Life Inc: Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
ONCE REMOVED: THE CORPORATE LIFE- FORM

Charters and the Disconnect from Commerce

If You Can’t Beat Them…

Commerce is good. It’s the way people create and exchange value.

Corporatism is something else entirely. Though not completely distinct from commerce or the free market, the corporation is a very specific entity, first chartered by monarchs for reasons that have very little to do with helping people carry out transactions with one another. Its purpose, from the beginning, was to suppress lateral interactions between people or small companies and instead redirect any and all value they created to a select group of investors.

This agenda was so well embedded into the philosophy, structure, and practice of the earliest chartered corporations that it still characterizes the activity of both corporations and real people today. The only difference today is that most of us, corporate chiefs included, have no idea of these underlying biases, or how automatically we are compelled by them. That’s why we have to go back to the birth of the corporation itself to understand how the tenets of corporatism established themselves as the default social principles of our age.

There were three main stages in the evolution of the corporation, and each one further imprinted corporatism on the collective human psyche. The corporation was born in the Renaissance, granted personhood in post-Civil War America, and then, in the twentieth century, branded as the benevolent guardian and savior of humankind.

Most history books recount the development of the corporate charter as a natural, almost evolutionary step in the advancement of commerce. To a certain extent, this is true. After the fall of the Roman Empire, early Middle Ages Europe fell into disarray. Europeans lived in isolation from one another, dominated by self- sufficient and self-governing rural manors. Feudalism, as the prevailing political system came to be called, wasn’t a particularly fun way to live–certainly not for the peasants who made up a majority of the continent’s population. Landowning lords gave tracts of land to vassals in return for military allegiance. Vassals, in turn, ruled the peasant farmers, who were usually permitted to subsist on the remnants of their crops. Unlike in the Roman Empire, laws varied widely from place to place.

The lack of an overriding system of commerce left the lords out of a significant but growing business sector: the activity occurring between the people of different manors and beyond. By the 1200s, technological developments such as water mills and windmills as well as increased travel and commerce led to the resurgence of towns and cities outside the lord’s direct control. Towns became centers for the manufacturing, exchange, and circulation of goods, and provided a stark contrast to the to-each- his- own way of life in the manors and villages. In their new urban setting serfs found legal freedom, opportunities for work, and a place to start afresh. Citizens of cities became known as “burghers,” a term that spread throughout medieval Western Europe and provided the basis for the later word “bourgeoisie.”

It was only a matter of time before the burghers would grow wealthier and potentially even more powerful than the aristocracy. Instead of depending on the ownership of a fixed tract of land farmed by peasants and protected by an expensive army of vassals, this new class of merchants and manufacturers could increase production, commerce, and acquisition almost infinitely. The marketplace where they transacted could grow as large as it needed to accommodate more and more trade, simply by spilling outside the city center. The town then naturally expanded around the new location, and this cycle would continue until the town would eventually blossom into a full- fledged city, which would in turn require more goods and commerce, and so on. Lords attempted to regulate all this trade and growth by controlling and taxing local markets, but people always found ways around these boundaries and restrictions.

One such boundary crosser was the merchant, who resurged in about the thirteenth century to serve as an intermediary between town and country, providing the first links in the chain connecting the movement of goods between producer, merchant, and retailer. On non- market days, cobblers, blacksmiths, and artisans were accustomed to selling their wares through the windows of their workshops. By allowing merchants to set up their own shops and sell these items for them, the artisans got more time to do what they did best. Shop owners did not specialize in actually making anything, but in generating profit through selling. Business for business’s sake was born. Over the next few generations, along with the traders, moneylenders, and investors who backed them, these retailers would become the core of the urban bourgeoisie. While the nobility declined in land ownership, finances, and power–as well as numbers–this new class of pure merchants had access to international trade, investment, and an alternative economy.

Worse yet for the aristocracy, as merchants set sail they were to benefit from the vast resources of other territories. While the new bourgeoisie were becoming members of the fledgling global marketplace, the traditional aristocracy was essentially landlocked. What official authority they had left to offer their subjects was diminishing as rapidly as their wealth, influence, and numbers.

