The company I work for is large, global, and diverse. It is also “prehistoric” by the standard of many of its modern competitors and, frankly, like many among its surviving contemporaries, it has struggled a bit as the pace and demand of change in the sectors it operates in have changed.
There are some cultural reasons for this but, actually, many large companies fall into traps like this, not because they lose their ability to innovate or even because they lose their talent, but because they grow—either by intent or circumstance—distant from their place in the world.
In the case of my employer, it’s largely down to circumstance—their kind of magical whimsey just doesn’t quite “fit” like it used to.
But, what I want to talk about today is the more intentional shifts in the utterly-dominant global companies of our age.
These are companies that have evolved away from not being “evil”; or realised that the trick when you “break things” is to blame others rather than your own fast moves; or have stopped being a store to buy “everything” in and have become the rent-seeking owner of everything the store is in, including the metaphorical roads and streetlights, and the literal choices of the shoppers themselves.
At first blush, these things just look like an organisation realigning itself to the demands of shareholders. But, we keep getting told that the incentivising goal of capitalism is fundamentally “profit” so, in theory, there’s no real reason why the aspirations that drove these companies to their first profits should need to change all that much—assuming profitability remained the main goal.
Only, somewhere along the line, capitalism and its sphere stopped being about profit and started being about dominance.
I’ve talked a bit about large corporations in this series because I think this is key to understanding how we are doing democracy at the moment. Specifically, it is a significant variable that has evolved into our democracy.
We still broadly think about social democracy as existing inside the same sort of ‘beneficial framework’ presented to us back in the Greek Philosopher days. But, in the hundreds of years since that original Western-democracy Foundational Thinking was done, to give us the principles of “one person, one vote” and “representation”, we’ve not really adjusted it much beyond the addition of a few new rules, regulations, and voting systems.
What that means is we tend to get wound-up about judicial rulings and voting systems and campaign laws. This is fine to a point, but maybe what we should be getting wound-up about is whether we even have a good sense of what it looks like to offer ‘representation’ for all living beings, now and in the future, within the realm of our physical planet and beyond into time, space, minds and morality…
Even if we scale back on the metaphysical aspects though, should we be questioning whether it is right for a nation-state, or a faceless corporation, or the opaque ‘personal-industry’ of a billionaire, or a thinktank, or even a workers’ union to, practically-speaking, achieve significantly more representation than any “one person”?
To fix a question that big, is it enough to simply finetune the systems and rules?
Or, are there more basic discussions that need to be had about what a right or representation even is now, and who or what should have it? The motivations of a limited-liability company are already very different from those of a migrating Red-Breasted Nuthatch. But, given neither of those are the “people” we originally designed democracy to represent, should either have any democratic influence? And, if so, how?
But wait. What does democracy have to do with companies that don’t know their place?
You might think of dominance and profitability as similar things. After all, a company that dominates an industry can presumably demand any level of profit that their industry can sustain.
But, in practice, they are different. We’ve all heard the stories about public companies like Uber losing billions in the race to dominate taxi services. And that’s nothing compared to the private AI companies that lose money on every prompt. Companies like Google and Meta openly offer their flagship services at a loss because they gain dominance through all the personal information they collect: Turning our vulnerability into their share price rises.
Part of this is prognostication about future profits, of course. And that's how it will always be justified to customers, regulators, and investors alike. But it’s more than that, because simply crushing competitors and other “enshitification” doesn’t actually make nearly the good future-profitability-sense you might imagine it does.
Imagine if McDonalds had used private equity funding to crush every other take-away joint that tried to open all through the 1960s and 70s—KFC, Carl’s Jr, Taco Bell etc. How big do you think the overall ‘take-away’ market would be today after decades of one type of bland hamburger? The existence of these other strong competitors changed habits, which grew the pot and incentivised innovation for everyone—including McDonalds.
And this is where it relates to the company I work for, because it was also founded in a era of rapid innovation, when a willingness to take risks was rewarded, and no-one could expect (or afford) to absolutely dominate. This was a time when you both had to make profit to survive; and Intellectual Property existed to protect real innovation, not just some broad concept that could be knocked together in 20 minutes on a basic web editor, and filed via a massively-global legal juggernaut. The game wasn’t to simply buy up all the random IP you could, or to acquire all the potential competitors before they became a threat, it was to actually create something brand new and hope your competitors joined in. Because that would validate your original idea and shift even more customers in your direction.
