Rebuilding Value in Our Lives

It was Christmas Eve when award-winning author and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff was mugged in front of his “hip” Park Slope neighborhood apartment in Brooklyn while taking out his trash. He immediately did what any responsible neighbor would do: Warn his fellow residents as to the location and description of the assailant through the neighborhood’s email list. Instead of sympathy and thanks, what he received were angry emails chastising him for broadcasting information that “could adversely affect all our property values.” Shocked from both the experience and his neighbors’ reactions, Rushkoff’s evolved his philosophy and he began to question his own complicity as a resident within a neighborhood more interested in buildings than the people who inhabit them. His investigation into how “corporate metrics” have replaced fundamental human values was recently published in the best seller, Life, Inc. How the World Became a Corporation and How To Take It Back. Douglas Rushkoff is a visionary thinker and elegant communicator, able to distill and successfully articulate concepts without polarization or alienation. SuperConsciousness Magazine was pleased to speak with Mr. Rushkoff about the pervasiveness of corporatism, how the corporate mindset interferes with our natural tendencies towards altruistic behavior, and what we can do to rebuild our neighborhoods. SC: How did your conceptualization of your book, Life, Inc., change after the Park Slope mugging? DR: Before the mugging I had a more abstract relationship to the material. As a media theorist, I understood that people were mistaking the medium of money for something real and that they didn’t realize that this was just one kind of money created at a particular moment in history. To most people, money was just money, so I intended to write a book that explored the medium of our money – its biases and original intentions – through the lens of a media theorist. I had already embarked on that process, writing a book proposal and sending it out to various editors to obtain an advance. The economy hadn’t crashed yet, but my views had already become increasingly anti-corporate or anti-market, in a real but abstract sense. And then I got mugged in front of my apartment. The angry emails from people in the neighborhood were bizarre to me, because I realized instead of people wanting to actually make their neighborhood better, they wanted to protect the “brand” of Park Slope, at the expense of real people. Other neighbors were getting mugged too and I found that this was really common and that the cops saw it as a big problem. And even though a lot of it has to do with gentrification and really awful race relations, the minute you bring up the reality that there’s awful race relations, you get accused of being some kind of a racist: “What are you saying? That it’s black people that mug and white people don’t?” What was really going on was that a huge population of residents was way over their heads in debt. They needed the real estate prices in their neighborhood to go up, not because they want to sell, but because they need to refinance their debt at a better rate, and the only way to do that is if the total property is worth more. People were behaving like corporations.....