The aristocracy longed for a way to participate in the new economy–a way to invest that didn’t put them or their good names at any risk. For their part, the new merchant class had certainly increased the speed and breadth of wealth creation–but this also made for a highly competitive and fluid business environment. Sudden wealth could be followed by a sudden wipeout if a single ship got lost at sea or a fire took down an entire workshop. Merchant businesses were still mostly family run, and rarely operated more than a few voyages before a shipwreck or other calamity took them down. They needed a way to institutionalize their success while they were on top, right after their ship had come in.

This is the landscape on which the Renaissance was to take place and a new way of conducting business was to emerge. The overriding priority was not to promote economic activity, global cooperation, or colonial expansion, but rather to freeze all this development in a particular position, and prevent the cast of characters at the top from changing too much over time. But locking down wealth was a lot harder for everyone now that so much innovation was going on– especially when success tended to come with a loss in competence. In fact, while the Renaissance is often celebrated for its emphasis on specialization and expertise, nothing could be further from the truth.

The division of labor is not the same thing as the specialization of labor. On the surface, it may appear that a society of merchants, managers, and various levels of laborers is more specialized than one of shopkeepers and artisans. But it was not to the manager’s advantage to hire highly specialized laborers who could demand higher wages. Instead, managers standardized processes in order to hire the least qualified and most replaceable laborers around. Far from encouraging specialization, competence, or innovation, all this mercantile and industrial activity actually favored generalization.

As the population grew and the demands for goods increased, open land became privatized. This uprooted rural peasants, forcing them into the generic labor market. Previously, the life of a rural peasant had been below or altogether removed from money and the market found in urban centers. Peasants made do with what they could produce with their own hands and barter locally. It was a life of great limitation, but also of self- sufficiency. As the commercial economy spread, the peasant had to turn the only marketable skill he had— physical labor—into his means of survival. Evidence of this sort of wage labor can be traced all the way back to Portugal in 1253. Just like the Home Depot parking lot where Mexican immigrant laborers gather today, there were designated meeting places, usually a square at sunrise, where a foreman representing an employer would meet with day laborers and hire them right off the street.

Meanwhile, the managerial class sought to diversify itself as quickly as possible, undermining any specialization of its own. Once a low-level shopkeeper or wage earner had saved enough money to make the first step into more advanced levels of commerce, his first move was to commission the very work he used to perform. Then he began diversifying his wares and financial activities. The higher the capitalist was on the economic ladder, the broader and more varied were his investments and enterprises—and the more disconnected he was from his business’s skills and the people performing them.

So both the aristocracy and the most successful of the mercantile class required a new mechanism through which they could invest their almost “generic” capital in the form of pure financial and legal power. This mechanism had to offer the ability to invest in a business with total discretion, anonymity, limited liability, passive participation, and little or no expertise.

Traditional family businesses, which shared labor, risk, and capital by blood ties, were no longer sufficient to the task. New kinds of laws, contracts, and standardized currencies would be required to extend these agreements to people of different families and regions. Florence, with its key location on the Mediterranean (as well as its widely accepted currency, the gold florin), became the birthplace of the first “limited partnership” firms. The precursors to full- fledged corporations, they distinguished between the liability of the firm’s directors and of those who merely contributed capital, who would only be responsible for the amount of their contribution. Furthermore, contributors were not subject to being listed among the business partners, allowing noblemen, and even monarchs, to hide their commercial interests. The concept of the limited partnership quickly spread throughout Europe, funding daring investments from mines and plantations to colonialist adventures. Through this new opportunity for quiet and passive participation, the nobility became mad for investing.

As the operators of these huge projects sought to secure even more capital from a wider range of regions and social classes, they formed a more advanced form of limited partnership called the joint stock company, which could generate investment from shareholders on an open market. This broke business open, allowing for the creation of businesses by virtually anyone capable of getting investors. It almost heralded an era of business meritocracy, which would have generated unprecedented churn in the class structure. The wealthiest merchants were now as vulnerable to upstarts as the aristocracy.
Finally, the monarchy had something it could offer the bourgeoisie who threatened to unseat them.

A Child Is Born

Although monarchs might have lacked the vast financial resources of joint stock companies, they still enjoyed a structural advantage over any of them: central legal authority. Taking a cue from the Church, which had a tradition of “incorporating” groups of monks into single entities, royals exercised their authority to sanction a new kind of chartered body: the corporation. It was genius.

The corporation was not a business or a government entity, but a combination of the two. Its government supporters—the monarchs— had the authority to write the trade laws and grant monopolies; its business participants—the chartered companies—would enjoy the exclusive right to exploit them.

