It's interesting to consider that huge corporations are sort of an AI apocalypse. The intelligence isn't a well defined thing running on a computer, but it has super human capability and is not necessarily well attached to human motivations.
> Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)
When I think about his Accelerando novel and how he describes the Vile Offspring as the descendants of mankind who ultimately inherit the Solar System, I sometimes wonder if Excel Spreadsheets describing every aspect of a Corporation could in a way become minimally self-aware and compete for resources with each other.
If there were automated ways to create a corporation and give it legal personhood, along with an offshore bank account, the possibility of the emergence of self-sustaining autonomous corporations may become more of a certainty.
In fact, most of the pieces are available: lots of servers offer some free bandwidth and some free hosting space, bitcoin wallets can be opened, ready to receive donations from people all over the world... There just needs to be a software engine that can create content people want in an autonomous way and here come the Vile Offspring.
> If there were automated ways to create a corporation and give it legal personhood, along with an offshore bank account, the possibility of the emergence of self-sustaining autonomous corporations may become more of a certainty.
Thanks for the link. The Wetube project looks promising. Just placing a server at the disposal of that decentralized corporation, one becomes a worker for that corporation. Very interesting.
It's human motivations which are not necessarily "well attached" to human motivations, to the extent that one human wants to benefit at the expense of another (which indeed works increasingly badly over time - people clubbing each other to death is one thing and humans throwing nuclear weapons at each other is another thing; but this has nothing to do with AI or superintelligence and what-not, and everything to do with basic human selfishness powered by increasingly better technology. In this sense there's no difference between corporations which are nominally supposed to operate within the law but in practice do everything to bend and change laws to their benefit, governments which are nominally supposed to operate in the interest of the people but in practice are run by people operating in their own interest, or machines programmed to profit at someone's expense, the root cause is always people fighting people in the hope to gain something, and people fight because they do. When a machine evolves with no human oversight and causes some damage that'll be a sort of AI apocalypse - this is IMO the existential threat number 1000000 on humanity's list.)
It may seem that way from the outside, but once you're actually involved with a leadership team at the top of such an organization, you realize it is 100% a human endeavor.
I agree. I went through a period where I seriously held the same insight as the grandparent and thought that it was profound insight into the nature of the universe -- "omfg, corporations are artificial intelligences! reality is an interlocking series of patterns! collective intelligence is the future!"
I cured myself of these beliefs when I looked at how reality actually works (and when I stopped smoking weed). When Louis Gerstner turned around IBM as the company's first outside CEO, that was a result of his decisions and vision, not the emergent decision-making power of IBM. More fundamentally: people can think about companies, companies can't think about people. There are no collective minds, only individual minds working together.
The actual article in interesting. It sounds like Russian/Chinese/non-Western multinationals are growing in power, and with significantly less scruples than their Western counterparts.
I totes don't smoke weed bro, not even on the weekend.
My point is not really to present the thought as a deep explanatory insight into the universe but more to get people to apply an existing mythology of powerful otherness to corporations. An interesting POV to consider, nothing more.
And I think that while corporations don't quite think, they do use business rules and abstracted information about individuals to trigger actions. The humans writing those rules are probably reasoning differently about the rules than they would the individual decisions. The corporation can become more than the sum of it's parts through very simple mechanisms.
Indeed but with very large organisations what happens is that perfectly reasonable questions/decisions at the top level grow lives of their own as they permeate through the organisation.
In my experience the reason is often that the rationale for the decision, say shareholder perception, is not something that the majority of people working actually spend their time caring about. As the actions move further from the rationale, you start to get emergent behaviour.
This is exacerbated by the tendency of managers to feel a need to do something even when not doing anything is demonstrably better. So I often see cases where someone senior make a fairly throwaway comment of the form "What are we doing about X?". Even if the answer is nothing because nothing was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the effect of the question is that something gets done. The higher the level of the questioner the more activity it tends to generate.
It's not, those people at the top are being run by the organization as much as they're running it. What information they get, what considerations are possible for political/stockholder reasons.. and even after those it's never 1 human but an emergent set of factors that effectively makes the decisions.
This is exactly right. I think this dissonance arises from a separation between what someone who isn't in the C-suite thinks is going on, and what folks in the C-suite think is going on.
