Author, media analyst, and graphic novelist Douglas Rushkoff's new book Life Inc. discusses the rise of corporations, their role in society, and how by internalizing "corporate values" we've crippled the way in which we interact with other Actual Human Beings. Tonight, he's agreed to sit down with Daily Kos readers for a Q & A session.
Q: You date the development of corporations back to the Renaissance. Doesn't that suggest that corporations have been a part of our rise from Medieval culture?
Douglas Rushkoff: Well, the fact that the first real corporations were invented at the very end of the Middle Ages certainly suggests that they were part of what took us from that era to the next. It's the idea that we "rose" from one era to the next that we might want to call into question. Most of us think of the Middle Ages as the "dark" ages, and the Renaissance as a golden wonderful age of reason and art and development. A lot of that just isn't true. It was a mixed bag, at best.
The late Middle Ages was characterized by massive decentralization. The first six or seven centuries of the Middle Ages in Europe were mostly feudalism: ultra-wealthy lords owned everything. But by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that began to change. A merchant class, capable of traveling from region to region, was quickly growing richer. Their wealth represented a threat to the feudal lords, who were essentially landlocked. They only knew how to extract wealth from the lands and people they controlled. Any loss of control represented a loss of power and wealth. Meanwhile, people farming the lands were bringing grain to the grainstore and getting receipts that could be used as local currency. These were currencies based on the abundance of crop, and were transacted vigorously. (They actually lost value over time, since some of the grain would be lost to spoilage each year, and the grain store needed to be paid. This kept people spending the money instead of hoarding it.) So local economies grew, money was reinvested in preventative maintenance on machinery, and on keeping workers happy. People worked four days a week at most, ate a lot, and the population grew faster than at any other time in European history. There was so much extra money, that small towns built cathedrals as a way of investing in the future. The late middle ages is also known as "the age of cathedrals." They weren't funded by the Vatican, but by the towns themselves.
The problem was that all this economic activity left out the Lords and other aristocrats, who had spent the previous few centuries simply being wealthy. They had to come up with a way to make money simply by having money. The two main innovations they came up with were corporations and central banking. Corporations gave them a way to invest their money passively. The king would pick a company, and then grant it a monopoly charter in return for a piece of the business. Each monopoly charter gave a particular company exclusive right to extract value from a given industry or region. So British East India Company would get exclusive control over America, and so on. Under the new system, however, people weren't allowed to trade with each other anymore. They weren't allowed to create and exchange value directly. They had to do it through whichever corporation controlled the industry in which they wanted to work. So American colonists who grew cotton couldn't sell it to other people, or, worse, fabricate it into clothes. This was illegal. They had to sell it to the Company, at fixed prices. The Company then shipped it back to England, where another monopoly corporation made it into clothes, and then shipped it back to America, where it was the only clothing permissible to be purchased. This biased corporations toward looking for ways of extracting value rather than innovating. There was no need to innovate - the markets were closed to everyone but themselves.
The second innovation was centralized currency. All local currencies were made illegal, and people had to borrow money, instead, from the central bank. At interest. Using anything but "coin of the realm" was punishable by death. But this gave the already-wealthy a way to make money by having money: lending it at interest. And yes, this led to a growth imperative. In order for money to be paid back at interest, the economy has to grow at the rate of interest. Where does the additional money come from? It is also borrowed. And so on.
People got so poor, so dependent on jobs in the city, so incapable of doing subsistence farming on lands that were taken way that - just thirty years after France made local currency illegal - they had the big outbreak of the plague.
But a grow-by-any-means economy was all pretty consonant with the original Colonial powers' desire to grow into Africa, the Americas, and Asia. And it worked as long as there were new regions to conquer - in which to grow - and enough soldiers to conquer them.
It also worked to centralize all value creation. We celebrate the Renaissance, that there were great wealthy families who sponsored the great Renaissance artists. But why did they need patrons to begin with? Because all money came from the center.
So yes, economic and industrial development that came after might, in part, be credited to these centralizing innovations. Would we have developed battleships had we not been seeking to conquer new territory? Perhaps not. Would we have developed the rails and the automobile? Maybe not the same way - but I'm not sure developing them via corporate lobbies, taking land rights away from municipalities, doing massive PR campaigns to convince Americans they needed private homes in the suburbs in order to fulfill the American Dream, was the very best way to implement them.
So the short answer to your question is yes, our "rise" from Medieval culture was largely a function of these Renaissance innovations. But we don't know what kind of society might have arisen by now if our industrial development had followed human need rather than a quest to centralize power in the face of a rising middle class.
Q: The replacement of normal human values with corporate values seems to have accelerated in the last few decades. What's made this attitude so prevalent?
