Find it here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html
--Kim
Invaders from Mars
By Charlie Stross
"Voting doesn't change anything the politicians always win." 'Twas not always so, but I'm hearing variations on that theme a lot these days, and not just in the UK.Why do we feel so politically powerless? Why is the world so obviously going to hell in a handbasket? Why can't anyone fix it?
Here's my (admittedly whimsical) working hypothesis ...
The rot set in back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began recognizing corporations as de facto people. Fast forward past the collapse of the ancien regime, and into modern second-wave colonialism: once the USA grabbed the mantle of global hegemon from the bankrupt British empire in 1945, they naturally exported their corporate model worldwide, as US diplomatic (and military) muscle was used to promote access to markets on behalf of US corporations.
Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)
Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.
Collectively, corporate groups lobby international trade treaty negotiations for operating conditions more conducive to pursuing their three goals. They bully individual lawmakers through overt channels (with the ever-present threat of unfavourable news coverage) and covert channels ( political campaign donations). The general agreements on tariffs and trade, and subsequent treaties defining new propertarian realms, once implemented in law, define the macroeconomic climate: national level politicians thus no longer control their domestic economies.
Corporations, not being human, lack patriotic loyalty; with a free trade regime in place they are free to move wherever taxes and wages are low and profits are high. We have seen this recently in Ireland where, despite a brutal austerity budget, corporation tax is not to be raised lest multinationals desert for warmer climes.
For a while the Communist system held this at bay by offering a rival paradigm, however faulty, for how we might live: but with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the adoption of state corporatism by China as an engine for development large scale opposition to the corporate system withered.
We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don't bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.
In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.
Posted by Charlie Stross at 12:34 on December 10, 2010 | Comments (165)
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Latro | December 10, 2010 13:22 | Reply
2:
This idea disgust me a lot. Not that you are not right, but ... its really disgusting because it is just a BAD excuse.
Corporations dont exist as people. Even with the law saying so, there is no mind behind them that has this thoughts and then communicate it to its minions.
We people make the decisions. So ok, they are not tied directly with anybody in particular... but all their sins are somebody sins. Somebody, not an alien hive mind, decided to buy into the Nuremberg defense of "I just follow the corporation orders" to approve those unethical decisions. Somebody, no matter for how short of a time or in what limited capacity, decided to hide under the collective non-morality of the corporation. Somebody, even if it was not the owner and just as interchangeable as everybody else, decided to discard morality and embrace greed by the convenient excuse of duty to the "shareholder".
And in creating the enviroment to have this convenient and absurd lie around somebody knew what they were getting, for all of us. Again, the particular somebody may not matter, but the culture we got as a result is one where its easy to be an hypocrite and pretend you dont have anything to do with the awful decisions you are making.
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Latro replied to this comment from Charlie Stross | December 10, 2010 13:33 | Reply
5:
I know, I know. The analysis is true, but still. It irritates me that that fiction has become so ingrained that is true; that we as society have, basically, found a way to do the evil we want to do and at the same time wash our hands of responsibility over it, by inventing this awful fiction of meta-creatures that only understand hunger, when the reality is that we shaped them that way on purpose, like some sublimation of ourselves that lets us have the cake (greed is all that matters) and eat it too (but I'm just a human like you!)
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theleftstuff | December 10, 2010 13:41 | Reply
7:
This is only part of the explanation. Corporations could be and were restrained by laws until they bought the system. In such a case it's perfectly accurate to say that voting changes nothing. From their own point of view, however, their behaviour is quite rational - loot what you can and destroy the rest. Just as Welles's Martians were an allegory of colonialism, so corporations are the new invaders from beyond, like the European slave traders in West Africa.
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PrivateIron | December 10, 2010 13:44 | Reply
8:
I want to emphasize this is not an apology for corporatism, just further explanimification: what if the current order exists because of evolutionary pressures? Countries/cultures that did not adopt this form end up at the short end of the stick and over time either eventually adopt the strategy or are consumed by those who have or left at the wayside. That does not mean this is morally right, "natural" or bound to persist. And I realize that this viewpoint tends to justify fatalism and inertia. But I would love to hear any brilliant plans for changing course. That cannot be evaded by money voting with its tiny pixilated feet.
