Life Inc Audiobook by Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, lecturer, and documentarian. If you enjoy media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan or Erik Davis you will enjoy Rushkoff's work; however, his work "Present Shock" sits squarely in the camp of futurologists such as Alvin Toffler. He frequently appears on Frontline and I have included as many of these here as I could locate.

In his book, Life, Inc. Rushkoff takes a look at physical currency and the history of corporatism. Beginning with an overview of how money has been gradually centralized throughout time, and pondering the reasons and consequences of such a fact, he goes on to demonstrate how our society has become defined by and controlled by corporate culture.

Rushkoff coined the terms viral media (or media virus), digital native, and social currency. He worked with both Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary on developing philosophical systems to explain consciousness, its interaction with technology, and social evolution of the human species, and references both consistently in his work. In his book "Cyberia", Rushkoff states the essence of mid-1990s culture as being the fusion of rave psychedelia, chaos theory and early computer networks. The promise of the resulting "counter culture" was that media would change from being passive to active, that we would embrace the social over content, and that empowers the masses to create and react.

Rushkoff's unbridled enthusiasm for cyberculture was tempered by the dotcom boom, when the non-profit character of the Internet was rapidly overtaken by corporations and venture capital. Rushkoff often cites two events in particular – the day Netscape became a public company in 1995, and the day AOL bought Time Warner in 2000 – as pivotal moments in his understanding of the forces at work in the evolution of new media. Disillusioned by the failure of the open source model to challenge entrenched and institutional hierarchies from religion to finance, he appeared in numerous documentaries decrying the corporatization of public space and consciousness. He wrote a book and film called Life Inc., which traces the development of corporatism and centralized currency from the Renaissance to today.

He is currently Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at the City University of New York, Queens College.