Chapter Four of Douglas Rushkoff's Life Incorporated is where things start to fall a little bit in disarray for me. Rushkoff begins by attacking the ideology of the Secret, but this is the same guy who wrote Club Zero-G as a graphic novel primer on the idea of designer reality. He's a man who believes that stories shape reality and we are ultimately the architects of our world. I'm no defender of the Secret by any means, but it's hard to be critical when so many of your own ideas support some of the same ideology.

I don't think Rushkoff's gripe is with any system of designer reality. Really he's just bashing the marketers that are making millions off of cookie-cutter self-help exercises and cliches, while taking advantage of people who are looking for any means to build a better life for themselves. Rushkoff equates the Secret with the culmination of a society bent on self-promotion - on selfishness - while also exhibiting an inability to want to work for your "wants." I can agree with this wholeheartedly.

Rushkoff goes back to the Renaissance to show the emergence of the individual out of the collective of the community. To him, this individualism is what corporations want people to seek out. To view yourself apart from your community is to seek out wealth, knowledge, etc. on your own, without concern for your neighbors. To Rushkoff, this divisiveness is a breeding ground for corporations to destroy local communities, while the individual turns a blind eye. It allows the corporation to supply a person's individual needs, while slowly making them another cog in the machine.

From individualism to industrialism, Rushkoff shows how corporations from the dawn of the Renaissance have destroy a local sentimentality in favor of a corporate identity. The diminishing of local libraries, town halls and community centers (or at least the vacancy of them due to some other highly promoted, yet less locally interactive activity) allowed for industrialism to take root.

"In the kinds of towns [Alexis] de Tocqueville visited, human relationships dominated the local economy. If you needed oats, you'd go buy them from the general store - just one step removed from the mill - or maybe even from the miller himself. If the oats were bad, you'd know where to find the man responsible. You knew his face and his wife's. His kids might have gone to school with your kids. If his oats were bad, he'd lose more than a customer, for you lived and worked in the same town as the miller. You might fix wagon wheels, or even work as the local chemist, mixing his wife’s medication. If you ate bad oats, you wouldn't be doing your job as well, either. The miller might end up with a dangerously assembled wheel or, worse, an incorrectly dosed prescription. If the miller supplied a bad product, he had more at stake than you business. You were more than just one another’s customers; you were interdependent members of a community.

The Industrial Age brought factories capable of making oats faster and cheaper than the local miller could have ever imagined. (And where industry couldn’t succeed in creating economies of scale, lobbyists were sure to tilt the playing field in their favor.) So now, instead of buying oats from a human being you knew, you’d get them from a big factory several hundred or several thousand miles away. It would come in an impersonal big brown box. There was no miller to be seen."

Instead of identifying with the makers of your products, you now identified with the brand. Your relationship to a brand took over for the lack of a relationship in a local economy. Mass marketing and mass production desocialized consumers, further separating them from their community - further solidifying an individual that was that much easier to divide and conquer from his neighbor.