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Scully | December 10, 2010 13:54 | Reply
12:
I've always assigned the corporation the role of AI in the singularity, rather that of an alien. People can naysay the singularity easily on grounds that AI isn't possible, but much less easily when you point out that there are already people and organizations treated as people which are, frankly, not driven by human intellect.
And that's the point I'd like to argue with Latro. A corporation has a set of incentive structures that are distinctly not human, and it subverts business people into regrettable positions that they can't see the longterm effects of (and the corporation has no incentive to even check) at threat of their livelyhoods. If anyone is to blame, the entire hive structure of the corporation is to blame, and trying to get a group of, as you call them, sinning humans to put on the breaks for the greater good largely at the risk of their jobs would be quite an amazing organizing act, and there's the key to my argument. We've designed organisms which force their component users to stick with the team or get tossed out. Furthermore, organizing the group to resist has to be done very quickly, else the organizers get tossed out.
Corporations don't get slowed by human compassion because the humans in a corporation need to risk their livelyhood to do it, and furthermore, need to organize brilliantly in a manner that corporations have evolved to squash.
Just because we built them and run them doesn't mean we have any hold on their moral stance. The system is too large, and is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
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tp1024 | December 10, 2010 13:56 | Reply
14:
Well, I'd agree if it wasn't for the fact that we had the same kind of thing in the late 19th/early 20th century - and the aliens went away for some time.
It rather seems like some kind of infection to me, that the human organism is adapting to and will eventually defeat ... although the condition humanity found itself in after the last time around wasn't exactly the best. (Cue WWI and WWII.)
We're not dealing with fully autonomous, intelligent limited liability companies - but slumbering, fully predictable zombies that scare the shit out of far more people than they ought to.
Did you see what happened to Iceland? They had a bit of a fever, the most exploitative companies died, and society is recovering. Which is quite a contrast to Ireland that, in trying to avoid the fever, is getting more and more ill. (By nationalizing junk debt of non-Irish banks; whose demise would supposedly lead to something *much* worse than the apocalypse, if you believe the scaremongers.)
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Charlie Stross replied to this comment from John Atkeson | December 10, 2010 14:00 | Reply 17:
(There, I fixed it for you.)
The question is not how to envisage a better system, but how to get there from here without experiencing violent push-back.
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Poul-Henning Kamp | December 10, 2010 14:05 | Reply
21:
It recently occured to me that we need to revisit Asimovs three laws of robotics.
The laws are not really about robotics, but about human-engineered autonomously acting entities.
... such as robots and corporations.
Poul-Henning
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David Earle | December 10, 2010 14:07 | Reply
25:
I agree with the point, but not the alien metaphor. Corporate entities, specifically industrial ones, originally acted as a beneficial mutation that helped the United States and western countries exert dominance over the globe. But in recent years the market pressure for continuous growth (brought on in part by the World Wide Web and increased amounts of capital in the stock exchanges) has caused corporations to metastasize into cancerous bodies that are causing significant harm to the organism as a whole, that is society. At the same time they are suppressing normal immune responses (regulation) in order to promote their own growth, allowing other societal ills to take root.
(Gosh it's fun to do metaphors on the fly!)
So of course, as cancer patients we either feel resigned to our fate, or we seek out increasingly radical treatments of dubious effectiveness, all the while terrified that the best option might be to cut out the growths entirely and pray the surgery isn't fatal. And it's very likely to be fatal, since the worst growths are firmly rooted in our financial nervous system.
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Tim Whitworth replied to this comment from Latro | December 10, 2010 14:15 | Reply
32:
Actually, a corporation doesn't need it's own mind as such, it only needs it's own decision making strategy. Which it has, at least in America, where ceos are required to pursue the financial best interests of the stockholders by law. That is, if they raise wages without necessity, they can be prosecuted.
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Eric | December 10, 2010 14:40 | Reply
38:
What has always troubled me with the fact that corporations have all the same rights as people is the fact that corporations can be bought and sold, yet people cannot be.
nelc | December 10, 2010 14:44 | Reply 39:
So Cthulhu is already here and eating our brains?