By granting a specific joint stock company a legal charter to do business, monarchs could give it a monopoly control of its business sector. So a shipping company that once competed with others for the resources of a set of islands now enjoyed exclusive, royally mandated control over that domain. No other corporation could do business in that region, and even locals or colonists would be prohibited by law from competing against the corporation extracting their resources or selling them goods. Another corporation would be granted monopoly control over glass production; another would win beer, and so on. By issuing corporate charters, kings could empower those most loyal to them with permanent control over their colonial regions or industries.

The joint stock companies’ problem with competition from rising new businesses or local activity was solved. And in return for granting legally enforceable monopolies over particular industries and regions, monarchs got fiscal support and profit participation far exceeding the worth of any cash investment they could have made. As a Dutch lawyer explained in a letter describing the very first charter of this sort, for Holland’s East India Company, “The state ought to rejoice at the existence of an association which pays it so much money every year that the country derives three times as much profit from trade and navigation in the Indies as the shareholders.”

For merchants whose businesses previously lasted only as long as a single expedition, the arrangement offered a way to earn more permanent status, military protection from the Crown, and the right to exploit new regions and peoples with authority and impunity. Equally important, they could lose no more than their initial investment. The “limited liability” granted in a charter meant that a corporation’s debts died with the bankruptcy of the corporation. And bankruptcy protection was granted by the state.

By inventing this virtual entity—the chartered corporation—the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie entered into a mutual codependency that changed the character of both. Through these first great trade monopolies, such as England’s Muscovy Company of 1555, the British East India Company of 1600, or the Dutch United East India Company of 1602, monarchs found a way to extend their reach without the cost or liability of an official military expedition. Better yet: for the monarchs, the merchants running the corporation would now become loyal subjects, dependent on the Crown for their legitimacy, protection, and escape clauses.
The chartered corporation was a bold grasp for permanent rule and permanent wealth that constituted a stalemate between the two groups. The contracts that monarchs and mercantilists wrote not only stopped their own decline from power; they stopped time, locking in place a set of corporatist priorities that to this day have not significantly changed. Instead, these priorities work to change the world and its people to conform to the rules of corporatism.

People who had always engaged in business with one another would now be required to do so through monopoly powers. All lateral contact between people and businesses would now be mediated through central authorities. Any creation or exchange of value would have to be run through these centrally mandated companies, in a system enforced by law, controlled by currency, and perpetuated through the erosion of all other connections between people and their world. Moreover, the emphasis of business would shift from the creation of value by people to the extraction of value by corporations.

In the new corporate scheme, the profitability and authority of a company now depended on its centrality. The more powerful the king, the more dominion a chartered company could enjoy. Where successful companies once threatened the authority of the state, now they contributed to it. While earlier companies benefited from a landscape on which value could be created independently of established power structures, these new, chartered corporations were part of the established power structures. The more that currency, law, and belief systems favored trade conducted at a great distance and orchestrated by a central authority, the better off chartered corporations were. Merchants who originally came to power in a bottom- up fashion were now maintaining their positions through borrowed top- down authority. Their power was no longer earned in real time, but mandated by proxy; their business practices were no longer dependent on value created but value extracted.

Meanwhile, and almost certainly unintentionally, the abstract and independent nature of the corporation gave it a life and agenda of its own. The more such corporations came to dominate business and finance, the more that legal and social systems evolved to serve them. Most of the business and finance innovations of the early corporate era—inventions we still look on fondly today—were really just ways of preserving and extending the reach of this new business entity.

The health of a corporation was understood purely in terms of money, as measured by the new accounting technique of double- entry bookkeeping. Any transaction resulted in the debiting of one account and the crediting of another. This made achieving a favorable balance of trade the highest priority, and fostered a zero- sum- game mentality among all participants. International trade became a fierce competition between states for positive balances, which led to wars unlike any seen before.

Where armies and navies had for most countries consisted of temporary forces raised to wage a specific conflict, the emergence of corporations with long- term agendas now necessitated full- time professional armed forces. This, in turn, led monarchs to raise sufficient quantities of hard currency to support their militaries. Corporations were happy to pay the levies for military protection—as long as they gained more influence over state policies protecting them from competition. And thus the cycle reinforced itself.

