Recently I've been reading Life, Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff.
Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He teaches media studies at the New School University, serves as technology columnist for The Daily Beast, and lectures around the world.
The book is about 'corporatism' and gets to the heart of so much of what I have been trying to get to with the concepts around The Yogic Edge, and the way I am teaching yoga teachers to build local, heart centered personal business plans. I'm inspired by his clarity, eloquence and level of synthesis around such an omnipresent aspect of our society.
As it turns out, you can read most of the book on Boing Boing, where he posted it a few months ago as a guest blogger. Here's the link to the first chapter, and here's links to a few comments (link link) so you can get a 'feel' for the dialogue that was starting around the book. You can also watch a short movie about the book here.
With all this talk about corporatism recently, I was struck in a heartening sort of way when I read this article, entitled "Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law" from the WSJ. It seems that during that hearing the Justice questioned the long held and rarely questioned legal fiction of a corporation's 'person-hood'. I think this question bodes well for putting some limits on the further unquestioned establishment of corporatism, even though it is unlikely to sway the court's opinion in the current case. And any shift back towards a human-focused set of constraints on commercial activity will bode well for our collective humanity.
Rich (Raghurai)
