Getting Beyond Corporate Culture: An Interview with Douglas Rushkoff

For those hip to countercultural media movements over the last twenty years, Douglas Rushkoff needs little introduction. His insights into the impact of the World Wide Web, stated at a time when most thought the Internet was just a passing fad, have proved mostly correct. His book Media Virus was a sensational deconstruction and elucidation on the tendencies of how the mediasphere influences individual and mass psychology. And as often occurs in this paradoxical day and age, his treatise was sought after and praised by the very center of media distribution he was seeking to deflate.

Rushkoff survived this and kept the train of thought going and growing. Personally, I became aware of what Douglas was doing when I first heard him speak at the Disinfo.com conference held during the early months of 2000 in NYC. He had just published another deconstruction of our modern mediated world, this one titled Coercion, and though his disposition was cheery and optimistic, the message in the medium was dark. He warned of advertisers and marketeers who utilize cognitive science research in order to take advantage of regular people's blind spots of perception, for the sole purpose of crafting good little consumers and workers and citizens out of the masses. I remember, too, listening to Rushkoff predict the downfall of the NASDAQ and the dot-com bubble -- and he was right. Later that night, I met him for the first time. And like many of the amazing speakers at that event (Robert Anton Wilson, Grant Morrison, Gensis P-Orridge) he was friendly, warm, and just as interested in talking to some unknown, crazy kid as he was about himself and his big ideas. I thought this was very cool.

After Disinfo's conference, I read all the material of his I could find, and have since become very engaged in watching his ideas grow. I believe that Rushkoff has been developing a very concise philosophical discourse that follows the trajectory set by people like Marshall McLuhan, Theodor Adorno, and Robert Anton Wilson. As Ezra Pound once remarked about good poets, I consider Douglas Rushkoff, an early warning system for the rest of us to listen to, think through, and judge our course of action based on what is being presented. In my own psychological searching and philosophical wanderings, reading a Rushkoff book is like opening all the windows of your house. Gusts of fresh air sometimes can cause a chill, yet will nearly always wake you up, breeze through your cortex, and get you going.

The following interview, in particular, concerns two up-and-coming projects Doug has planned. The first is his new book that is slated to hit the shelves in June, tentatively titled Life Incorporated, which is about how corporations have taken over our public spaces and tweaked our communities in very strange and potentially dangerous ways. His second project is an online class he is going to be teaching at the Maybe Logic Academy, beginning Monday January 12th. This course will consist of readings from the upcoming book and online forum discussions about how we can all take action to change the current corporatized conundrum collapsing our communities.  

I caught up with Doug Rushkoff in a small diner in Jersey City, just after he and Legbra Carafour interviewed Paul Krassner over the WFMU radio lines.

PRop!: Doug, please give us a rundown of the course you are going to be teaching over at the MLA.

Rushkoff: My original idea was to do the course while the book was being worked on, but that didn't really time out exactly right. I wanted to get done with the first draft of the book, the first totally raw, ugly draft. And then throughout the course we would all read a chapter a week, read some of the source material, and then engage together and ask questions, “What are some examples of so and so?” Make us all smarter, including me, and make this book better. This way the book would be a much more bottom-up, open-source style of investigation of corporate culture, how it screwed us up and how to get away from it. But the world of publishing being how it is, the course has ended up happening right when I'm finishing the book.

What we'll do is engage in the ideas brought up in the book. And engage in them when the ideas are totally fresh in my mind – while these are still fresh and new arguments for me, and I want to see them challenged. I think it is important for people to understand how our world got corporatized, and to stop accepting the corporate state that we're living in as a given condition of reality. The economy we are living in is a model of an economy. And it's just one model. The kind of money we use is lent into existence; there are others with other models. So in looking back to see when these rules were put into place, who put the rules in place and for what reasons, we start to see, and say, “I get it, we are living on a playing field that is tilted towards other people's interests and not towards ours.” The institutions that are here supposedly working for us and the utilities that are here to help us, aren't really helping us at all. They are really meant to work in the same way corporations have worked for 600 years, to extract value from people and resources in order to promote central authority.

It's not a weird conspiracy theory, anti-authoritarian rant. It's a very simple and supported deconstruction of the world in which we live that occasionally has to go back into history to say, “Right, there was this guy, and here's what he did and why, and this is the thing he put in place and now we think of it as just business -- just commerce.” And it's not; it's a style of commerce. Finally, what the book and what the course will do, I hope, is start a process where people can exchange models for ways to return to terra firma. Ways to re-connect. If the majority of the book is about the ways we have been disconnected from one another -- disconnected from land, as land turned into property; disconnected from value as value turned into money; disconnected from each other, as people were turned into individuals and consumers and shareholders -- I'd like to see us start to look at the processes that can help us reconnect.