Rushkoff: I think what has happened in the last few decades is that we have moved from being mere consumers in the scheme to being investors. People with mortgages - debts to pay - no longer look at their neighborhoods primarily as places to live, but as investments to maintain. So they become more concerned with the "brand value" of their district than the experiential value of their communities. As pensions gave way to 401k plans, we moved to the other side of the investment equation. Yes, we hate the Gap or Nike or whatever for their policies, but our mutual funds are also dependent on their quarterly reports.
Between the 40's and the 80's, corporations became our national heros. Whether it's MTV or Apple, most of us have some well-branded corporate hero with which we identify. But after that, we began looking at the world through a corporate lens. When we look at the whole world as a kind of corporation, we tend to measure success through corporate metrics, like the GNP, rather than through human values; we tend to see one another as competitors rather than people with whom to collaborate or share; and we tend to look at our world as a region to conquer rather than a planet to take care of.
The more worried about our survival we become, the more corporatized our logic and behavior seem to get. We begin to act as if corporatism - more than just corporations - were a pre-existing condition of the universe, rather than a set of rules developed by some kings in the Renaissance to address a rising merchant class.
We outsource, just like corporations. We outsource our jobs to corporations, our investing to Wall Street, our borrowing to banks, our buying from Wal-Mart and the like. Instead of needing laws to prevent direct transaction between people, we have internalized a logic that dictates this behavior - as if exchanging value with one another directly were somehow dangerous or dirty. And the left, well, we buy right into it, too. Commerce is not a bad thing. We should not shun it, we should reclaim it.
But when toy conglomerates can put lead paint in outsourced toys, and then get regulations passed that put every small company out of business (new testing regulations costs tens of thousands of dollars per toy, making handmade toys no longer possible) we no longer have the ability to do it directly.
Q:You say we've undergone a devolution from citizen to consumer, getting not just our production but our opinions in pre-packaged forms. Do you see evidence of that at work in the current health care debate?
Rushkoff: For sure. The most obvious flaw in the current healthcare debate is that it assumes anything valuable is coming from big pharma or centralized medicine. We're totally focused on endgame health technologies, and highly centralized solutions to extremely localized, individual problems. And the result is we look at healthcare as a corporate product. That's not healthcare - that's critical care, which should really only be affecting a tiny population of people until end of life.
But to your point, our perspectives on the healthcare debate are mostly second hand. And even the people arguing about it in congress - or especially those people - are not even talking about anything that has anything to do with anything. The whole debate is a sham. Obama said he wanted national healthcare, and presented Congress with a bill that would create a public health insurance option for people who can’t or won’t afford the ones offered by the private sector. It’s like having public school for people who can’t/won’t afford private, or even public libraries for people who don’t want to buy and own books. The idea was that it would save so much money by preventing poor people from showing up at the emergency room in crisis (or just being sick at all), it would pay for itself. The insurance companies got really upset, and got Republicans to argue that this would hurt competition, and upset the free market.
Obama understands this perspective: that the sanctity of the free market is in some ways more important than the health of the nation’s people, and has begun to back down. What is being ignored is that health insurance is not a free market. It is part of a monopoly of corporations currently controlling what we call healthcare in America – a healthcare system that promotes the use of costsly patented pharmaceuticals over preventative care, nutrition, and basic health education. If we had a truly free healthcare market... well, don’t get me started.
But all that aside, when Obama suggests he is open to removing the national healthcare part of the national healthcare act, he is turning it from social spending to straight corporatism. Now, instead of requiring everyone have insurance, and then subsidizing a person’s participation in a government health plan, the act will still require everyone have insurance, and then subsidize a person’s participation in a private health plan. So the net effect of the law is to use public funds to subsidize a private, highly inefficient healthcare insurance industry which has been documented to care much more about profit than anyone’s health.
This is corporatism.
And it is not even a step in the right direction, not a step towards getting America healthier or more people properly insured. It promises only to exacerbate the very features of private-sector healthcare that already puts America fiftieth in the list for life expectancy and general health (Canada is 8th, UK is 36th).
But the weird part is that Republicans – in the thrall of the insurance companies – are now still making a show of arguing against the bill on grounds that it’s socialism, when in fact it’s really just corporatism or corporate welfare. This is the bill they actually want passed. But in addition to making sure it passes (all they need is enough Democrats to vote for it) they want to earn political points by arguing against the steamroller of socialism that Obama is supposedly driving over us all. Get it? It’s all backwards.
And meanwhile, most Americans look to the talking heads on their favorite shows for cues on how to talk about all this with their friends. And those talking heads pretend that the debate is real, because otherwise what are they supposed to talk about?
Q: The term has been tossed around so casually in the last few months, and so broadly misused, that it seems to have lost most of its meaning, but have we all really become "fascists" in support of corporate culture?
Rushkoff: Smart people are afraid to use the word fascism because cynical and stupid people use the word inappropriately. Cops arresting pot users aren't fascists (at least not for that). Fascism isn't just dictatorial control; it's a marriage between the government and corporate sphere, supported through coercion, and in which anyone who attempts to question the logic of this collusion is regarded as an enemy of the state.
