The weirdest thing was not that people were debating whether Rushkoff is a corporate sellout, but that they saw his clothes as a significant reflection of his ideas. You could argue that these snap judgments are an inevitable by-product of the modern, nanosecond business world. It's much less taxing to suss out their wardrobe. The world is so fast, you have to make decisions about people very quickly. The myths of casual dress go deeper still.
Companies actively tout their superfly dress codes as proof that they've cast aside old hierarchies.
Hell, the boss is twenty-five years old and he snowboards at Valdez. This sort of charade has reached its apotheosis in the canonization of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. But when the hard times arrive, it turns those snowboarding CEOs can be as vicious with the layoffs as a nineteenth-century mining baron. Months later, it shuttered it doors and let everyone go. Meanwhile, Amazon axed 150 with one day's notice, and by the end of the year, a group of customer-service employees were sufficiently alarmed that they'd begun trying to unionize.