The Corporation: R.I.P.?
Writing at his spectacularly interesting blog, Ribbonfarm, the independent scholar Venkat Rao offers up a 7,000-word essay on "The History of the Corporation, 1600 to 2100," which is like a best-selling book in miniature. Rao argues that the corporation, after centuries of explosive growth, is now a sinking ship, essentially because it's run out of resources to exploit.
Rao divides the history of the corporation into three phases. First, roughly from 1600 to 1800, came the Mercantilist phase. During this period, huge corporations like England's East India Company and the Dutch V.O.C. ruled the waves. Increased naval power opened up whole new areas of the globe, and governments, taken by surprise, allowed private companies to take over huge swaths of it. The scarce resource was territory, and companies used private armies and navies to seize it. They could use government forces, too, because company employees often did double-duty as government officials: Robert Clive, for instance, was not only a high-ranking officer in the British Army, but also an employee of the East India Company. ("If you thought it was bad enough that Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton before he took office," Rao suggests, "imagine if he'd worked there while in office.")
Towards the end of the 18th century, however, governments started to reign in corporations, horning in on their revenue streams by levying taxes. (A good example is the English tax on tea, an East India Company product; that tax, Rao notes, cost England her colonies.) The corporation shape-shifted. Having exploited all of the world's territory, corporations stumbled upon a new resource to exploit: time. Corporations discovered the power of technology to make life faster and more efficient. In this new, "Schumpterian" phase of the corporation's life-cycle, corporations created more time, and then filled it. Labor-saving technologies created more time for the consumption of goods; many of the goods consumed were themselves labor-saving devices. From 1800 to 2000, Rao argues, modern societies entered into a feedback loop, in which new pockets of time were continually created and exploited. The zero-sum world of mercantilism was left behind; "'Progress,'" Rao writes, "had begun." The result was astonishing corporate growth -- not just in terms of profits, but in terms of attention and mind-share. Today, every day of our lives is crowded with some corporate product, designed either to create time or to fill it.
Unfortunately, it turns out that time and attention are finite resources, too. In America, he suggests, we reached "Peak Attention" several years ago. This is bad news for corporations. "As you find and capture most of the wild attention," he explains, "new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.... Due to the increasingly frantic zero-sum competition over attention, each new 'well' of attention runs out sooner."
What's next? Rao argues that the age of the corporation is over. There's plenty of room for life to improve -- but corporations, having conquered the spatio-temporal world, won't be able to take part in that improvement, which, Rao suggests, will be mostly "perspectival." Read the whole piece here.
