To continue with the theme of “Guides to Living in the Information Age” I’ll point you towards this great interview with Douglas Rushkoff on Reality Sandwich.

In his new book, Life Inc., media ecologist and author Douglas Rushkoff tells the story of how the corporation has made us over into its own image, how we have altered our reality to serve its needs, and how we can take it back. In this conversation, Douglas illuminates the Dark Ages, reveals why there’s a God on our money, and explains what we’re really buying into when we buy that mortgage. We have the code to open-source everything, he says.

These ideas refer back, if obliquely, to what I’ve been writing about with deep reading and the fetishization of live experience. More to come on making those connections . For instance, Rushkoff on Renaissance culture:

The first individual in Renaissance literature was Dr. Faustus, who represented the extreme limits of greed. This was the new man, not a citizen of the city-state but an individual who has his own perspective on the world. We get perspective painting in the Renaissance, which meant the individual was a self-sufficient being whose point of view is important; we get reading in the Renaissance, which meant that a man can sit alone in his study and have his own relationship to the Bible, instead of gathering in the town square or the church, having the Bible read to him by a priest, as part of a congregation. So on the one hand it was this beautiful celebration of individual consciousness and perspective, but on the other it was all in the context of a new economy, one in which individuals were in competition against one another for scarce jobs, scarce resources, scarce land, and scarce money.