I guess Anonymous' Operation Payback attacks on Visa and MasterCard could be the beginnings of an immune reaction to these entities, but they're a bit of a blunt-object approach.
heckblazer | December 10, 2010 14:49 | Reply
40:
Is the problem primarily large, for-profit corporations? Or do the invaders include small closely held corporations like The Kilimanjaro Corporation (agent for service of process: Harlan Ellison) non-profit corporations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Inc.? I ask because it might affect the preferred solutions.
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cod3fr3ak replied to this comment from Latro | December 10, 2010 15:16 | Reply
47:
I think that most people feel they have a high degree of indivudual control ofver their actions and choices in life. When only the opposite is true. You get to pick from a list of menu items that has been pre-selected for you. Your choice is no real choice at all.
Trying to get folks to understand this is difficult and contributes to people buying into Nuremberg defenses and such.
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Bromo replied to this comment from Charlie Stross | December 10, 2010 15:21 | Reply
50:
Not a bad analysis start - but I think the specialness of the "Limited Liability Corporation" is another large concentration of power.
Large concentrations of money and power tend to breed arrogance and corruption - I think this is how the Soviet system went so bad so quickly - the solution to "Capitalism" (if one views this as a problem) wouldn't be having the means of production concentrated in a government - it quickly begins to disregard its subjects and behaves like an ultra-large collective.
And as the US corporations could accumulate capital with the limited liability laws (if you were personally responsible/liable for the profit and loss of companies in which you own shares ... you can bet Corporate governance would be much different and corporate size would be much smaller) - they became larger and larger, and started becoming extremely influential in the politcal process. And not much interested in the "Free Market"just maximizing shareholder value by any means necessary.
But for me, I think the issue isn't the unique nature of Corporations as "legal entities" - it is the concentrations of power and money that is the problem.
One of my favorite quotes by Robert Anton Wilson ( I paraphrase ): "The Left dislikes corporate power, the Right dislikes government power, both are correct."
It is concentrations of money and power that are the issue, I feel.
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Charlie Stross replied to this comment from Justin Boden | December 10, 2010 15:23 | Reply 51:
I don't understand the timing - multinational corporations directly influenced international politics before the modern nation even existed (Virginia & Dutch East India Companies, for example, predated nationalist movements of the mid-to-late 1800s). Why did things change in the post-War environment?
Look at the conditions of incorporation back then and you'll notice that it was much harder to establish a company -- it took a royal charter or act of parliament or the like to authorize one, and the financial instruments used to capitalize them were a lot less sophisticated (and less volatile).
I'm no expert on the field, but I think the germs of our current mess lie in the business practices of the big American trusts of the gilded age. They were designed as work-arounds to laws designed to restrict ownership, and their descendants seem to have worked too well.
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Charlie Stross replied to this comment from Bromo | December 10, 2010 15:26 | Reply 53:
I have "The Corporation". Other obligatory background reading? "No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein, "Defending Democracy" (and anything else) by Noam Chomsky, and "The Economist" every week.
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pallas | December 10, 2010 15:43 | Reply
58:
""Voting doesn't change anything the politicians always win." 'Twas not always so, but I'm hearing variations on that theme a lot these days, and not just in the UK.""
The problem with this analysis is you've begun the discussion with the statement "back in the good old days, things were different".
What good old days? What empirical evidence do we have for this statement? I haven't read Noam Chomsky, but from what I know of him, I get the impression he would have a rigorous critique of pretty much any historical period.
In other words, hasn't the world always been messed up?
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Charlie Stross replied to this comment from pallas | December 10, 2010 15:49 | Reply 60:
Yes, but different bits of the world have been messed up differently. This seems to be the first time that we've had a global problem, as opposed to a bunch of different little local problems.
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Igor | December 10, 2010 16:16 | Reply
64:
This is a very interesting metaphor, and it certainly touches on many essential points, but there's something that creeps me out about it - you've absolved the population from any political responsability.
You see, voter apathy can be explained by lack of political education (note: NOT political indoctrination - I'm talking about classical humanist studies - philosophy, sociology and political science; that is, the basic theory on democracy and politics, that ranges from, say, Aristotle to Habermas) - and this is something that is specially true regarding the USA: from my interactions with US citizens on the net, I can say that they've been trained from childhood to be good little sheeple, believe in the TeeVee and NEVER confront authority - whereas people on continental Europe tend to be more critical and a lot less susceptible to the bullshit that the media throws at us (which is why Fox News is an essentially north-american phenomenon: no other nation has been sufficiently trained to believe in this kind of bullshit)
The notion of Political Responsibility has been utterly extracted from the collective conscience: growing up, we're told that our only responsibilites are to indulge in our every whim and to The Family, the Most Important Thing on Earth. We've been told that voting, once every two years in avarage, is All That We Can Do to influence the res publica .