As businesses and states alike began to see the world through the lens of corporatism, places became “territories,” people became “laborers,” money became “capital,” and laws became “game rules.” For this was the embedded bias of the charter itself: to maintain the central authority of the state while granting monopoly power to the corporation. Corporatism. Real things, such as human beings, land, and resources, only mattered insomuch as they kept the credit side of the balance sheet bigger than the debit side. The underlying bias of corporatism would be that everything, and everyone, could be colonized for a profit. Anything and anyone would be incorporated, as long as they increased the power of a central authority that in turn promoted the monopolies of its chartered corporations.

The rise of European imperialism itself can be attributed to this new perspective. Thanks to the distance and limited liability offered by the new corporate entity, the people enacting policies and making decisions were effectively removed from any personal connection to the repercussions of their actions. The less liable for and connected to their choices, the less responsibility they felt and culpability they incurred. Besides, corporations outlived any human individual or monarch, anyway.

My Oppressor, My Hero

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, monarchs were unflaggingly catering to the merchant corporations that fed them. Whenever state favoritism became too overt and subjects or colonists revolted, monarchs eased restrictions on the people and promoted their favorite corporations’ interests through preferential taxes and duties instead. Everything went through corporations; even the Pilgrims’ famous voyage to America was made on a chartered British East India Company ship, the Mayflower, which was actually on its fourth such trip to the continent. The corporation had already claimed—and been granted—the entire American coast. Successive waves of colonists were appreciated solely for their capacity to enhance the credit column of the ledger back home.

The East India Company lobbied vigorously for laws that would help it quell any competition from the colonists. This was a particularly easy sell since the royals and governors they were lobbying also happened to be shareholders. Laws forbidding colonists to actually fabricate anything from the resources they grew and mined made self-sufficiency or local economic prosperity impossible. “An Act for the Restraining and Punishing of Pirates” defined the import of tea from anyone other than the Company as smuggling. The Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773 helped the Company unload a surplus of tea accumulated in British warehouses by removing all barriers to trade as well as granting tax exemptions. “No taxation without representation”—the rallying cry that led to the Boston Tea Party—wasn’t about voting as much as about Britain’s passage of tax laws to the exclusive benefit of the East India Company. The American Revolution itself was less a revolt by colonists against Britain than by small businessmen against the chartered multinational corporation writing her laws.

This is why the founders so carefully limited the reach and scope of corporate power in newly independent America. Corporations were to be chartered by states, not by the federal government, so that their actions could be governed locally by those affected. Corporations were also required to demonstrate that they had a specific beneficial purpose other than making money—such as getting a bridge built or a waterway opened. Having fought against a foreign megacorporation, the founders understood the dangers inherent in the kind of centralized economic authority demanded by corporatism. Just like Adam Smith, they hated big government and big corporations alike, envisioning the ideal business landscape characterized by locally scaled firms and farmers, unencumbered by large, dehumanizing monopolies. Thomas Jefferson considered “freedom from monopolies” one of the fundamental human rights. James Madison praised self-sufficiency and appropriately scaled enterprises: “The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety.” It was as if they meant to reverse the effect of the Renaissance- conceived corporate charter.

Still, due largely in part to the tremendous Revolutionary War debt, early American politics was dominated by a division over whether or not the United States, like European nations, should have a strong central government that was also capable of granting corporate charters and running a bank. Jefferson argued unsuccessfully against Federalists George Washington and John Adams for the Bill of Rights to include “freedom from monopolies in commerce” and to forbid the creation of a permanent army. This back- and- forth continued for the next century. One administration or Congress would pass laws favorable to corporations, and then the next would attempt to rescind them. But because they could live on indefinitely, corporations simply waited for conditions to change, made what progress they could, and then waited some more.

The second great phase in the evolution of the corporate life- form would take place under Abraham Lincoln, who had built his legal career fighting on behalf of the Illinois Central Railroad, and then used the privilege of free rail travel the job afforded to keep his presidential-campaign costs low. With Lincoln’s help the railroads won the right to break unions, hire immigrants for up to a year by paying for their passage to America, and—most important—enjoy strong contractual advantages that people didn’t have. According to successive pieces of legislation he signed in the early 1860s, if a corporation broke a contract with another corporation, it was still to be paid for the portion of the contract it had fulfilled. But if a human being broke a contract with a corporation, he was entitled to no payment whatsoever. The playing field itself was changed to give corporations rights that people lacked.