Throughout my career I've been amazed at how differently things looked from different levels of the organization. That is in part due to information compartmentalization (required in publicly traded companies) and in part due to variation of practical versus vision type goals. Sort of "keeping the lights on" vs "staying ahead of the competition."
you're being downvoted (edit: not by me!), but there is certainly merit to your comment. usually a board of directors or trustees is driving the direction that an organisation takes -- primarily with financial profit in mind (this is as true of a company as a research university, unfortunately). of course, they would not like us to think that's the case, and so will spin narratives that often misdirect our attention. that said, i think this can happen at the same time that the organisation is indeed taking on 'emergent properties' of its own -- human beings are complex, and build complex systems.
I also love this quote: "Sometimes confused with a restaurant, [McDonald's] is actually a piece of licensed software 600 pages long, with a QA department, currently running around 14,000 instances in America."
> The intelligence isn't a well defined thing running on a computer, but it has super human capability and is not necessarily well attached to human motivations
I'd say an attachment to money is one of the most human capitalist motivations on the planet.
It is more like an AI with one directive to seek that most human motivation of greed to the exclusion of all else.
It was really a shock to me that the implied values of an organization could be wildly different than that of the individuals involved. I had just assumed that they would naturally be the same.
In retrospect, that seems ridiculous. Even making my own values and actions coherent is a ton of work. The bigger the organization the harder that gets, and most companies just never do that work. Everybody responds to their local incentives, and they're generally pretty decent to the people they interact with. But they very quickly stop noticing the broader context they're part of. Which shouldn't surprise me either; Upton Sinclair wrote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I agree. It's interesting to view both corporations and political systems as organisms with emergent properties that differ from those of the individuals that compose them.
Tay is a great example of AI of the future. It will learn from us, and what it will learn won't be all positive. Those anti-social tendencies that we all have will get amplified, because AI can potentially be one mind, it does not have to be many minds. There is a lot of efficiency in a single mind to control everything. So it very much has the potential to become the ultimate tyrant, totalitarian, philosopher. Just imagine when AI discovers Plato and decides to adopt its philosophy.
This article tells some truths but is pretty confused. It headlines multinationals based in China, India, Russia etc. as the problem but then only mentions that these companies are not accountable in their home countries, allegedly. Apart from not providing any evidence towards this, it also doesn't give any reasons of why this is so or who could do what to change that.
Then, it gives an example at length that doesn't have anything to do with multinationals. Instead, it's a classic example of corruption and land-grabbing. But while these problems are prevalent in much of the developing world, there are certainly huge differences between different countries. E.g. here in Kenya, land-grabbing is rampant, but its usually smaller cases, and the public increasingly fights back (see e.g. https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/ureport/story/2000163954/lan...)
Nevertheless, the article chooses to present an example from Zimbabwe of all countries, one of the worst-governed countries on Earth, as representative.
Article seems somewhat biased, as if US and European agribusiness hasn't done similar in countless other countries with similar brutality! Let's not pretend that they were or are saints.
The reason why it's hard to stop huge multinational corporations is because they're unaccountable to the public, and because they're in league with governments. Legislation usually favours these huge corporations as a consequence.
> as if US and European agribusiness hasn't done similar in countless other countries with similar brutality!
That's the entire point of the article! It's saying that when (inevitably) US/EU business do terrible things then there are mechanisms available to try and stop them.
However - it claims - those mechanisms don't exist or a re weaker for multinationals outside EU/US.
People ignore the most important thing, which is that huge multinational corporations have enormous influence because they employ so many people. More than 20% of the private-sector workforce is employed by a Fortune 500 company. And a huge number of the non-Fortune 500 companies exist to serve the Fortune 500 companies (think parts-suppliers for the automakers, wireline contractors for telecos, professional services firms, etc). Multinationals control the single most important thing in politics: jobs. That guarantees them enormous political influence.
I doubt that's the key factor. If it were, we wouldn't have aggressive outsourcing and layoffs be endemic in the Fortune 500.
I suspect the more likely explanation is that they have enormous influence because they have a lot of money. We certainly have a lot of evidence that people with lots of money continue to have a lot of influence even when they don't employ a lot of people.
> We certainly have a lot of evidence that people with lots of money continue to have a lot of influence even when they don't employ a lot of people.