For me, it felt like I was living in a fascist state back when I got mugged in front of my apartment, and my neighbors got mad that I had posted the location where the mugging took place. They sent angry emails, telling me I was hurting the market, and that it was criminal for me to take an action that could hurt the brand value of the real estate.
But, like I say in the book, the current situation resembles the managed capitalism of Mussolini’s Italy, in particular. It shares a common intellectual heritage (in disappointed progressives who wanted to order society on a scientific understanding of human nature), the same political alliance (the collaboration of the state and the corporate sector), and some of the same techniques for securing consent (through public relations and propaganda). Above all, it shares with fascism the same deep suspicion of free humans.
And, as with any absolutist narrative, calling attention to the inherent injustice and destructiveness of the system is understood as an attempt to undermine our collective welfare. The whistle-blower is worse than just a spoilsport; he is an enemy of the people.
Unlike Europe’s fascist dictatorships, this all happened pretty bloodlessly, at least here in America over the past few decades. The real lesson of the twentieth century is that the battle for total social control would be waged and won not through war and overt repression, but through culture and commerce. Instead of depending on a paternal dictator or nationalist ideology, today’s system of control depends on a society fastidiously cultivated to see the corporation and its logic as central to its welfare, value, and very identity.
Q: You talk about the merger of entertainment and news to create a new kind of authority, pushing out information to drive people into action. But isn't the worst problem with this authority that it's not "authoritative?" That is, that under current corporate media, a ten year study from NASA and Glenn Beck's gut are given, at best, equal value?
Rushkoff: Totally. It's more of a funhouse or house of mirrors than an organized propaganda state. When Brittany's latest breakdown commands as much or more attention than the war, there's not much need for a conscious, controlling authority. This is why democracy doesn't work in a society that has surrendered itself to sensationalism. And the only reason we've done that - really - is because we've surrendered human contact to the private, isolated watching of TV. Even the net is a poor excuse for contact. It's an adjunct to contact, and a great way to bring people "together" from long distances. But it is no substitute for engaging with real people in our real world.
The mediaspace is not biased towards the dissemination and amplification of human values. Mass media was developed to give national brands a way of broadcasting their values across the entire nation. That's what it's for, and that's its bias. So if we want it to be our main information space, we have to be aware of that bias, and willing to effortfully lean against it.
Q: Several authors -- and many in the corporate media -- have pointed at the rise of blogs, Twitter, etc. as the cause for decline in the quality of news. Is there any truth to this?
Rushkoff: Well, I hate reading news articles about Twitter and the like, so it definitely waters down the headlines with itself. But I get you're talking about the quality of newsgathering and reporting.
I think the influence of blogs and tweets on the quality of services like BBC, The Guardian, or Associated Press might be overrated. Its impact on the NYTimes, which seems to feel obligated to make its journalists blog and tweet, may be real. At least in that it creates a distraction from their other work.
I remember before I had a blog, I resisted. Bigtime. I felt like it wasn't fair for me to go blog when I already had column space in the Guardian or Discover magazine. This was the people's medium - a delightfully amateur place for a real conversation between peers to take place. But then all the ad-supported blogs came out, and the distinction between professional and amateur, profit and non-profit, corporate and civic, pretty much dissolved.
The real difference between a pre-internet news media and today's is that the redundancies are more apparent. I hate to watch journalists lose jobs, but when fifty newsvan satellites show up to a celebrity suicide attempt, that's probably 49 too many. I bet even three great journalists could cover such a thing. If even just ten of the others covered real news, we'd be in a better position.
The biggest problem with the proliferation of so many media channels is that it has driven their corporate owners to compete in the worst ways. They have debts to pay. How do you get people to watch one news show or channel instead of another? Flash some tit or teeth or put on someone insane like Beck or, now, Dobbs. And people look at these folks and think that because they're behind a desk that it's news. This isn't the Internet's fault - it's the fault of a corporatized system that doesn't know how else to react than to compete in a race to the bottom.
Q: If democracy itself has become a "relict" of a less corporate age, is there anything we can do to revive it? Better yet, is reviving the kind of democracy that the oft-sainted founding fathers proposed really a goal we should be shooting for?
Rushkoff: Now you're making me sad.
I think Big Democracy is always vulnerable to the worst kinds of branding and over-simplification. Even Brand Obama bothered me. Centralized politics can't help but be abstracted, branded, and beyond the experiential mechanisms of real people. I am suspect of most movements - however well intended - because they are somehow up there, named and abstracted, instead of down here where real people exist. They certainly worked in the 20th Century - for civil rights, women, environmentalism - but we no longer have the means to distinguish what's real from what's not when it takes place on the state of mainstream media.
Local politics, on the other hand, real activism, reclaiming energy, local farming...these are the places where people can begin to exercise democracy. Not just voting, though voting matters, but action. That's what being in a "free" country is actually about.