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Friday 3 July 2009

And so now we find ourselves in a world in which the public is manipulated – Rushkoff cites a Republican strategist who campaigned to change the terms ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’, ‘estate tax’ to ‘death tax’ and ‘third trimester abortion’ to ‘partial birth abortion’, in order to gain leverage for his Party’s issues. We find ourselves in a world in which the news is manipulated – with VNRs ‘or video news reports… a complete, prepackaged story made by a company or a cause, beamed to news stations around the world for them to broadcast as if it were one of their own reports’. And the best alternative to Rushkoff we have is celebrating ‘brand You’ – Rushkoff cites consultant Tom Peters who said ‘It’s time for me – and you – to take a lesson from the big brands, a lesson that’s true for anyone who’s interested in what it takes to stand out and prosper in the new world of work… We are the CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.’ Understandably, Rushkoff has a lot of issues with the whole idea of ‘Brand You’, saying, ‘The problem is that no matter how well we play, the real corporations will necessarily beat us. This is their realm. Corporations will always be better at being corporations than people will. They don’t need to eat, sleep, or worst of all, feel. They do not age or suffer doubt.’Although Rushkoff isn’t blown away by the new administration in the US (‘Part of what got Obama going was big investment from Wall St,’ Rushkoff told us, ‘his views are consonant with theirs’), he does prefer it to the ‘full on guns in face old school Roman oppression’ of the Bush/Cheney era. But the idea is not to look to Government or indeed big business for the answers. ‘There is a way out,’ he explains in Life Inc. ‘But it means getting off the artificial playing field or corporatism and touching terra firma. Only by disconnecting from corporatism and its dehumanising, delocalizing, depersonalising and devaluing biases can we muster the strength and find the tools through which a people-scaled society might be constructed – or reconstructed.’ ‘Full on guns in face old school Roman oppression’

Notes

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