from people we know. OK, got it. Buy locally. Produce locally. Share. Cooperate. Agreed.
For a while Rushkoff worked with companies and tried to get them to think differently. A recent book was called Get Back in the Box. The premise, as I understand it, is that corporations don’t make anything anymore. They merely work to fool people into spending money on their products rather than making their products better than other corporations.
Of course, this is by design. Noam Chomsky has pointed out that business leaders don’t want competition. More competition makes making money harder. It’s easier to have no competition, off-shore your factories to practically slave-labor, reduce money spent on improving your products, and then spend money on propaganda to convince people to give you their money for your mediocre widgets. Wouldn’t it be even better to get out of the product producing business and just get into finance where you can just speculate and not worry about the pesky masses of workers who make irrational demands like paying them a living wage? And that’s what has been happening until — pop goes the housing bubble.
In Rushkoff’s Get Back in the Box, he argues that companies would be better off if they ditched this model and concentrated on making whatever it is they came into existence for in the first place. I think this would seem obvious to most regular people. But it would seem the business leaders (the best and the brightest?), people who do not do well by rocking boats, need someone to tell them this. And this is a reason I haven’t paid too much attention to Rushkoff since reading Media Virus. I feel like he’s speaking to a social, business, religious, and cultural elite that I have never been, will never be, and do not want to be a part of.
On the other hand, I find his ideas interesting even if they seem fairly obvious and don’t seem to require an entire book to comprehend. And I have been reminded of Rushkoff’s articles that have appeared in places like Arthur magazine, which feel addressed to normal people, ground level critical thinkers and creative types.
I’m glad to see Arthur has been resurrected.
Here’s the Rushkoff video:
via Rushkoff’s site.