The only privilege corporations were still denied was that of personhood itself. If only corporations could get a court to consider them people, they would be entitled to all the rights that real people got in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The rail companies understood this well, and fought for the “personhood” argument in every court case they entered—whether it applied or not. The passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, written to guarantee the rights of citizenship to former slaves, gave corporate lawyers the legal framework to make their cases. For reasons historians can’t quite articulate, the Amendment uses the phrase “persons” instead of “natural persons.” Corporations argued that this was because it was meant to include their own, non- natural personhood. In their opinions, justices repeatedly scolded corporate lawyers for attempting to exploit a law written on behalf of emancipated slaves. But the corporations had patience, and opportunistically sought out every leak and crack in the system.

Finally, in 1886, in a legal maneuver that has yet to be conclusively explained, a Supreme Court clerk with documented affinity for corporate interests incorrectly summarized an opinion in the headnotes of the decision on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The clerk wrote, “The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution . . . which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” There was no legal basis for this statement, nor any discussion about it from the justices. From then on, however, corporations were free to claim the rights of personhood. The more precedents that were established, the more embedded the law became. Over the next twenty- five years, 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases went before the Supreme Court. Two hundred eighty- eight of them were brought by corporations claiming their rights as natural persons.

The elevation of corporations to personhood was accompanied by a slow, corresponding devolution of human beings to something less than personhood. Corporations were bigger than people, lived longer, had more money and more influence. The biases programmed into them four centuries earlier, however—to thwart local activity, prevent competition, and disconnect people from their resources and competencies—remained the same, regardless of the circumstances. Traditionally, the distance between corporations and the people or territories they exploited was a matter of geography, class, and race. But America was already a colony, and its people had been raised on an ideology of equality, freedom, and agency. The Industrial Age gave corporations a new way to create the illusion of a preordained social order: the machine.

Originally, the steam engine was developed as a means of sucking water out of mine shafts in order to get to the coal beneath. Until the abolition of slavery, American industrialists saw no role for this contraption in agriculture or industry, where the human body was still the primary energy source. When slavery became untenable, a reconfigured steam engine rose to the occasion, accomplishing with coal what used to be done with indentured muscle, and what we now call the Industrial Revolution began. Coal allowed for the mechanized factory, the locomotive, and, perhaps most important, the steamship. With coal- powered boats, newly industrialized Western nations— predominantly Britain—were capable of distributing their manufactured goods to their colonies, as well as enforcing military superiority and the trade policies that went along with them. Legislation required the colonies in India to use mechanized looms, for example, so that the ready availability of human labor in that region could not compete with En gland’s mechanical replacements.

The increased mechanization of labor in the United States, where freedom was supposed to rule, proved a bit more troublesome. Machines now controlled the rate at which people worked, and the assembly line further reduced the autonomy and humanity of workers by relegating them to a single, repetitive task. Early industrialists, such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and particularly John D. Rockefeller, were constantly on guard for labor unrest, and not averse to resorting to violence when necessary. It was a bad strategy. Union busting only provoked progressive newspapers to attack the industrialists, leading to further unrest, more violence, ugly interventions by the National Guard, and even some legislation against corporate power.

As an alternative to overt repression, the industrialists sought to develop a cultural ethos more simpatico with corporate prosperity. In their new world picture, machines became the model for society, and people were the cogs within it—increasingly disconnected from their own sense of technical expertise or whatever unique contributions they might make to the process of production. They were replaceable. The function of the industrial corporation was to extract value from people’s work, for the economic benefit of the nation. This meant disconnecting people from the wealth they might be creating through their labors, and substituting a less costly sense of satisfaction or, at the very least, compliance.

So leading industrialists funded public schools—at once gifts to the working class and powerful tools for growing a more docile labor force. They hired education reformers, like Stanford’s Ellwood P. Cubberley, to design a public school system based on a Prussian method that sought to produce what he called “mediocre intellects . . . and ensure docile citizens.” Cubberley modeled our public schools after “factories, in which the raw product [the children] are to be shaped and fashioned . . . according to the specifications laid down.”

