In Life Incorporated, Rushkoff examines the roots of our modern corporation-dominated world and traces the underlying economic rules back to the Renaissance. He goes into detail over how our society became disconnected from the real, local, and personal, and which laws and policies facilitated this. The digging leads to questioning the assumptions by which the modern world operates, such as the nature of the money we use (a complementary system operated in the High Middle Ages, and outlawing it led to a lack of local reinvestment that ultimately facilitated the Black Death).

He notes a number of organizations contributing to solving problems, and weighs in most strongly on a variant of “think global, act local”: get involved in your own community, and spread the knowledge of how you did it to other communities. (Examples of this include complementary currencies like Time Dollars and BerkShares, barter exchanges like ITEX, and community-supported-agriculture groups like Sustainable South Bronx.) ( )