Corporate Greed Isn’t New. The Internet Is Just the New Playing Field, says Douglas Rushkoff

Corporate Greed Isn’t New. The Internet Is Just the New Playing Field, says Douglas Rushkoff Watch the newest video from Big Think: Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Online Economy Is Breaking Businesses, and Stealing Our Time and Energy It’s harder for most people to making a living now than it was before the rise of online businesses like Facebook and Amazon. That’s because the digital economy is hurting the real economy. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and a professor of digital economics at CUNY/Queens. He is also the author of a dozen bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including, Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, and Team Human, the last of which is his latest work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: Douglas Rushkoff: The digital economy is breaking things because most people running digital companies aren’t aware of the operating system that’s beneath what they’re doing. There’s a good old fashion venture capital driven operating system. It goes back to central currency and corporatism and chartered monopolies and really the way our economy works, which has worked for a good 400 or 500 years and promoted everything from the British East India Trading Company right through to Walmart and General Electric. But when you take that and juice it up with digital steroids, weird things start to happen. You end up able to tweak and optimize your business so carefully that you can really see is a growing? Is it not growing? What can we do to promote growth? Growth. Growth. And if your company is not growing you end up in big trouble against all the other players that are growing. It’s simple power law dynamics. It’s a winner takes all landscape. So if you have a company like Twitter, which I would see in my old fashion view as a successful company. It makes $500 million a quarter based on 140-character app. Success, right? No. In the current environment that’s a failure because they don’t have a growth strategy. They don’t know how to turn into a video company, a news company, a social company, an everything company. And the reason why the digital economy is breaking our businesses is because we’re taking the old agenda of growth and running it on digital platforms and it ends up amplifying and spinning this priority out of control. Most of us look at the industrial age as this natural outgrowth of the need to do more and better business. But as I researched it I found out that most of the innovations we came up with in the industrial age were really for the opposite. There was a thriving peer to peer economy right at the end of the Middle Ages that nobody likes to talk about. The soldiers had come back from the Crusades. They had all sorts of new inventions and technologies and mechanisms; there were new trade routes that they had opened up. And they had came back to their towns and they took something that they found in the Middle East called the bazaar and they revived it as something they called the marketplace. So now people who had just been peasants working on the land of the Lords started coming together and trading this stuff that they made. And they had all of these really interesting instruments from market money and local currency and grain-based currency and all of these evolved really to promote the exchange of value and the velocity of transactions between people. And it started to really do well, which was the problem. As the peasants became wealthy the aristocracy got scared, who are these people? They’re not going to be dependent on us any more. So they came up with two main financial innovations to prevent the rise of this peer to peer economy. The first one was the chartered monopoly, really the parent to the modern corporation. All the chartered monopoly was was a way to say all of you small businesses are now illegal. If you want to be in the shoe business you have to work for his majesty’s royal shoe company. You want to be in the grain business you have to work for his majesty’s royal grain company. So people who were small business people now became employees. Instead of selling the value they created, now they sold their time as servants, as wage laborers. Read the full transcript on