This is actually a natural law: An ecosystem that expands its diversity grows in a way that benefits all participants in it; An ecosystem that remains dominated by monotony eventually wilts and dies.
But in the past few decades, the incentives have gradually shifted to where companies are too fearful to really ‘compete’ with each other. Instead, boring product categories and media just remains boring. A huge library of good new ideas are simply stored in filing cabinets, and even the companies that own them can’t use them—because they’re either just a tax-dodging postbox in the Caribbean or, if they do have the ability to actually produce anything, they can’t be too weird because it won’t be matched by their IP-lawyer-fearing competitors, leaving millions of innovative ideas stranded in an unvalidated no-man's-land.
Not that it matters, because the goal isn’t profit remember, it’s dominance. And you can do that with acquisitions, service fees, and regulation changes far more cheaply than with risky R&D.
Obviously this doesn’t prevent all innovation. But it does add a lot of friction to it.
And, importantly, it puts what’s left of the innovation into the hands of “certain kinds of people”: Specifically the kinds of people with money and a life disconnected from reality. People whose father owned exploitative mineral mines, or went heavy on the (accelerationist) massive data processing and storage typified by crypto-currencies and NFTs and got out in time, or who happen to be part of a royal family with a share of trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuels.
It's worth thinking about what kinds of innovation those sorts of people might be keen to use their dominant status to shift industries with. Personal electric cars? Creativity-harvesting AI? Carbon capture?
Any of those sound familiar recently?
These are not innovations that solve global poverty, inequality or disease. Contrary to some appearance, these things aren’t even attempting to fix climate change or productivity.
Like the petrodollar since the 1970s, these are things that simply tilt the balance of power away from real accountability: Turn on the money printer (via financial instruments) or the wow-printer (via cheap tricks), and distract anyone asking difficult questions about the externalities.
But, more than any of that, the country-sized power these corporations and their owners have changes the way they get to fit into the world.
You've probably come across entitled people who park their Lamborghini in the disabled spot when they stop for dinner. But that desperate attention-seeking millionaire just scratches the surface. It's safe to assume no one reading this is close to a billionaire, so none of us really appreciates fully what it means to be able to buy anything, pay any fine, hire lawyers to tie up courtrooms for decades, pick politicians and write laws you want them to pass, get citizenship in any country…
What this is, is a refusal to accept that sometimes you’re the runner-up and sometimes you’re in power. And that is fair and proper. That is precisely how democracy should work and how nature works.
Sometimes you’re a predator, sometimes you’re prey.
When you look at an ecosystem like a vast savanna, it appears to have winners and losers. But actually what it has is balance: If the lions eat too well one year, they’ll starve to death next season.
What we’ve done is forgotten that natural inevitability, and filled our savanna with Armor-Plated, Jet-Tyrannosaurus-Rexes.
Because profit has stopped being a primary measure in a world of cheap debt, financialisation, and rent-seeking, we’ve just allowed dominant corporations and their industrial-lobbying-industries to just stomp around in our politics instead. Outside of our revered “Western Democracies” we’d describe this as oligarchy or corruption, but that can’t be the case for us right? Because power in our systems can only come from a ‘free market’, right?
The actual result is no-one on the ground is really happy, and they can’t be sure why. The socialists are freaking out about unchecked capitalism; the small business owners are freaking out about socialism; the academics and journalists are freaking out about getting funding; and the conspiracists are freaking out about who’s funding the “elites”.
Meanwhile, the AP-JTR’s are just buzzing around overhead, out-of-sight, and just occasionally dropping down to eat the world.
That is what it looks like when you distort a system by allowing things to exist in it that are out of place. This is what it looks like when you just hold tight to the “spirit of the savanna”, even as an AP-JTR chomps up 13 of your friends in one bite.
This gets even darker when you realise it’s been happening for decades and, yet, the T-Rexes still haven’t starved.