What would a sustainable culture look like? Why can't we have a sustainable culture? Well, we can't have a sustainable culture because banks and businesses can't survive in a sustainable reality, but human beings can survive in a sustainable reality. We did for many, many years before the last few centuries of infinite growth requirements. So I'm excited most of all for the end part, and to talk to people who are doing things in their own communities and towns. Whether they are developing their currencies or community sponsored agriculture or alternative schools or baby-sitting clubs. Anything and everything that allows people to create value for one another directly, instead of running it through one or the other corporation that has been set-up to extract our labor through its process rather than provide any kind of goods and services to us.

Will you break down the role of the corporation as you see it?

I'm not a lefty in the classical sense of the word. I really think that business is good. Commerce is good. Myself doing something that I think is really valuable, and then selling it to you in exchange for something that you think is really valuable, is good. And no, I don't just have to give you a book for you to give me a chicken. I'm really into the fact that there would be some kind of currency where you would give me money for my thing so you don't have to get my book, or I don't have to get your chicken right away, I could buy something else with it. I'm really into that. For a long time, money worked that way. And people, when they were in scaled economies and scaled communities, were able to provide value for each other that way. There have been a lot of ups and downs in history, but by the late Middle Ages things were actually going pretty well. There was a really short workweek, people were fed really well, people were super-healthy and had all sorts of what we would call alternative medicines working for them. There wasn't plague, there wasn't widespread disease. There was a lot of great stuff going on.

The problem was that there was a merchant class that was rapidly rising. As international (or long-distance) trade started, these merchants ended up becoming really rich really fast, and the aristocracy became afraid. Royals and nobles were finding out that these merchants were getting richer than they were. The bourgeoisie, the middle-class, was actually getting richer than the traditionally wealthy. So they had to figure out something that they could do.

What they came up with was something called the “Corporate Charter.” The Corporate Charter was not created in order to help businesses grow; it was created to give monarchs a way to participate in this vast accumulation of wealth. So what they did was go to their friends, or who ever was leading in an industry at the time, and say:

“You guys are doing the best in the West Indies. You guys are doing the best at digging something out of the ground. You guys are the best at growing grain. And what I'm going to do is let you stay on top. You don't have to worry now that some other business is going to compete and interfere with your business. You don't have to worry that one of your ships is going to get robbed by pirates or burned on its way back, and leave your company out of business.

“What I am going to do is give a monopoly charter, and what this piece of paper is going to say is that you are the only company that is allowed to do business in the West Indies. You are the only company that is allowed to do business in grain. You are the only company allowed to make water mills. And in exchange for this monopoly, this legally granted monopoly, you are going to give me a piece of the business. You are going to give me a whole bunch of stock and let me, the king, be a passive investor.”

So it was a weird kind of a stalemate death grip that any company would take. Sure, I'm going to give up 20% or 30% of my profits to guarantee that I'm the only one who can be in business. It was a really smart move too on the part of the kings, because now the leading merchants, who are the biggest business people in the country, are going to support the king. Why? Because he is the one who wrote their charter monopoly. As long as the king stays in power, they maintain their monopoly. And what it did was start a style of business that was really about extracting value rather than creating value.   

These companies were no longer concerned with competition or the creation of value. What they were concerned with was exploiting the things they have been given. So the result is a really nasty collusion, if you will, between the people writing the laws the people exploiting the laws. This is how shortly before the American Revolution the British East India Trading Company was the only company really allowed to do business in the colonies. So if you were a colonist and you had a farm and you were raising cotton, you were not allowed to sell it to other people for them to make clothes. No, you grew your cotton and sold it to the British East India Company at the price that the corporation set. Why? Because the law said you have to do that, that's what a chartered monopoly is.
British East India Trading Company then took the cotton all the way from America back to Britain, and that's where it was fabricated into clothes. Then they shipped them back to the United States and the colonists bought their clothes at prices the corporations set.

So when the American colonists had their revolution, it wasn't so much against England, it was against the British East India Trading Company. It was against England's chartered monopoly that was preventing them from doing business, from creating value for one another. And corporations really do work in the same way today. The code and rules written in those days have become embedded in corporate culture today, to the point where people don't even know they're there. It's just taken for granted that that's how corporations work. Wal-Mart goes to a town and they build a super-store, they hire people at barely subsistence wages, at wages that actually make welfare and Medicare and medical spending through the tax base go up, because people no longer have health insurance. People aren't making as much money; they are actually more dependent on government.

