{"id":270966,"date":"2009-05-12T14:41:57","date_gmt":"2009-05-12T14:41:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/05\/12\/life-incorporated\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:19:59","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:19:59","slug":"life-incorporated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/05\/12\/life-incorporated\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Incorporated"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago we posted<\/a> a brief interview that Jason Boog of GalleyCat conducted with Douglas Rushkoff about conglomerates and the media. This interview tied into Rushkoff’s latest book — Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back<\/em> — which is a fantastic critique of the rise of corporations and the negative influence the principles underlying corporations have had on virtually every aspect of our life. <\/p>\n

We’re planning on running an interview with Douglas about the book and about corporations and publishing (irony #1: Life Inc<\/em> is coming out in June from Random House<\/em>) in the not-too-distant future, but since this is such a fantastic, important book, I thought I’d point out the book’s special website<\/a> and “Life Inc The Movie,” which hits on some of the major points of the book. (It’s kind of like a videobook!<\/a> )<\/p>\n

The book releases on June 2nd, but is available for preorder<\/a> from, well, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. (Irony #2.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the interesting examples Douglas uses in this video is the bit about the restaurant Comfort and the owner’s inability to secure a bank loan for expansion. When this happened, he came up with the idea of “Comfort Dollars” through which, for every $100 invested, you received $120 Comfort Dollars to spend at the restaurant, thereby helping this local business to expand, and receiving a 20% return on investment . . . This isn’t unlike our subscription model<\/a> through which for every $120 “investment,” you receive approx. $180 worth of Open Letter books . . . From our perspective, it’s great to know that X number of units of a new book are going directly to readers the second the book comes back from the printer, and for readers, you’re receiving $1.50 worth of books for every $1 spend . . . <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago we posted a brief interview that Jason Boog of GalleyCat conducted with Douglas Rushkoff about conglomerates and the media. This interview tied into Rushkoff’s latest book — Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back — which is a fantastic critique of the rise of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,15106,21626],"class_list":["post-270966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-douglas-rushkoff","tag-life-inc"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":352766,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270966\/revisions\/352766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}