Pinkerton's Weblog

OmniMegaDynaCorp Inc.

I don't understand corporations. I really just don't. The entire idea of a corporation strikes me as a virus of some kind. Its very purpose seems to just be to consume and consume until there's nothing left. The same could be said, I guess, for human beings (a point noted by the inestimable Agent Smith in the Matrix movies) -- but if this is true, then surely corporations are the best method humans have so far devised to ensure destruction.

Let's say you have a company that sells shoes. Or pizza. Or coats. Or washers. Or whatever -- look, let's make this easy and you just pick whatever your company's making. I'll wait until you thought of something.

Okay, and we're back. So you have a company that makes x. And x is selling so well, you're able to beef up production and sell more of x. The people who are skilled in making x become a sought-after commodity for making x well, and get paid more for their skill. Everything works well.

But because x is doing so well, it stands to reason someone else will soon start up a rival company to compete with you to make it. And they do, but they figure out a way to remove all skill from the position by automating the process on an assembly line. Because they've removed the skill from the job, anybody can now do it, and so everybody involved gets slave wages. The product x of course suffers considerably in quality, but the cheap overhead means your competitor can sell it at half the cost, and who doesn't want shitty x at half price, right?

You are faced with the problem that your x now costs twice as much as the new industry standard. If you want to survive, you also have to fire your skilled staff, adopt assembly lines, kill off the need for skill, and churn out x twice as fast with none of the care or quality as before. You have to because consumers have dictated, through purchase of your competitor's x, that this is what they want. And you give it to them, and to compete, improve the assembly line even further, and make your x even cheaper, so you can undersell your competitor, and he'll die and you'll survive. Throughout this process, most of the other sellers of x who were unable or unwilling to commoditize their x quietly go out of business, reducing consumer choice and killing off the last remaining need for skilled x workers.

With so little competition, you and your one competitor now make all of combined revenue for x, a revenue which has exploded in popularity since you started making it obscenely cheap and of low quality. When you first started your x business, annual revenues were $500,000. At the end of this year, you've cleared $4 billion. And that's nice, of course, eacept that a) as a single human being, you don't conceivably NEED $4 billion, and b) in order to raise the money needed to mass produce x at a commodity level to survive, you had to incorporate your company, i.e. get a lot of other people to help you. Instead of owning your x company, you now own a market share in x, and others do as well. You essentially have given yourself no accountability or reason to care about how your company makes its money, so long as it does. Moreover, a new responsibility to the many faceless people you are responsible to for the company's continued success forces you to pour most of that profit back INTO the company, expanding, expanding always outward, bigger, faster, cheaper, so that next year you make $10 billion, and you can throw THAT back in too, because by Jesus, that's what your competitor's doing and if you don't too, your business is over. In other words, you've made $4 billion and you're on step away from extinction. You're not actually doing well. You're actually "just getting by" on a very vast scale.

Meanwhile, commoditizing x has killed consumer need for x, because cheap, fast production has made x suck. Consumers dont know WHY they dont want x anymore, because they cant remember a time when x was quality. They just know they dont want it. Meanwhile, your company's newfound lack of decision-making and accountability has forced you to make morally corrupt choices that destroy the environment and the economy, because if you dont clear a huge profit, you wont survive. And your existing $4 billion helps grease the wheels on a government level to allow the destruction. You've forced any skilled makers of x into unemployment. Your workforce now makes no money and works in an unsafe environment and is powerless. Your mass production is destroying the enivronment. You and your competitor are unwillingly locked into a gigantic-scaled game of chicken, where both of you must continue to expand and increase profits or face extinction.

And the money you DO make is fed back into the gas tank. The money you DO keep is more than you will ever need. Before you were a corporation, you made quality x, maintained a healthy, well-paid, skilled workforce, made a reasonable amount of money, and distributed the rest in a way where everyone was happy. Now, all the money made off the backs of consumers, tax payers, your workforce and the environment go directly back into making your corporation bigger, so that it can make twice as much money off the backs of consumers, tax payers, your workforce and the environment. And you can't stop or change any of it, because your competitor will eat you alive, and you'll lose the game of chicken. You're locked into this course.

Corporations are a disease.