Still, a public school system alone didn’t guarantee a compliant population—not when intellectuals, artists, philosophers, and labor-union organizers still seemed to emerge from its ranks and so easily foment dissidence wherever they went. Henry Ford, in particular, identified this ability to breed discontent with the Jews—not the real Jews people might know as neighbors, but the more abstract Jews and Jewish ideology thought to be running and ruining the world. The anti- Semitic diatribes Ford published formed the foundation for the anti- Semitism incorporated by Hitler into his book Mein Kampf. Hitler even quoted Ford, with attribution. And though Ford might have been more vocal about the need to eliminate Jews than most of his fellows, he was hardly alone in his support of Nazi- style fascism. American corporations from General Electric to the Brown Brothers Harriman bank either funded the Nazis directly, or set up money-laundering schemes on their behalf. Though well financed, this effort to order the world by force would fail.

While Henry Ford was busy compiling his perverse pamphlets on the power of industry and the Jewish obstacles to corporatism, brighter propagandists with even loftier goals were still working on behalf of government. Although he had run for reelection to the presidency in 1916 on a “peace” platform, Woodrow Wilson eventually decided that America needed to get involved in World War I. With the help of some of the first practitioners of the new science of public relations, including a young Edward Bernays, he formed the Creel Commission, whose job was to change America’s mind. It worked, and it served as the model for what would become known as mass communications.

Bernays and his cohorts, just like Ford, honestly believed that the masses were too stupid to make decisions for themselves—particularly when they involved global affairs or economics. Early public-relations specialists were convinced by Freud (Bernays’s uncle) and a century of savage wars that human beings could never overcome their bestial instincts. Instead of letting them rule themselves, an enlightened and informed élite would need to make the decisions, and then “sell” them to the public in the form of faux populist media campaigns. This way, the masses could believe they were coming up with these opinions themselves.

But particularly after the perceived failures of the League of Nations and two world wars to lay the groundwork for a peaceful world order, Bernays and those of his ilk no longer believed that this enlightened élite was to be found in the chambers of government, or that this was even the power center from which to direct the mob. Bernays turned instead to the boardrooms of corporations. If democracy is a sham, why bother to prop up its impotent leaders? Consumers are easier to please than citizens, anyway: simply get people to believe in corporations as the great actors of civilization, and in consumption as the surest path to personal fulfillment.

Besides, the more influential the public- relations industry became in the electoral process, the more corporate funding was required to put anyone in office. By the late 1940s, it was already very clear which way the power was flowing: toward a corporately governed industrial society that had much less to do with politics than it did with commerce and capital. So the public- relations industry eventually turned its back on an already cynical version of democracy, and focused its efforts on supporting an institution it believed really did stand a chance of organizing the savage world with far less messy voter intervention: the corporation.

This was not a devious plan, but a hopeful model for controlling human beings and their unpredictable group behavior, as well as keeping an economic engine in motion without an all- consuming war to motivate our production and resource extraction. As the nation’s best engineers and economists unanimously agreed after World War II, the tremendous strides made in wartime technology simply had to be retooled for a postwar era. Although everyone from computer scientists and the Frankfurt School to President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of a military- industrial complex promoted through mass spectacle, the engines of production could not be slowed for the specious priorities of civically engaged workers or an artwork’s “aura.”

The disconnections inherent in industrialized culture would thus extend beyond the division between management and labor to include the distance between consumer and producer. The rise of factory-made products and a rail system to transport them meant that consumers no longer knew exactly where their goods came from or, more important, the people who made them. The “brand” emerged to serve that function, to put a face on the oats, beverages, and automobiles we bought, and eventually elevating them from commodities to icons. The new corporatism would use television to stoke desires, and factories to fulfill them.

Mass media stimulated the new mass market and created a sense of trust between people and the corporate- created brands that were bidding for their attention. Marketing through media also became a kind of science, ruled by the same principles and ethos as the factory floor. Everything from spokesmodels to theme songs were tested on samples of potential consumers for their efficacy in eliciting a positive response. This made us all, in one sense, parts of the machine. Goods were developed by industrialists, manufactured in factories, shipped via rail or interstate highways, and then sold to consumers whose appetites were already whetted by commercial television. The more dependent Americans and our economy became on this model, the more America remodeled itself to its demands.

Suburbs such as Levittown, New York, guaranteed that each family would own an individual house, car, and entertainment system. And the more individualized consumers became—the more separated in their own suburban homes, isolated from their communities and totally self- reliant—the more stuff they would need to buy. Independence from one another meant increasing dependence on the companies that served us.

