Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?
— Bob Dylan
Powerful corporations now dominate the governments of the world. Their global empires extend across all continents and supersede all nominal forms of government. Although most people believe them to be marvelous cornucopia of enticing goods and services, there is a growing understanding among informed individuals that something has gone badly wrong. The collective activity of the multinational corporations is not bringing us an earthly paradise. Instead, it is bringing us environmental devastation, growing inequality, endless war, and the curtailment of freedoms.
This three-part essay explains the necessity of subduing the corporations and returning them to a politically subservient role in which their efficiencies can be harnessed to the public good rather than pernicious institutional aggrandizement. In my view, the struggle between the networked people of the world and ruthless, malignant corporations will be the defining conflict of this century. Part II of the essay explains how a growing revolt against the corporations is taking shape on the Internet, and how it will ultimately harness their power for the welfare of mankind.
The rise and rapid spread of the Public Internet is an epochal development, whose ultimate social and political consequences are unknown. The only roughly comparable antecedent for this innovation was the rise of printing and literacy enabled by Gutenberg’s press, and the consequences of that amplification of global knowledge were vast and far-reaching. The volume and tempo of knowledge exchange enabled by the Internet is orders of magnitude greater than that enabled by book printing, so we may expect commensurate societal impacts.
Early evidence indicates that the Internet will be the locus of a worldwide rebellion against the hegemony of global corporations. This rebellion, which we may term the “Netrevolt” will not take the form of the (largely unsuccessful) physical uprisings against abuses of power that have punctuated all of history. There will be no bloody resistance at street barricades, no revolutionary banners, and no heroes and martyrs of the revolution. Instead, the Netrevolt will be a slow awakening among millions of individuals to the dangers of malignant corporations and the gradual emergence of a people’s movement aimed at subduing unchecked corporation power. The argument for the emergence of the Netrevolt against malignant corporations follows:
1. The free resources of the Public Internet nullify the material advantages enjoyed by capital-rich corporations. In the past, the only institutions capable of challenging a large corporation were other corporations, governments, or wealthy individuals. Because corporations now dominate governments and their interests are aligned with those of the wealthy, there is no practical possibility of a conventional challenge to the dominance of corporations. But the extraordinary leverage provided by the Internet enables the nearly infinite leveraging of powerful ideas.
2. There are already hundreds of web sites actively engaged in exposing the mischief of malignant corporations. These sites range from political blogs to company-specific debunking sites, but their number and influence will grow steadily as people seek remedies for the growing abuses of corporation misconduct.
3. The customary propaganda assault counterplay of corporations against isolated challengers will be ineffective against thousands of centers of resistance. The opponents of malignant corporations will simply become too numerous to be silenced by targeted punitive strikes. Generic public relations counterattacks will show diminishing returns as the global population increasingly turns to trusted Internet information sources in preference to corporation-controlled propaganda outlets.
4. A coalition of Netrevolt sites will synthesize memes to subdue the malignant corporations. These memes may include the following:
Corpocrap – the identification and stigmatization of blatant corporation propaganda
Chartism – the drafting of a Global Corporation Charter governing the conduct of profit-making corporations.
Delinquency finding – the formal declaration that a corporation’s behavior is delinquent (i.e., minor to moderate violations of the Global Charter)
Malignancy finding – the formal declaration that a corporation’s behavior is grossly harmful (i.e., major violations of the Global Corporation Charter)
Sanction regimes – punishments, ranging from targeted boycotts and bans to De-Chartering (excommunication from Internet Society), triggered by Charter violations
Note that these memes will not have the force of traditional law. Like the RFC structures on which the technical framework of the Internet relies, they will be adopted by voluntary consensus. What is not codified in law cannot be challenged by law, and thus another major avenue of corporation power will be nullified.
5. The corporations will strike back vigorously at the early advocates of global accountability to the world population. They may even attempt to shut down portions of the Public Internet or impose harsh surveillance and repression measures to weed out their critics. But such efforts will only slightly slow the global movement to subdue them. Attacking the Internet on which their own commerce depends will ultimately be seen to be self-defeating.