So you are sucking money out of people as laborers, and you are also taking all their money as consumers. Instead of buying from the local druggist, you buy from Wal-Mart, because Wal-Mart, in the short run, is cheaper. They can give you this piece of merchandise at a lower price than your neighbor can supply to you. But in the long run, you end up completely dependent on a foreign corporation for everything and are incapable of creating value for yourself or for each other.

It's really no different than an American corporation going into New Guinea and putting a big factory on people's land and ruining their top-soil, making agriculture impossible, being the only employer in the district, and then actually selling people grain that they used to make themselves at higher prices than it would have cost them to make it themselves. And their standard of living goes down, even though the GNP of that region (which is what the corporations and the World Bank and the IMF measure) goes up. Even the cleanup of the toxic spills, the treatment of the cancers of all the kids in the area, is actually measured as part of the GNP and is on the plus side if the balance sheet.

That's some dark stuff. Can you provide some examples of the positives you see happening in response to all this?

What is interesting to me right now are people doing little things. There's this guy in my town, Don, and he's the chef of a tiny organic cafe called Comfort. And it's the only really good restaurant in our town, and everyone goes there because it’s healthy food and he makes it cheap. He secured a new location so he could expand and open another restaurant. He received the initial bank loan to rent the place, but then the financial crisis happened, and now he doesn't have enough money to renovate it and open the restaurant. He can't get the money from the bank to create this business that everybody knows will work.

So he decided that what he is going to do it create a VIP card, where if you give him $100, you'll get a VIP worth $120 towards the food at his current restaurant or the new one. You give him a $1000, you'll get $1200 credit. So I said, “John, instead calling this thing a VIP card, you should call it Comfort Dollars. You're restaurant is called Comfort, so call them Comfort Dollars, because what these things are is really an alternative currency.” What he did was sidestep the bank. Instead of you going to the bank in order to borrow money at a high rate of interest, money that we have put into the bank in order to get a low-rate of interest, why don't you get the money from us directly? That's what you're doing.

So what we are doing is buying 120 Comfort Dollars for every 100 dollars we put in. So we get a 20% return on our money, which is better than any broker is ever going to be able to give you. In turn, Don gets the money cheaper than he can borrow it from the bank in order to build his restaurant, because he pays us back in food and labor. Now Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve are cut out of the deal, and we are able to invest locally. We not only get 20% return on our investment, we make our town better.

Where I take it is to ask, "What about when Comfort Dollars aren't just spendable at Comfort, but at other stores? What if other stores and other local merchants start using alternative currency?'

So I'm interested in things like that. I'm interested in things like babysitting clubs. Where people decide that instead of hiring day-care with this or that insurance and its corporate sponsorship, they just get together and put time in to take care of each other's kids. You put in a certain amount of hours, you get this many hours worth of credits. So if you took care of five kids instead of two, you get so many credits an hour. This is all easy to work out, and you don't need to do involve real money at all.

What this says is, you don't have to use money for everything. I'm really into looking for examples of people looking to get messy again. People willing to be social again. People willing to do favors for one another, and more importantly, people willing to owe someone else a favor. The real reason why we don't do stuff for each other is not because we don't want to do stuff for each other -- we all want to do that. It's because we are afraid to accept something from someone else. Because what does that mean? Do I have to do something for them? What kind of reciprocity has been set-up? And those reciprocities are actually the fabric of community. That's the way people work directly with each other. So the examples that I'm interested in are where people break down the social barriers and start doing stuff for each other, because it's so much more fun and ultimately prosperous to do things that way.

Could you give a little more detail about your course at Maybe Logic?

The course is a starting place; I'm not big into movements. My problem with movements is that they can get so abstract, and so branded and so big and so non-local, so quickly. Sure they are convenient. It's great to sit at your laptop and blog about this or that or what you saw on the Huffington Post. And it feels so good to say, “I'm going to create the next meta-blog through which networkers can network, or meta-networkers can have a clearing house for their thing, and I'm going to create the wiki of that thing, and blah blah blah.”

Really what I want to do, is rather than create the ultimate website or brand of the new bottom-up counter-culture movement, is just to motivate people. Have an officers club, if you will, of people who are committed to this thing. To share their experiences and more importantly just motivate each other to dig in where they are. I'm a firm believer in the notion that the internet is limited in what it can do on a certain level, because it is very seductive in its scale. I think the internet will be most valuable to us when its used locally by people to create new metrics and transparency for local exchange and local engagment. If we can model behaviors and if we can talk about stuff, if we can find out what other people are doing in their towns, and use this course as a starting place for an ongoing conversation, then I think we will have done a more important thing than simply share our mutual dissatisfaction about all of our problems.Tweet