Monday
Jun152009
Life Inc. Dispatch 04: It's Just Little Brown People Over There, Somewhere
Monday, June 15, 2009 at 11:48AM | in Events
Life Inc. Dispatch 04:
It's Just Little Brown People Over There, Somewhere
It's Just Little Brown People Over There, Somewhere
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The LIFE INC. Dispatch = Brief weekly videos encapsulating key concepts and ready strategies from Douglas Rushkoff's LIFE INC. for de-corporatizing our lives, abandoning the speculative economy, and rebuilding both commerce and community from the bottom up.
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Reader Comments (6)
Interesting this idea of remote. In French they say "Loin des yeux, loin du coeur" far from your eyes far from your heart.
I definitely will use it.
I was just led to you by radicalsahm.blogspot.com and was curious as to whether or not you will make a full length documentary. I would love to buy it if you did. Not that I don't like reading, as I am very interested to read Life Inc., its just much easier to spread the word if it is in dvd form, which I do when I find one worth spreading. You're a rare breed and people like you give me some (small) hope in humanity. So thank you.
-Chandra
This is, in my mind, one of the less convincing arguments. It strikes me as an absurdly romantic notion that, if we had to actually face the people hurt by our actions, we'd avoid them, and behave more "humanely" (a misnomer if there ever was one). Maybe some people would. But I doubt many would.
People have never been especially ethical. So it's not that this remove isn't causing us to behave unethically. It's that this distance allows us the luxury of moral vanity, of continuing to behave as destructively as we always have while imagining that we are "better" than that. True, this does not change much of your argument. But the distinction is important, and it's why I have a lot of trouble embracing your optimism.
Well, there were folks doing the colonisation "face to face" as it were. These people were distanced from eachother. Chartered company representative down to indentured servant or slave and they were all distant from their original homes. If one has not been exposed to critical theory in university already, there are lots of movies from Disney's Pocahontas to Marlon Brando in: Burn! [1969]. The Piano with Holly Hunter, i believe, is another.
Sometimes a little "moral vanity" helps, not so much from afar, but right there with the little brown ones as we harness their energies for our purposes in the name of Jesus.
The colonial experience obviously created counter discourses when individuals merged and forged hyper personal relationships which challenged assumptions about identity, purpose and the order of things. These discourses are a matter of record now.
I believe there are plenty of possibly redemptive discourses in the making today if you don't let the media bring you down with stories of fading american empire.
-mason
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNgMJnU8Q5o&feature=related
I read once that the kernel of consumer capitalism was in place by about 1750 when poor English peasants could be found putting sugar (grown on Western lands from which natives had been displaced, and harvested by Africans snatched from their homes and dragged to the fields in chains) in their tea (grown on imperial plantations run like prisons in the East), both of which (tea and sugar) are mildly intoxicating, and were provided by monopoly-charter corporations (enabling the wealthy to pool their resources in pursuit of new frontiers of profits). Consumer-corporate-capitalist globalization in a nutshell...
I meant to say sugar and tea are "mildly addicting" rather than intoxicating, which makes the "consumer" point even more pointed... The general point is made in Susan Willis, A PRIMER FOR DAILY LIFE, riffing off Sidney Mintz's great SWEETNESS AND POWER.