(2007-01-12) Rushkoff Next Book Corporatism

Douglas Rushkoff says The topic of my appearance will be the influence of market forces and Gentrification on community, segregation, and local values - as well as what is the greater social cost, if any, of participation in real estate market-mania. This will be the first interview related to a book I'm just beginning to write (the proposal is going out this week, in fact) about the rise of "Corporatism" as America's value system. This became LifeInc.

Update: this interview with R U Sirius goes into more detail.

• It's not just political. Bush and co. may have done us wrong, but the landscape and environment permitting their misdeeds is more to blame than any "NeoCon" ideology. And this is the landscape of Corporatism - a game in which non-player characters rule the day. Our values have been completely penetrated by a Market model, sold to us through propaganda since about the time that EdBernays turned his back on government and became the first real PR man for corporate America. Everything from Worlds Fair-s to Public School-s were developed to promote the corporate agenda and ideology. So now we live in a world where we see corporations and Currency as pre-existing conditions - laws of nature; a part of creation. We may feel decentralized, but we still don't know how to create value for one another that doesn't involve central authority. (SmallWorld)

• So many of our greatest challenges as a civilization still hearken back to our inability to operate an economy on a system other than the Scarcity model. We could make enough energy or food. It's not a technological problem. It's an economic problem. An economy based on Artificial Scarcity - on the hoarding of resources and meting out of commodities - doesn't know how to cope with abundance. Or even sustainability.

• I have to believe that currency is moving towards an Open Source model. And that's why we're having such awful wars right now. As people come to recognize that Money isn't real, the powers that be will have to invent a new method of social control. Really - money began to replace religion as a means of central control back in the Renaissance. Until then, there were local currencies complementing centralized ones. People in towns could create value for one another without involving the central authority.