For those who might yet remember—or, worse, talk openly about— better times, a new ethos was developed that valued the future over the past, and progress over nostalgia. Public- relations and advertising chiefs borrowed the most persuasive features of the spectacles staged by their Nazi counterparts—and in some cases employed some of the very same architects—to stage new spectacles on behalf of the American corporation.

World’s Fairs in 1939 and again in 1964 offered the experience of a future America where a benevolent corporation would address every need imaginable. AT&T, GM, and the U.S. Rubber Company sponsored utopian pavilions with names such as Pool of Industry and the Avenue of Transportation. Corporations would take us into the automobile age, the space age, and even the computer age. No matter the sponsor, the overarching message was the same: American- style corporatism would create a bright future for us all.

The intelligentsia played along. Former socialist academics and Nazi expatriates alike were finding easy money in the form of research grants from both the military and industry if they recanted their prior socioeconomic theories and promoted the new corporatism. Many of these academics, like James Burnham, professed the benefits of an industry- led “American Empire,” which, like the Roman Empire that conquered Greece, would “be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control.” Freshly graduated psychologists, now willingly in the service of marketers, conducted the first “focus groups” to determine how and why people buy things. Slowly but surely a new definition of self as “consumer” penetrated the mass psyche.

The scores of economic, management, urban- planning, and marketing theories to emerge from this effort were almost invariably geared toward making one part or another of the industrial machine work more efficiently: motivate production, stimulate consumption, assimilate impediments. No matter how humanistic in their wording, or how focused on giving people what they really wanted or needed, these techniques were only “creative” in their ability to tweak the great engine of commerce. They all came down to manufacturing, shipping, and selling more stuff for greater profit and in less time.

As a result, our physical, commercial, spiritual, and personal accomplishments came to be valued only insofar as they could serve the market. And while the market may be as good a model as any for human interaction, the corporate terrain did not represent a level playing field or a “free market” in which value might be created from anywhere. Remember—in spite of its individualistic mythology of open competition, the landscape of corporatism was first cultivated during the Renaissance, when local currencies were outlawed in favor of centralized money. In the United States, in an assumption of centralized value creation that reached a crescendo under the Nixon administration, the Federal Reserve won the authority to create money by fiat, based on nothing but faith in its own corporate chutzpah.

The massive potential of computers and networking, technologies developed in many cases by engineers hoping to decentralize the very power structures funding their projects, was quickly recontextualized as a market opportunity—the beginning of a “long boom”—and appropriated as NASDAQ’s stepchild. New rules for a new economy were invented, in which people’s ability to access interactive technology for free or to create value independent of any corporation could be understood as the power of the network to leverage what were formerly “externalities.” The dot- com boosters sought to reconcile the incompatibility of an abundant, decentralized media space with the legacy of a scarce, centralized monetary system. Everything is “open source,” except, of course, money itself.

Instead of serving to reconnect us, our technologies now serve to disconnect us further, reducing our contact to virtual prods and pokes. Meanwhile, corporations are finding online a path toward incarnation: Chase and Coca- Cola build avatars in online environments such as the Second Life “virtual world” that are as real as we are. Sometimes more so, especially as our life and status online dictate or even supersede our life and status in the former real world.

The institutions of last resort, be they religious or nonprofit, are themselves in the thrall of the marketing techniques employed on behalf of their corporate rivals. Instead of presenting alternatives to totalitarian corporatism, they conclude that “if you can’t beat them, join them.” Religions hire consultants to re-brand them in the image of MTV, while charities refashion themselves into for-profit corporations seeking “social- philanthropy” money as sexy to venture capitalists as an Internet IPO (initial public offering of shares). Even those who seek to overturn what they see as the corporate hegemony succumb to the logic of corporatism in their campaigns.

It’s not just that the landscape is sloped toward corporate interests, but that our own beliefs and activities are directed by corporate logic. When those of us alive today have no memory of a world that functioned in any other way, how are we to think otherwise? Like kids with a radio dial that plays nothing but Top 40 songs, we have adapted to the music that we hear, and choose our favorite tunes and pop heroes from the available menagerie.

With no other choice available, we grow up partnering with corporations for our very identities. A kid’s selection of sneaker brand says more about him than his creative- writing assignments do, and is approached with greater care. Our ability to actually do anything about, say, greenhouse- gas emissions is based entirely on the extent to which we can trust Toyota’s claims about developing a car that cleans the air as it drives. Our feedback and participation are managed by customer service, empowering us as consumers by infantilizing us as human beings. This dependency augurs a regression on our part, and a transference of parental authority onto our corporations that recalls our ancestors’ allegiance to emperors and high priests.

