Life Inc: The Movie

Submit your video and begin subtitling.

Welcome to dotSUB!

Any Video Any Language

On dotSUB you can view, upload, transcribe, and translate any video into and from any language.

To get started and create your own subtitles, click on the yellow "get started" button below!

Other videos from josemurilo

Talking about the CulturaDigitalBR Forum at the FCForum in Barcelona

Lula and Free Software

James Boyle at Zeitgeist 2008

Duration: 9 minutes and 11 seconds

Year: 2009

Country: United States

Language: English

License: dotSUB - Other

Genre: Video Blog

Producer: Douglas Rushkoff

Director: Douglas Rushkoff

Views: 154 (61 embedded)

Posted by: josemurilo on Oct 6, 2009

A nine-minute history of corporatism, by Douglas Rushkoff. "How the world became a corporation, and how to take it back".

Report this video as offensive

Embed this player (420x347)
Embed a smaller player (320x272)
Advanced Embedding Options
Embedding Options

Size:

Language:

Embed Code
Invite a user to dotSUB

Your invitation to join dotSUB was successful

There was an error inviting that user to dotSUB

Video Transcription

Show in new window

I got mugged on Christmas eve
and, I went up to my apartment
and immediatly posted on our local parents list
the street I got mugged on and when it happened
and I got two emails back within an hour
not from people concerned about me asking:
"oh are you ok? I hear you got mugged.."
but complaining that I have posted the exact spot
where the mugging had taken place
because what I've done might adversely affect their property values.
It was enough of a shock
that it made me want to look at
how had this happened to people
how had a neighborhood become more concerned with its property values
than people's experience of one another
and their own town?
What I started to do was look at the different ways
we as modern Americans have become
disconnected from one another
disconnected from the places we live
disconnected from the value we create
and even disconnected from our own
sense of self worth
and I came to the conclusion
that corporations and the corporate mindset
or what we could call corporatism
were really at the center of this phenomenon
I wrote this book because I realized
that people are accepting the ground rules
of our society as given circumstances
and walking around utterly unaware of the fact
that these rules were written by people
at a very specific moment in history
with a very specific agenda in mind.
If you look at today, what kind of world are we living in?
We're living in a world where if you want to make money
you've got to work for a corporation. If you want to make what we call money
the money you are getting is Central Bank issued currency
there is really no way to prosper in today's world
without selling out.
"Anyone who has an insurance policy, a bank deposit,
or a share of stocks is helping to finance our business system."
That equation was really put in place during the Renaissance.
We've been taught that the Renaissance
was one of the great golden ages of civilization
The Renaissance was not a golden age
it was the end of a golden age.
The Renaissance was the moment in history
when kings decided they were going to
monopolize all of the value that people were creating
throughout Western Europe, so instead of letting
people make stuff and trade stuff
they created the chartered corporations.
Monarchs were losing power
and losing money, and they needed a way to control
the rising merchant class.
So they picked individual businesses to charter
and in return for the exclusive control
over an industry, or over a region
that company would then give the king shares of stock.
People would have to work for corporations
instead of letting people in different towns make their own money
everyone would have to use the coin of the realm
Instead of people creating, and trading, and selling art
now you would have to have a sponsor, a patron,
who would then bring you to court and let you be an artist.
This centralization of power
continued right through to our own time.
The industrial age was really about perpetuating
this dehumanizing trend.
We like to think of the industrial age really as
"Oh, we created all those machines, so that we had better production"
No. What the industrial age really was about
was disconnecting human beings
from their own labor, from their own consumption,
from their own pleasure.
The society that we built
for the industrial age, was built to
mythologize the mass produced object.
Because we needed to create a society of consumers
who thought that buying all of this stuff
would somehow make them happier.
In America in particular
we promoted the cult of the individual
as the path to real happiness.
Then I am going to be happy by making myself happy
When even this whole notion of a self
who is going to be made happy
somehow in isolation from all the other selves... is real.
When I was a kid, I was raised
in a middle class neighborhood of Queens
and the houses were so close together
that we had one barbecue pit
in the middle of our big shared backyard
and every Friday night someone would torch up the barbecue
and kids would bring things
and we would have this weekend long cookout.
As my dad started to make money
we moved to better neighborhoods.
We ended up in Westchester where we had our own house
with our own big yard and our own big barbecue.
But then the barbecue became an event for just our family
so instead of barbecueing with the neighbors
we were barbecueing almost competitively against them
you know, they would have porter house, we would have sirloin
they have filet minon, we would have to buy some even better..
So, the actual joy of the barbecue was gone.
Now, sure the GNP went up
because more grills were being sold
but the actual community spirit,
the fun of the barbecue was taken away.
Most of us
spend so much time
working and consuming
that we have very little time and energy left
to do anything that has to do
with other people.
By the time you're done with work, and buying,
and Costco and Walmart,
it's all you can do is sit on the couch and watch a little bit of television
before you go to sleep.
It's really hard to muster the energy to get together with other people
and the more we behave as individual actors
in competition with one another
the harder it is to encounter one another
in a friendly way.
I made friends with a guy, John,
who has a restaurant named Comfort
and he started an expansion
but couldn't get money from the bank to finish it.
So we came up with the idea for him to develop
something called Comfort Dollars.
So, for 100 dollars
you get 120 Comfort Dollars to spend at his restaurant.
You get a 20% return
on your investment,
and he gets the money he needs to expand his restaurant
cheaper than he could get it from the bank.
And this is the kind of thing that people can do anywhere,
start investing in one another and with one another
and make their towns better
actually earn returns that you're not going to get from your Smith Barney broker
- I promise you that -
and see the return of your investment
in the place you actually live.
That's not hard to do.
That's why it is so funny and sad to me today
that Obama talks about the financial crisis
as a banking crisis.
And the first thing we have to do is rescue the banks
Vikram Pandit, CitiGroup, 45 billion dollars
John Stump, Wells-Fargo
Lloyd blankfiend, Goldman Sachs, 25 billion each
It's as if he doesn't understand
that the banks are the very things
that sucked us dry in the first place.
the banks are not the institutions to be rescued
The banks are the institutions that we need to let die
so that we can get on with business.
"You found a flaw... in the reality..." ''... a flaw in the model that I perceived...
is the critical functioning structure
that defines how the world works, so to speak."
This isn't just a crisis
this is actually an opportunity.
This is probably
the first moment
in the last couple of hundred years
that we've had to rebuild our society
and our economy
on principles that serve humanity
instead of killing life.

Welcome to dotSUB - Any Video Any Language

Welcome to dotSUB!

Any Video Any Language

Other videos from josemurilo

Life Inc: The Movie

Share

Video Transcription