6. The global regulation of corporations will emerge despite every effort made to corrupt politicians, arrest rebels, and intimidate populations. The people of the world will defend themselves against malignant corporations by the most practical means at hand: the extraordinarily powerful Public Internet.
Part III of this essay will describe in greater detail the mechanisms by which the Global Corporation Charter and related memes may emerge. The timing and ultimate structure of a global regulatory framework for corporations is uncertain, but the need to arrive at this goal will gradually come to be universally accepted. The Internet will provides the means and opportunity for acting on the growing global motivation to subdue malignant corporations.
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This is a thought-provoking essay. It is one viable alternative.
But given the inability of blogs to date to effect wide spread rapid change, and the structure of the internet as thriving on free and independent thought, I wonder where, how and who will bring the resources needed to effectively resist and encumber corporations.
There is almost unlimited potential energy out there. But transforming it from potential to actual and organized action seems to be a major limitation.
Thank you for writing this series.
oh, how i could do unspeakable things with that sentence. THAT’S how much i like it.
but it is its conceptual underpinning, really, and seriously, that has me all fired up. i agree that leashing corporate malignance is one of our most critical challenges (if not number one), and the time when the rights of these fake citizens are, apparently, deemed more valuable to/by our government than those of us real, flesh and blood, individual citizens has got to stop.
…agree that the list you have put up is possible. However, it is unlikely to happen unless some basic changes are made within the left community you are addressing.
First of all information is useful but it is a minor factor when you are talking about power relations. Most people, in my experience, when confronted by what you and I might agree as objective truth, will ignore it if it goes against their view of the world and their tribal identity (yes we are all tribal people). I often refer to the power of a gook like What’s the Matter With Kansas wherin Frank describes how Kansas voters vote their tribal identity over economic interests consistently no matter the practical results. You can also look at whole series of psychological tests that show people are always looking for cues from other people in order to manufacture a reality that meets the norm.
We can arm ourselves with info all we want but only the tribe that is interested in info will listen (10-20%) of the American people depending on the issue. The left needs to use the net yes to make the beginning of a network but power comes from the ability to project force and that can only come through the collective economic, cultural and political unity of “our” tribe such as it is.
Despite the internet, despite the spread of information we are drifting into an authoritarian/neo-feudal regime that has as its main engine the ability to project force anywhere in the world. It chooses prisons, green zones, privatization, and the compleat fascist agenda from soup to nuts on us whether we approve it or dispute it or know about it or not–because we are powerless as individuals.
are you assuming that the corporations are not reading and/or participating in the netroots, blogs, internet in general. You made a later comment about that so I guess you are not saying that, but how does corporate participation or involvement affect what you are talking about here?
I think this is a crucial question: will the power and fluidity of the network outrun corporate domination, or will corporate power bend the network to its will. This is the fight of the early 21st century, maybe the next decade.
One guy I know who is an oldtimer in the computer world, and I guess pyrro here as well, seem to think that the nodes of authority will rule in a decentralized way by moving or swelling centers of power as necessary, and that “ordinary” people will have it over government and corporate power. I don’t know. I’m not convinced.
On the other hand, some students I know were fired from their corporate grocery store jobs for “copyright infringement” (an early corporate attempt to squelch free speech on the internet) because they started a website, overtly mocking if not attacking their very own employer and inviting their friends to do the same. The “evidence” was that in some of the photos, there were people wearing shirts with the company logo on them, which I guess you could see if you held up a magnifying lens to the monitor.
So which is it going to be?
Another whole different set of questions and possible problems comes with the possibility you raise of extra-legal self-regulation. This can possibly work as long as everyone has safe havens to retreat to when things get ugly. We’re talking about people here, things will get ugly. Lynch mobs, stonings, etc. Perhaps the network will create its own retreat centers.
Anyway, I totally agree this will bring as big a transformation as that brought by the printing press.
Oh, and the marriage of the corporation and the network may create all kinds of new possibilities for good or ill. I believe the corporation can be a force for good. And the net can be a conduit for spying on customers, and workers and voters.