What that tells us is something close to equilibrium has been reached. It may be starting to flicker and wobble a bit now, but it’s worth noting that ultimate predators couldn’t exist without ultimate prey.
I’ve mentioned several times before that a lot of bad stuff started in the late 1970s in many Western Democracies—privatisation, deregulation, more ‘rights’ for corporations, lower taxes for the wealthy.
Those things all helped create ultimate predators, but it was the prioritisation of individuals over society, the crushing of labour unions, the commodification of land, and a general urging to have us turn inward into some self-interested-mythical-The-Secret-worshipping husks, that has kept them stocked with the ultimate prey.
We’re much easier to pick off one-by-one, than together.
I’m a believer in the “Common Good”. You’ve probably heard this phrase, but maybe haven’t thought too much about it. It basically is the idea that we can choose to build our institutions, laws, interactions, innovations, and economies not just for ‘good’ but for everyone.
Building something for good might be building it for efficiency, or profitability, or growth. But building something for the Common Good requires you to ask hard questions about those goods and, in particular, “for who?”
Efficient, for who?
Profitable, for who?
Growth, for who?
By the same token, it might be fair to ask of a world where political representation can be influenced by money and power:
Democracy, for who?
I grew up a hetro-cis-male pre-Millennium, so if I tried to tell you that I think that dinosaurs with jet-packs and armour are “a bit shit”, you could fairly suspect I was lying. We are all drawn to powerful things—I spent my last newsletter pointing out how that bit of you has a tendency to makes populism happen.
I genuinely hate illegal-parking Lamborghini-drivers, but I still can’t help being a little drawn to what it would be like to live their life. We have been conditioned to stare in awe at the T-Rexes, even as they eat our mates.
This isn’t about the minutiae of underfunded public services, or corruption, or any of that stuff. It’s about us pretending our democracies remain as pure as one-person-one-anonymous-vote.
This is presenting us with some pretty challenging contradictions. A good example is education, which is perfectly capable of serving a select group of people based on their ability to pay for it, their class, culture, or their workforce needs… Or, it can empower any person to develop the skills and aspirations to become their own best self.
Objectively, a functioning democracy would strive to deliver option 2; but a democracy that ‘looks the part’ (but has T-Rexes in jetpacks circling overhead) might instead be unknowingly fooled, incentivised, or scared into delivering option 1.
I don’t want to oversimplify all of human culture and civilisation down to a metaphor about animals that eat grass vs animals that eat other animals: That walks me right into the trap of the Manly (and often Nazi-adjacent) Men of YouTube, who genuinely believe in the existence of things like “Alphas and Betas” and “Wolf-pack Leaders”, and who will happily num-num-num the boots of the rich and powerful because they are convinced it is “right and just” and “some people are just born to rule over others”.
It’s obviously true that we have different abilities and things to contribute—some more than others, however you measure it. But fuck not having any choice in the matter! Our democracy simply cannot be representative of our choices if it allows structures to participate in it that are designed to dominate it.
There will undoubtedly always be a cycle of winners and losers, but the losers should still feel they are participating.
-T
Thank you for those analogies. Having lived, for most of my voting life, in electorates dominated by conservative people whose voting habits never seem to waver, I grasped at MMP as the way to make (one of) my vote(s) actually work for me.
But the commercially-led media have done a great job of ignoring MMP and convincing many that elections can only be a choice between good or evil. Naming those concerned about the common good as the ‘Red Feds’ in 1909 allows nasty connotations to still be used to stimulate fear.
Thought provoking, Tim. And yes, there are some eXtreme cases of individual money buys everything and anything ... including our votes in some cases. Equally, powerful lobby groups sway government choices, and the people who voted them in. (Been part of a couple long ago and know how it works.) A giant issue may be how they manipulate truth. Not many of us believe there are lizard people in power, but a range of these trolled ideas do disenfranchise pockets of voters. Get enough voters sidelined and that enables more realistic half-truths to take care of many others. "We can sort out the economy. We know what we're doing because we've run businesses" and similar ilk... caught out NZ voters in October who desperately wanted a magic economic wand to make everything better. People craved belief in it ... I'd like leprechauns and fairies to be real too, but unfortunately they're only real in novels. I shall return to mine!