And here's the problem with representative democracy: it creates a class of scapegoats - the devilishly Evil, the politicians - on whom we can pin every single problem of the nation. You see, contrary to popular belief, politicians are human, and as such, tend to become corrupted when they hold unrestricted power; I'm not making a point for anarchy, though: watch them very closely, put restrictions on how they can exercise their power and make them responsible for the illegal decisions they make (like, say, putting in jail an ex-president that lied to his country for the sake of starting a war...) and suddenly they're not so evil.
This is getting very long, so I should get to the point: get organised and push for your rights, because no one else will. The politician you voted for WILL NOT give you anything if an organised group does not pressure him. Look at the "tea party": yes, they are a bunch of nutjobs ("please, let the corporations rule us! guvmint is EEVIL"), but they organised and imposed their agenda on the coutry.
Ultimately, this is why corporations are so succesful in getting what they want: they're simply more organized
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heteromeles | December 10, 2010 16:33 | Reply
67:
I'd say a huge part of the problem is that corporations are, by human standards, psychopaths.
Maximizing shareholder value has been interpreted to mean maximizing money flow per quarter, even though (as I understand it) this is not written into the law. Many (most?) humans who operate this way are insane and often criminal.
But I think the corporations have already been hijacked themselves, and I can demonstrate that by one simple question:
How many of you make a living on shareholder dividends? In fact, how many of you have seen these dividends go down in the last 10 years?
Really? You do know that corporations have gotten richer in that period, right? Where did your money go?
This is the old journalistic trick of following the money: While I don't actively support Wikileaks, I think Assange & Co. are on the right track. There are a relative handful of rich people pulling the strings on most of these corporations, and they're working with each other, not with us.
The problem here is twofold: even when our overlords are smarter than we are, they're not that much smarter, and even when they have strong controls in place, they're not that efficient or effective. The system is sufficient to insure that the rich, on average, get richer (at present), but they do so with tremendous waste and inefficiency.
One analogy I'd use is that it's like controlling a marionette that in turn controls another marionette. That second marionette's going to be jerking all over the place, even if the top puppeteer is dexterous. That's where the waste and inefficiency come from.
But the more apt analogy is cancer. Cancer pursues a goal of growth at all costs, and if left unchecked, it kills its host. There's a reason why we have an immune system that kills cancerous cells if it can see them.
Unfortunately, I think cancer-like behavior and out-of-control growth may be an inherent problem of complex, self-reproducing systems. We may never be able to get rid of it entirely. The positive key to controlling corporations is for the people at the top to realize that too much unregulated growth will kill them along with the system, and for them to set limits on the growth of their corporations and control. The negative key is something like wikileaks, which is the corporate equivalent of a schizogenic neurotoxin.
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Ben Firewater replied to this comment from Till | December 10, 2010 16:43 | Reply
70:
I think George Carlin put it best when he said: "There's no conspiracy, only similar interests"
Managers - in their role as managers - do realize that lobbying governments for less regulation and more privatization helps their agenda of maximizing profits. And politicians - in their role as politicians - realize that friends with money are good for financing PR (for them or against their opponents) and therefore help them to stay in power.
As more and more managers and politicians joint the dance, we end up with a system that is completely detached from it's idealistic idea.
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rpgoldman | December 10, 2010 17:00 | Reply
73:
With respect to the sociopathic nature of corporations, in the US at least, this has gotten worse relatively recently. Relatively recently, we have a new branch of corporate ethics (that seems to have legal bite), holding that the only responsibility of corporate leadership is to shareholders. This replaces an earlier, somewhat more benevolent model, that held that corporate leadership was responsible to all stakeholders, including not just the shareholders, but the community, and the employees.
For whatever reason (collapse of communism?), we have seen what seems to me an increasing hardness in capitalism. E.g., layoffs are now something routinely done to increase stock value, rather than a last resort in times of poor business, off-shoring is done with no concern for in-country employees, etc., etc.