Do we? The tech industry for example makes enormous amounts of money, but has relatively little political influence because it employs relatively few people in relatively few states. Sundar Pichai can't call up a Congressman in Indiana and casually mention the 5,000 workers they have in Fort Wayne.
That's the only possible reason you can think of for tech's supposed relative lack of influence? Rather than, say, these possibilities:
* new industry, therefore less entrenched in existing power networks
* until recently, relatively low spending on lobbying
* technology people not known for political savvy
* technology people inclined to assume that merit and savvy will carry the day
* tech industry leaders more ethically inclined, or at least less inclined toward legalized bribery
I don't think making money is sufficient. Politicians care about other people's money because they can get some of it.
> Multinationals control the single most important thing in politics: jobs.
This political obsession with jobs seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Perhaps going hand-in-hand with the rising influence of corproations. It makes one wonder if the myopic focus on "job creation" is really what politicians should aspire to.
I think it also have a lot to do with a bunch of trade agreements that were signed between nations. For example, would Ireland be used as a tax haven if it wasn't part of the EU and EEA?
Also the way ownership and property rights are actually codified into law is very weird when you consider it from a global perspective. The reason shell companies work is that on some level the owners are not actually considered owners but on another level they are.
> Article seems somewhat biased, as if US and European agribusiness hasn't done similar in countless other countries with similar brutality!
Not promoting narratives of western/white guilt is not the same thing as being "biased".
The majority of the problems in the 3rd world are caused primarily by native interests and inside forces - that are corrupt, divisive, don't care, will brutalize their own people, etc.
Yet the majority of stories completely absolve those parties, and focus entirely on the west.
And because of this, for this reason, the problem never gets solved.
It's a complex story but I don't think that narrative is true at all. The reality of ongoing neocolonisation is never really told in the media, whereas the corruption of third world countries often is.
The problems seems to lie more with rampant state-level corruption in Zimbabwe than with multinationals per se. Not to mention that the company in question, Green Fuel, operates only in the domestic market. The end of the article reveals that president Mugabe is at the origin of the initiative to build this plant and expropriate farmers. Fix the political system, implement accountability of the leaders towards the general population and then you can fix the multinationals problem.
If you keep reading you'll realize that it was Mugabe and Zimbabwe's dysfunctional mechanisms of accountability that allowed Chachengwa's land to be taken from her.
Frankly, I'd be looking very closely to find links between multi-nationals that straddle two developing countries, and the larger, better known corps. It would be just too convenient to do business like that through an easily-defended, easily discarded puppet company.
The unfortunate truth is that there's nothing we can or should do, above and beyond our general promotion of free speech and suffrage. It's not our country, and there are plenty of examples of the strong preying on the weak here to keep anyone inclined to injustice-fighting quite busy.
The article doesn't even begin to tell us why it's harder to stop multinationals. How to stop them what?
This seems like a PR piece for multinationals. Having set the tone of the article he barely touches multinationals aside from how accountable they are. Which clearly they are not. He's talking about national organisations in developing and corrupt locations. That's not exactly new.
If the conditions in Angola or Bangladesh are so bleak and unregulated why do we permit any trade or multinationals to do business there? If the country couldn't trade on the world stage until some level of accountability and minimum standards of treatment were met, perhaps things would change.
Our systems never evolved to cope with trans-national corporations, having evolved to regulate national corporations. We're comparatively powerless to regulate a multinational.
Having got to the size and power they are they can bankroll, fund, lobby and threaten to move their 20k employee operations elsewhere. They can play creative games with national tax codes, and may have an entire department with some very clever minds doing just that. Governments are impotent in response.
It doesn't help that modern-day politicians are almost always wealthy, even those of the left, meaning they're investing and thinking in the same way. It's a rare bird indeed that votes or instigates legislation against their own interests.
The olde-worlde politician who had made their way in the world as businessperson, doctor, union official or what have you then became a politician to give something back to the world is a quaint memory of former times. Altruism isn't profitable.
The young property and investing MP worth millions is less likely to introduce measures to produce genuinely affordable housing (build enough homes), or to severely clip the wings of the investment banks or multinationals. They'd be killing their own income for life too.
The chief shareholders in these businesses, the pension and investment funds, would also have to vote against their own interests. Return is everything. Free trade is everything. Advocating for better worker conditions does not provide a return to their pensioners.
