It takes a global village to enrich our local lives
Life Inc, Douglas Rushkoff
Reviewed by Pat Kane
The Independent, 31 July 2009
When faced with windy laments of civilisational decline, you can always rely on British popular culture to worm its antic way into your brain. Throughout this overstated thesis in praise of bottom-up community against top-down capitalism, I kept seeing and hearing the frightening visages of the BBC's The League of Gentlemen: "We're local people… doing local things".
Unfair, I know. But Rushkoff is so infuriatingly magisterial in this book that you reach, with some desperation, for the nearest court jester.
It's the right moment to read long-view analyses of our commercialised society. Ruskoff's Life Incorporated is as fluent and well-researched as any of his books – but its target is too large, and too badly constructed, to help us much. In a heaving rush of anti-modern sentiment, Rushkoff bundles together vast and complex trends over the last half-millenium – political, economic, scientific and cultural - into a monolith called 'corporatism'.
For him, corporatism isn't just a form of commercial enterprise cooked up by 15th century merchants and monarchs to control and standardise the varied social markets of the early Middle Ages – an account he takes, accurately, from the great French historical masters Aries and Braudel. It's also a kind of permanent civilisational war – abstraction, universalism and individualism, versus the face-to-face, the local and the communitarian.
But like a CGI-generated Transformer robot with a faulty program, the monster's pieces just don't hold together. For one thing, not all universalised standards – a brand which Rushkoff sizzles into many hides, from the first central currencies to the latest "flashy" social network – are as implicitly "fascist" as he suggests.
How about that brutal reduction of our oral traditions known as the printed book? A format so standardised, both physically and in terms of the settled national languages it regularly deploys, that it can convey the new verities of the village to audiences all round the world. Rushkoff deprecates the cultivation of interiority and subjective reflection in almost every realm except the one in which he plys his own trade.
So oppressive is the shadow of this corporate behemoth in Rushkoff's mind that the actual historical forces of resistance to capitalism and imperialism (more boring but more accurate terminologies) end up being downgraded or ignored. The Renaissance and Enlightenment is nailed for being an epistemological hand-maiden to domination by distant, centralising powers – its "clean, universal truths [keeping] people's attention and eyes upward, and off one another": a disconnection that allows David Hume to support slavery and democrats to ignore the rights of women.
But what about Romanticism? With its celebration of the organic and the rooted, its passionate feminists and early ecologists, casting off the "mind-forg'd manacles" of industrial society – and fuelled by all that nasty subjectivism?
Rushkoff's attitude to the labour movement as a corrective to the march of corporations is also, as he might say, kinda weird. He often bundles unions in with other "community-minded" groups, whose hands-on, in-the-streets sociability is swamped and subverted by a miasma of capitalist ruses – everything from housing regulations to self-help courses, never mind the obvious traps of easy credit and ad-driven consumerism.
But again, is this really a battle between local, face-to-face virtue versus universal, faceless vice? Rushkoff undercuts his own argument when he supports industry-wide collective bargaining on wages and conditions. Yes, you could see it as part of the Sabbath tradition of holy days of collective rest – but it's also a continuing modern struggle conducted (at its best) in a supra-local way.
That Rushkoff is a sinner in repentance has been evident from his last few books. He turned spy on the marketing industry that initially feted him in Coercion, urged companies to eschew consultants in Get Back In The Box, even attempted to create his own open-source version of Judaism in Nothing Sacred. But there's something particularly galling about a one-time evangelist of 'cyberia' and 'playing the future' (titles of his earlier books) who decides to wizz all over the current vibrancy of social media.
Yes, it's a battleground between the copyright enclosures of the corporations, and the frankly neo-communist behaviours of users, hackers and convivials – but there is a battle of values going on. One which shapes Californian internet platforms so much that they find themselves being used as tools for Iranian insurgents – their locality becoming our world responsibility, through (guess what?) the robustly universal protocols of the internet. In Rushkoff's Tolkien-esque, Mordor-like vision of corporatism, that simply shouldn't have been permitted.
At the beginning and the end of this book, Rushkoff evokes what's wrong and what's right about the community values of his own upstate New York neighbourhood. With children and wife in tow, the writer has been clearly moved to celebrate the immediate, the friendly, and the love-driven, from the place where he lives and nurtures. No argument there. But such bucolia can't justify Rushkoff's gross misreading of the societal structures of the 21st century. It's an ultimately disempowering account, which makes you feel (wrongly) like a deluded dupe for even trying to engage with current realities.
To paraphrase our friends from Royston Vaisey, "universal people doing universal things" (meaning not just corporate elites, but daily cosmopolitans) have to be part of the progressive picture too.
Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com), and one half of Hue And Cry.
