Fuck corporations

I fly around a lot. My Internet is managed by a corporation. My computer and phone are made by a corporation.

In the past, I have enjoyed and have written effusively about the consistency and preferability of the corporate experience when it comes to their customer focus. Food tastes consistenly great, stores open and close at standard hours, getting help to resolve issues is easier.

Today, I'm coming out against corporations. Any corporation which believes in their fiduciary duty towards maximizing shareholder duty can fuck right off.

Instruments of Power and Coercion

I believe corporations are a means to exert control over society without explicitly coming out and claiming jurisdiction over the citizenry. When enough of a country's population is locked up inside a corporation - either as employees or stockholders or consumers - it becomes very easy for a governmental actor to apply a little bit of pressure on a small group of people to make them communicate unpopular, invasive, sometimes immoral ideas into the mainstream.

E.g., if the NSA had come to you and asked to read your communications, you'd have cried foul. So they went to a handful of corporations which we all use and twisted their arms into complying with privacy eroding rules. With such a cozy setup, every large company today is essentially TBTF. The government cannot let those companies fail

And other reasons

Now let us list out a few smaller issues with corporations. These issues should be more familiar to us because they affect us directly. Also, these issues apply more to companies which feel that they owe their shareholders a rising stock price and/or a dividend, all else be damned. There are some corporations which work for the public good where the same problems listed below favorably affect society.

• Innovation stalls - when you have a proven business model which makes you money, you tend to be loath to introduce churn and uncertainty into your money train

• Lobbying rises - immense pots of money allow companies to influence lawmakers to draft favorable legislation. Most of the time, lobbying efforts by companies in the same industry point in the same direction. In recent times, net neutrality is one issue I am aware of where two groups of wealthy companies were in opposition to each other.

• Democratization of talent reduces - rich corporations can pay top salaries to attract top talent. The possibility of cashing out after a successful IPO notwithstanding, a good programmer stands to make a very comfortable living working for one of the FAANG companies than for a startup. Rich companies lock up great talent to work on incremental enhancements rather to move the bottomline. I'd rather see talented people spread across the globe inspiring people around them to improve themselves to keep up.

We need to break up corporations and release the creativity of people. We need to stop the incessant tribalization of people into corporate identities. We need to shatter things before we gather ourselves back up into a more acceptable way of life.