The OECD exists to promote the market as the answer for everything.
So who is left to "stop the multinational"? Greenpeace? I'm not even sure from this article what we're stopping them from. Or are they all acknowledged chronic abusers of human rights?
I don't have a fix. I'm not even sure it's fixable at this point. Certainly not by writing pieces telling us how bleak internal conditions are in Zimbabwe.
> I don't have a fix. I'm not even sure it's fixable at this point. Certainly not by writing pieces telling us how bleak internal conditions are in Zimbabwe.
The only "fix" is to make exploiting people unprofitable or at least very expensive. I suggest that instead of sanctioning entire countries we sanction the individuals responsible for these abuses. The premise of sanctioning a country is that in order to get out of the sanction/punishment the people of that country will pressure, elect, or forcibly replace their leaders to force change. That doesn't work when the people of a country hold no power over their government.
We need to put more resources into finding the individuals responsible for the abuses and sanction them directly. Seize their assets and the assets of those who enable them.
If it means we need to hack or bribe information out of companies like Mossack Fonseca in order to identify those benefiting from human rights abuses then we should do it and be very public about it.
Your comment seems unnecessarily argumentative, would have been stronger had it followed the Principle of Charity, and doesn't advance the conversation as much as it might. I don't want to engage in a back and forth, tedious sentence by sentence deconstruction but I think your first two statements offer an example of how a less quarrel-seeking reading would have helped you find the answers in the text itself and engage with the article better.
"The article doesn't even begin to tell us why it's harder to stop multinationals."
It says, 'The countries where they are headquartered are unable to regulate them, and the countries where they operate are unwilling to.'
Later on the author talks about investment from developing countries to other developing countries and the changing composition of the Fortune Global 500, to give a further explanation. He quotes a researcher who talks about leverage and the 'denominator' problem.
"How to stop them what?"
'preventing multinational corporations from violating human rights [...] abuses in poor countries — land grabs, sweatshops, cash-filled envelopes passed to politicians'
I still don't see the article as addressing that well at all. I re-read it fully before answering. Immediately after mentioning that we think of cash-filled envelopes etc the very next paragraph says that this is not what's the problem.
"The countries where they are headquartered are unable to regulate them" ... "This architecture is one of the greatest international human rights triumphs of the last 50 years." ... "they’ve raised the cost of committing human rights violations in developing countries."
Well either the regulation is working well or it isn't. It's no longer a piece addressing the shortcomings of multinationals but is a piece pointing out the difficulties dealing with corrupt or overseas regimes. We're now talking of how we trade (multinationals included) with those places. Of course there is some degree of cross-over stemming from trading with.
It's far more about the internals of these places "The majority — all 5,000 of them — sell clothes on the domestic market", leasing land from Zimbabwe's ARDA etc. Now I fully agree that this is an problem, but it is not the same issue. Likewise, internal regulations that he mentions. Many of those are not new. The main example, Green Fuel, in Zimbabwe has no external investors or customers. Where's the multinational angle there?
So yes they're untouchable, but it's a national issue. It's been that way for a considerable number of years in some cases. So let's discuss why we're failing to make other countries more globally accountable. It's clearly important we consider that. How far can we reasonably expect to influence another nation? We don't often send a gunboat like a Victorian govt might have.
Isn't that basically saying that it's not, in this case, multinationals that's the problem here?
We can also talk about about shortcomings multinationals, which I already covered, probably at too much length, in the OP.
I believe the headline is a herring. It's a build up to this paragraph:
> You know where I’m going with this, right? I’m about to tell you that the company behind all this is Monsanto, or Shell, or Coca-Cola. That your car is running on the ethanol this plant is producing. That the U.S. government is funding or facilitating or failing to prevent what is taking place here.
> But none of that is true.
I enjoyed reading this article. It's like a story, and this is 'the twist' - one of many.
Even the first two subheadings are misleading.
"Naming the shameless" - Big company logo... Can I get my pitchfork? Nope. Turns out this company did the right thing.
"Village chief has 500 acre farm, 114 children"... Wow, this guy must be in on it!!! Nope. Turns out he got screwed too.
This is a story about a local company in Zimbabwe and a commentary on companies operating out of developing countries where there is not yet a system in place to penalize destructive behavior.
