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A while back, I was watching a video about emergent behaviour. A fun concept. the idea is that under some rules, the way things behave ends up making their own different rules. Like how the rules of particle physics determine how subatomic particles behave, but when together they form chemistry, a different set of rules working on top of the lower layer. The same way as biochemistry becomes its own thing, and so biology is built on top of that, and on top of that we have ecology and then humans, and sociology, economics…
It left me with a question, a rather big and stupid question. We are intelligent, sentient, we are just a bunch of cells, intelligence has appeared in our layer. and my question was, can it appear in another? would we notice if there was an intelligent organism that uses our behaviour as its cells? I am not asking for sentient, because that is such a philosophical question which would be a massive tangent just to unpack.
For a while I was just wondering if it was possible, until I realized. They exist. Institutions. they are another layer of emergence, and they do have intelligence and behaviour.
You might say, that it is obvious they are intelligent, they have a CEO that makes decisions, therefore they get their intelligence from him and/or his advisors or advising teams. good point, exceptthe CEO is not the institution, he is replaceable, and the institutions themselves have built in mechanisms for it, to run efficiently. everyone is replaceale and for what? the survival ad near cancerous growth of said institution. Shareholders only care about numbers going up, and will fire anyone who makes any decision that questions it.
Aha, you will point at the shareholders, they are people, they make the decisions. Except most of them are not, they are other institutions, other corporations trying to keep the numbers up. trying to feed on capital.
This seems obvious. But I just providing another lens. Because now we can see their behaviour under a new light. Just like living organisms requre energy and its distribution to live. Institutions need capital, need people to work in there for them to exist, need people moving money around for them to exist.
And given the new lens we can ask different questions. Do they age, evolve, get diseases, do they have an ecology?
They do age. They must grow and a bigger corporation might be stronger but less adaptable and less nimble. can take less risks, it has less space to grow and might only survive by buying off the competition. For example, we can point at Kodak, they could have developed the digital cameras except they make money selling camera film, not cameras. For them making any product that will hurt film sales was short term suicide. Digital cameras were unavoidable, they could have succeeded in the digital fight and come out on top, but trying was forbidden to them as any decision that would hurt them in the short term is beyond the scope of their actions.
Evolve? yes they do. in their own way. simply, any institution that does not grow as fast or as strong will simply die off. There is a lot of competition, and new corporations with different rules will try to take over and if they actually are better fit for their environment they will succeed. We can see the evolution of corporations within the last centuries with corporations getting more traits, all using new behaviours and try to survive copying from each other if they can.
Ecology? Just look at the markets, private equity are basically scavengers, some corporations feed each other, niche speciation, trophic cascades… all those concepts apply here in some way.
My point is, corporations are not people. They are their own creatures, which care for us. The same way you care for your own cells. Are you even aware or care that millions of your cells die regularly, for example in your gut or skin? no, the same way a corporation has absolutely no care for their workers.
This is just a lens, if you are a socialist you might think best to end them, which might work. Whatever institutions we make will likely have their own issues. A liberal might think that under these metaphors we might be able to tame them, which is possible. Except not fighting them is something corporations want us to believe.
I personally think we can consider domestication. by understanding them through this lens. One way to domesticate them is simple. Kill them. I mean the bad ones. Let them fail, and fear not for their death. If they hurt people, and there is a lawsuit, the punishment should be significant, enough to kill the company and ruin all the investors. This way surviving companies will be afraid and police themselves. They will only behave themselves as long as there are consequences for not doing so. If you try to domesticate animals you will put down those who bite and are dangerous. Another solution is that stakeholders should be entitled to shares, people who work or rely on the product should have a voice and more importantly a vote. Although then we need to look into what institution is deciding who gets shares.
BTW, this can be interpreted as a liberal believing that “Just one more reform, trust me bro”. or worse an ancap thinking we just need the right corporations. My version of a reformed capitalism would be so different it would be a stretch to call it liberal.
TLDR: corporations are not people, they need to be treated as such, and be forced to serve public interest. Even less considering them as a group of people.
