Conversation between Douglas Rushkoff and Kurt Andersen
Design Observer has posted Part 1 of a fascinating email exchange between two of my favorite writers and thinkers, Douglas Rushkoff and Kurt Andersen. They each have new books out about the economy in America. Rushkoff's book is called Life Inc., and Andersen's is called Reset. Julie Lasky was the moderator.
Douglas Rushkoff: All I wanted to do [in writing Life Inc.] was show how we got here, how this way of life was sold to us in the 20th century by the very same folks who originally saw fascism as a great idea, and why I believed it to be economically unsustainable. Remember, now, every chief economist of every major investment firm or bank I spoke with insisted that the economy was sound, and that it was bound for increasing expansion. And none of them knew what I was talking about when I asked them about the biases of the money we use. "There were other kinds of money?" they all asked, amazed.Kurt Andersen and Douglas Rushkoff: Part I. Two cultural critics and one global economic meltdown add up to a bracing conversation about values and what they're worth.Kurt Andersen: Actually, the ideas in Reset germinated six or seven years ago, when I was deep into historical research for Heyday, my most recent novel, which is set in the mid-19th century. Through that research and writing, I acquired a new gut understanding of what I take to be the cyclical course of American economic and political history, and of the concomitant bipolar nature of the American character — that is, how America has always swung back and forth between Yankee prudence and manic magical thinking, between free-market worship and communitarian public-spiritedness, between financially driven busts and bubbly booms. Sometimes the cyclical swings are swift and extreme, and those violent swings can result in progressive political and economic rejiggerings of the system. So when the crash came last fall, followed by (and probably causing) the election of Barack Obama, I was inclined to take a longer view, and see it as a rare and potentially positive convergence of cyclical economic and political swings. And that led me to write Reset.
the latest
latest episodes
Rushkoff makes a really good point that looking at economics and society from any perspective which doesn't take for granted the inevitable and immutable role of the unified Free Market and megacorporations comes off as "anti-corporate" or "anti-capitalist".
This seems at first like a mischaracterization - after all, we're not completely opposed to any form of markets or collectivized business ventures. However corporatism and free market capitalism by their very nature must be wholly consuming systems - they can't coexist or cross-pollinate with other economic models. So any proposal which suggests that the free market or corporate control may not be the only ways for organizing economic and social activity is, indeed, anti-capitalist and anti-corporate.
The Bat Segundo show (and podcast) had a good interview/caht with Rushkoff not long ago http://www.edrants.com/segundo/douglas-rushkoff-bss-299/
-G.
Kurt Andersen is a nice guy.
Rushkoff is a very good writer, and I look forward to reading his book. Also worth noting is Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges.
Am I the only one who thinks Rushkoff is a little too out there? His discussions are interesting but also generally very, well, fantasy-world.
@5: of course, by "government getting in the way" you're including "allowing corporations to exist as legal people", right? Without governments corporations as we know them (i.e. limited liability corporations) cannot exist. Also nobody would use federal reserve notes if the government didn't force them to (and force alternative currencies to not exist).
@1: continuing the above thought, how are government-supported corporate "people" consistent with a "free" market? Shouldn't the market just be, you know, free?