Life Inc Book Report

Life Inc (summary)

Author wants to find out how a neighborhood has become more concerned with it’s property values then peoples experience of one another.

The corporate mind set, also known as corportism, are at the center of the disconnection

People are accepting the ground rules of our society as given circumstances and we are unaware of the effect that these rules are written by people at a very specific moment in history with a very specific agenda in mind (Nazi Germany??)

Nowadays, If you want to make money you need to work for a corporation and the money is central bank currency; there is no way to prosper in this society without selling out.

The renaissance was actually the moment in history when kings decided to monopolize all of the value that people were creating.

Instead of letting people make products and trade products they created chartered corporations. Monarchs were losing power and losing money and they needed a way to control the rising merchant class. Therefore they picked individual business to charter and in return for the exclusive control over an industry or region the company would give the king shares of stock. People needed to work for corporations to earn money instead of people in different towns making their own money they had to use coin of the realm. Instead of people creating and trading and selling art, now you needed to have a sponsor who would bring you to court and let you be an artist.

This centralization of power continued right through our own time from Dutch East Indian company to Samsung and Mac Donalds.

The industrial age was really about perpetuating this de-humanizing trend; 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 massed produced object, because we needed to create a society of consumers who taught that buying all of this stuff would somehow make them...