HeresTomWithTheWeather

Until the inevitable South Park spoof, Rushkoff weighs in on the Secret:

What we're really looking at here is a get-rich-quick scheme. What the Secret is is the logic underlying the religious grandiosity of Amway or Mary Kay or any of the pyramid schemes. They all rely on a kind of bootstrapping that comes from nowhere. And it is true that maybe in a purely capitalist era when we're no longer selling each other things of value but we're really just selling each other symbols of value that something like the Secret works because it's really a matter of whose got the most charisma in order to sell his worthless beans to someone else so that they then think now that they've got that piece of value. So, where all value is phantom, then phantom systems for the creation of value start to make sense again. But it's a very cynical place to go especially when so many people in the real world are starving.

Rushkoff also comments on Jim Henson's The Cube and his upcoming book Corporatized. His last comment in the interview is something I've been thinking about lately:

We really are living in something of a cult. It's like we're all doing the Secret or something.

Lessig is shifting focus. He's going to address how money corrupts policy decision process. Awesome.

Update: Nearly three months ago...