Life Inc.

Park Slope, Brooklyn, is just a microcosm of the slippery slope upon which so many of us are finding ourselves these days. We live in a landscape tilted toward a set of behaviors and a way of making choices that go against our own better judgment, as well as our collective self-interest. Instead of collaborating with each other to ensure the best p

The benefits to society are pure mythology. Whether it’s Brooklynites convinced they are promoting multiculturalism or corporations intent on extending the benefits of the free market to all the world’s souls, neither activity leads to broader participation in the expansion of wealth—even when they’re working as they’re supposed to. Contrary to mos

Advertising doesn’t merely mean to suffuse the atmosphere; it means to become the atmosphere.

Corporatism depends first on our disconnection. The less local, immediate, and interpersonal our experience of the world and each other, the more likely we are to adopt self-interested behaviors that erode community and relationships.

Behavioral finance is the study of the way people consistently act against their own best financial interests, as well as how to exploit these psychological weaknesses when peddling questionable securities and products. These are proven behaviors with industry-accepted names like “money illusion bias,” “loss aversion theory,” “irrationality bias,”

Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living—the operating system on which we are now running our social software—was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.

Bush, FDR’s former war advisor, wrote of a hypothetical computer or “Memex” machine he intended as an extension of human memory.

From the perspective of the Communist Manifesto coauthor Friedrich Engels, however, this indebtedness was just the yoke that capitalists needed to keep labor in line. Home ownership, and the mortgage it required, would be “chaining the worker by his property to the factory in which he works.”

Congressional Research Service report found that for every two jobs created by a Wal-Mart store, the local community ended up losing three. Furthermore, the jobs created were at lower wages (an average of under $250 a week), fewer hours, and reduced benefits. A majority of Wal-Mart employees with children live below the poverty line, qualifying for