While some corporations may serve as our accepted public enemies, others quickly step in to embody our dissent. Ford’s contention that it knew the one right car for every American was countered by GM’s repackaging of its cars in personalized brands for each of us. As much as Microsoft frightens us by echoing the tactics of chartered monopolies, Apple and Google excite us by presenting the illusion of a bottom- up, people- centered alternative. We hate Nike and love Air-walk, hate Hummer and love Mini, hate Nabisco and love Hain, hate A&P and love Whole Foods. Or vice versa.

But we all love corporations.

Role Reversal

The last century of media- enhanced public relations set in motion something the founding fathers simply couldn’t have imagined: a corporate sphere in cahoots not only with a corrupt government, but with the people. We are the new collaborators, engaging with one another and the world at large through these artificial actors. As we do, our behaviors become increasingly predictable, our lives more predetermined, and our awareness of alternatives to corporate- enabled autonomy diminished. It’s just the way things are and—as far as we can tell—have always been.

The more disconnected and predictable we become, of course, the less alive we are by all measures that matter, and the more our corporations take on a life of their own. On the synthetic landscape of corporatism, corporations are the indigenous creatures and we are the aliens. They function better than we can, because our laws—even our roads, neighborhoods, and political processes—are written to favor their activity over our own. We must work through them rather than through each other, which only worsens our disconnected predictability. We surrender our agency, losing the free will that makes us human. We have reversed roles.

The landscape of corporatism favors the selfish over the social, the brand over the product, and the central over the local. This is why our search for solutions has been so stunted; we look for nationally branded answers to problems that can be approached only on a local or a personal level. We are drawn to solutions that offer the same instant gratification as consumption, the same frictionless immediacy as high- end salesmanship. Political leaders have all the emotional power—and insubstantiality—of the tested images on which their campaigns are based. As long as we experience the world from the perspective of its corporate conglomerates, we will remain oblivious to the activity and opportunities still available to us on a human scale. We will continue to fight on a battlefield that was created to benefit corporate actors while disempowering and dehumanizing real people. And the longer we limit our activity to this synthetic sphere, the further we mistake this artificial landscape for the territory on which we are to act.

The corporation is a significant but invented institution—and the impact of its invention on our relationship to one another and the world around us was as significant as the invention of an abstract God. For while it might be said that the invention of monotheism purposefully disconnected us from the forces of nature, the invention of the corporation purposefully disconnected us from one another. And while religious institutions and mythologies may have dominated the social, political, and economic landscapes for the first thousand or so years of civilization, it’s corporations and their mythologies that direct human activity today.

Corporatism depends first on our disconnection. The less local, immediate, and interpersonal our experience of the world and each other, the more likely we are to adopt self- interested behaviors that erode community and relationships. This makes us more dependent on central authorities for the things we used to get from one another; we cannot create value without centralized currency, meaning without nationally known brands, or leaders without corporate support. This dependency, in turn, makes us more vulnerable to the pathetically overgeneralized and fear- based mythologies of corporatism. Once we accept these new mythologies as the way things really are, we come to believe that our manufactured disconnection is actually a condition of human nature. In short, we disconnect from the real, adapt to our artificial environment by becoming less than human, and finally mistake carefully constructed corporatist mythologies for the natural universe.

By tracing the development of the great disconnect and unearthing the misconceptions supporting it, we will enable ourselves to come to terms with how we reconnected to an artificial landscape sloped in favor of corporations and away from our own agency—or why we behave against our better natures in the name of self- interest. Luckily, if we can call it that, the real world is finally diverging too far from this false model for the illusion to be sustained. The reality in which we actually live is crumbling; the barbarians are at the gates and the muggers are in Park Slope, while the wealthy are still arguing about the impact on property values.

Instead of using this opportunity to reconnect to our world and our potential to create value from the bottom up, we argue about how to restore and refinance the very corporations whose purpose is to dis-empower us further. If we can forget about the Dow Jones Industrial Average for long enough to remember who we are and what value we might truly bring to this world, we may just be able to take back the world we have ceded to a six- hundred- year- old business deal.