USians will know what I mean when I say we are all living in Potterville now...
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Kyle Wilson replied to this comment from t3knomanser | December 10, 2010 17:36 | Reply
79:
One aspect of the 'money is speech' issue that we've gotten into here in the US is that is seems to suggest that bribery is protected speech. I am constitutionally permitted to petition the government to get them to do something I personally think is important. That involves 'speech' with a government representative that is intended to cause them to act in the manner I want them to act. Money is speech, thus giving them money as a way of getting them to do what I want done must be protected speech and so a bribe is just a form of exercising the first amendment (at least here in the US...Britain may be saner...)
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Stephen Watkins | December 10, 2010 18:00 | Reply
86:
I think I'll add to this though. Corporations are not wholly mindless entities. You hint at their function and purpose, but it's really a lot simpler.
They exist to keep a shadow aristocracy in power. I mean that not in the conspiracy theory sense, but in the sense that corporations are controled by and enrich their existence a class of people who are already wealthy and influential and largely who have inherrited that wealth over multiple generations. So, this same time period also happens to coincide with a drastic, historic decrease in the Estate Tax, at least here stateside.
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allynh | December 10, 2010 18:26 | Reply
92:
This has been discussed in an extensive DVD and book, _The Corporation_.
The Corporation
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Corporation
Topics addressed include the Business Plot, where in 1933, the popular General Smedley Butler exposed a corporate plot against then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt; the tragedy of the commons; Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning people to beware of the rising military-industrial complex; economic externalities; suppression of an investigative news story about Bovine Growth Hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate television station; the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany; the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust); the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia's municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation; and in general themes of corporate social responsibility, the notion of limited liability, the corporation as a psychopath, and the corporation as a person.
The video is available as a download.
http://www.archive.org/details/The_Corporation_
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Shay | December 10, 2010 18:29 | Reply
94:
I recently heard a lecture by Jerry Greenfield (of Ben & Jerry's) about the trend he says he's seeing in businesses adopting a "second bottom-line", being a social responsibility one.
He says that Ben & Jerry's (notably, a Unilever company nowadays), has always judged themselves by these two bottom lines. They participate in a variety of charities and social justice activities, employing recently-incarcerated and "at risk" kids at their parlors, free cone day, etc.
This is of course very fitting for two aging hippies with their own company, but I have to wonder, has the recent economic crisis brought about by clear moral hazards, caused some kind of shift in corporate behavior? Is this trend a reality?
Is it possible that corporations will no longer be sociopaths, but actually .. grow a conscience ?
An interesting idea.
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Stephen Watkins | December 10, 2010 18:37 | Reply
97:
In answer to Shay @94:
Sadly, no. Because the net result of the economic crisis has been an increase in the wealth, assets, and power of exactly some of the most egregious offenders. It was only those corporations that were not quite powerful enough that ultimately failed, and they were absorbed wholesale into other entities, creating larger and yet even more sociopathic institutions in the wake of their fall.
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Stuart replied to this comment from PhilD | December 10, 2010 19:15 | Reply
107:
I think poster #10 is onto something. I think we should react to corporations subverting the public by having the public subvert corporations. Maybe found a GNU Public Corporation as a front for regular people. :)
I know there are such things as employee-owned corporations, but I have had no experience with them, and clearly they haven't taken over the world. Is it because a democratic structure is inherently less efficient than a hierarchy, or have we yet to stumble upon the magic formula that allow them to outperform traditional corporations?
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Charlie Stross replied to this comment from Stuart | December 10, 2010 19:22 | Reply 109:
Stuart, you might find the John Lewis Partnership interesting. (An employee-owned retailer that happens to be the third largest privately-held British company, with turnover well over US $10Bn/year.)
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bob_d replied to this comment from Latro | December 10, 2010 19:28 | Reply
110:
Saying that people make decisions rather misses the point with corporations. I think it was Jeremy Rifkin who discussed that notion; anyone working for a corporation, he pointed out, is restrained by *legal obligations* to behave in a particular way. There's a rule set that defines how the company operates, and all the desires and moral urges of the individuals who work there are necessarily overridden by these rules. The argument was made that corporations are therefore machines. If we expect moral behavior from corporations we're going to be disappointed.
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