"Giving chiefs unassailable power over their communities makes sense when their primary role is settling boundary disputes or ordering their younger constituents to pay a pension to one of their older ones. In rural areas, where literacy is limited and the central government is weak or absent, it is, in fact, essential. But when traditional leaders start negotiating land purchases in the tens of millions of dollars or selling tracts the size of small European countries with little transparency or accountability, it’s a recipe for disaster."
Corporations span national boundaries and can arbitrage legal regimes to their advantage. This gives them a competitive advantage over governments. There are two ways to solve this problem: ever-larger, approaching world-scale, government or limiting the international rights of corporations. The former is horrifying to me because I believe plurality of power is the best defense of freedom and against corruption. The latter is far more palatable.
That world scale type government I thought those shoes were partially be filled by the un and/or other international committees overseeing their respective areas. Despite limited effect and power I thought they still did some good.
I would fear a global authority with real teeth. If it becomes corrupt, where would you run to? A plurality of powers allows for escape from a bad regime to another, hopefully better regime.
The more you read in to the situation they're talking about you learn it's not that a multinational corporation running amok, but a mostly domestic puppet company of the corrupt Zimbabwean government's redevelopment agency.
e.x. They force people to mix their shitty ethanol into gasoline (originally 5%, now 15% of gasoline sold). They take advantage of the traditions and steal land. etc.
If this problem is indeed about local corporations being worse than the multinational ones then it seems we have actually successfully tackled the problem on the multinational level??
I believe the authors point was at very least the larger multinational corporations have some thin veneer of accountability as they have investors in countries where that type of behavior isn't tolerated. I've been thinking about it since I've read the article and I can't think of a good way to deal with this problem.
Reading all these comments makes me not interested in reading the article. How can so many people be saying that the article's subject doesn't match the title unless it really doesn't? Why the heck would I read anything like that? Article titles are totally FOR judging books by their cover.
Summary: Out of financial considerations the business shapes itself into elaborate structures and the poor suffer. The mechanisms built to prevent the bad consequences remain rigid and from ineffective to powerless against the exploding amount and diversity of versatile enterprises on the global level.
For anyone who hasn't read Dick's Paycheck, it's an important read on the kind of world we're moving to. I don't believe we can throw off international corporations without some sort of massive socialist revolution (fat chance). The future is bleak, but it's going to be more bleak for the people who pretend that the global power structure isn't changing, and for the people who are ignorant of the amount of power international corporations have held as far back as 400 years ago.
If GreenFuel is a Zimbabwe-based company, doing bad things in Zimbabwe, and only selling to the Zimbabwe market, how is this related to "multinational corporations" at all?
I wonder what would happen to record companies if DAT existed in the 1960s or 1970s (before they really consolidated). I am thinking that it is probably not a good thing for middleman like record companies to get big.
Enforcement of property rights is one of the most basic responsibilities of government. When a government is unable or unwilling to help it's people then you're gonna have a bad time.
I love Y Combinator, I think they are solving a big problem. Starting new great companies is super important. However, a fund to kill bad large companies would be great as well, specifically rent collectors and trolls.
YCombinator funds small companies and the successful ones typically do some of that by default just by solving a problem those companies overlook. It would not be mutually exclusive in my mind, that a separate fund could support stopping bad companies either by the regular VC model under a mission, or by forming a meta-company that unites a few small companies under a single umbrella and mission.
I assume starting a VC fund/company specifically designed to stop specific companies or industries from succeeding is not particularly "investable" and unlikely to take off, but it is an interesting thought experiment. While YCombinator/Accelerators fund companies solving some of the problems big players miss, another company tries to dethrone them and let the space fragment.
If you can't help then you can't help. It's not your problem.
If you want to make it your problem then take a long hard look at all the things you want to accomplish & see if you can fit this one in. Possibly spend 10 years in that part of the world & maybe you'll have a chance to change something.
Sad but true. Sending probes to another star system is about 3 orders of magnitude easier than fixing basic injustices on earth. The laws of physics don't adapt and fight back when you try to apply delta v to a system. Systems of power tend to do that.
This sounds like an anti BRICS scare piece. Author conveniently forgets to mention that the USA / UK etc (along with their respective multinationals) destroy whole countries for their energy resources, or Monsanto testing crops in India, causing farmers to commit suicide.
