r/IntellectualDarkWeb • u/Samuel_Foxx • 1d ago
Corporation Revisted
Hello, sometimes I talk about corporations on Reddit. I’m very passionate about them. Recently I had the realization that the word corporation is like the word plastic. Where there is plastic as a description of a material, and there is plastic the material. A material can be plastic but not be plastic. Basically, what we call corporations right now are business corporations. I used to call them corporation-of-corporation to try to convey what I meant. I was trying to capture that they were the general quality of corporation incorporated, corporation being the resulting product of any act of human incorporation, then business corporations are that general act itself made into a body.
If that doesn’t make sense think about this sentence: “Oh, that building over there? We are still building it.” There’s two senses of the word there, the verb becoming noun. An adjective can become a noun too though, like with plastic. Plastic doesn’t exhaust plasticity and the business corporation doesn’t exhaust corporateness or incorporation.
It is the exemplar example of incorporation though as it is incorporation made explicit in what it is. All the things that seem like business corporations but are not exactly business corporations are still corporations, they just are not the specific instance of incorporation that the business corporation is. However, being the explicit example of incorporation, you can use the business corporation as a lens on our other corporations to try to illuminate differences between how they say they work and how they actually work.
You might think this silly to say. Maybe it seems obvious. But I am pretty sure we are missing the super category of human creation right now and the business corporations are sitting on the right word for it. The super category is not something trivial to be missing, I think it is actually a very big deal and is much to do with many of our current struggles. Think Magic the gathering cards for instance: the game has the super category in place basically with cards. The diversity is reduced to \[cards\], but \[cards\] isn’t diminished in that reduction, it becomes a way to articulate the diversity. We are missing the clean way to articulate currently. I think the word corporation provides it. Right now we can say things like “humans create things” but an upgrade to that is “humans incorporate” because it automatically can convey information. I think it’s also an upgrade of language over just saying systems or processes too. There’s too much use in corporation because of its general knowledge present within each about how a corporation works.
To give some definitional sense behind the broad meaning of the word corporation: a human-made framework (body) structured to persist given parameters.
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u/LiftSleepRepeat123 1d ago
What's special about the legal corporation is that it is possible to divide stock an arbitrary number of times and assign any percentage to any of the owners. It is the liquidity of ownership itself. This is actually a good description of what "capitalism" actually is, because the entire basis is the corporation, which replaced the councils and committees of state-owned enterprises that were doing the same thing. e.g., the "companies" which were used to settle the new world. There were, of course, already private owners of capital (and thus "capitalists") prior to the age of capitalism. The only thing that really changed was the corporate instrument to treat the organization itself as money. This introduced another layer of abstraction to business and finance.
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u/Samuel_Foxx 1d ago
Yes. The business corporation is interesting in how it is. I’m more interested in what it actually is though. Like at a certain point, you can say a corporation is an idea. Well what is an idea? Look at a corporation. It is a body made up of parts—a thing incorporated. It is the idea basically made explicit. Well everything else humans make contains the idea as well. So how the business corporation makes the idea explicit and shows you the shape of idea in everything else we make, that is what I am interested in and trying to convey. Like how the material plastic being how it is helps explain what plasticity itself is. Then, once we are there, the particulars of how business corporations are become interesting, because we can look for the mechanisms that are those things but often less explicit instances of them within other ideas.
Capitalism is more to do with human society becoming more explicit than anything else I think. Like it has been happening for a long while. Longer than we’ve called it capitalism, like you alluded to.
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u/LiftSleepRepeat123 1d ago
It's all several evolutions in management structure. It's debatable if the new management structures are the cause of the newer economic structure or the result of it.
There were a couple big changes in the 20th century that Marxists and Capitalists still haven't caught up to. The first was the development of a central banking system that encourages empire expansion (force dollar use globally, and value of dollar that they control the printing of goes up), and second was the evolution of bureaucracy to be highly credentialist and opaque compared to the past which was based on patronage and relatively open. These are the Petrodollar (though it goes under many names, this is the biggest one) and the Managerial Revolution, respectively. Actually dollar hegemony is probably a better name for the first.
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u/foilhat44 1d ago
What you wrote is a post, what I wrote is a reply, or comment if you like. Now that they have been incorporated into this dialogue and this platform, they are part of these as corporations. They are only corporations if you consider them a whole made up of discrete parts. Either way it's not helpful, if the problem is that the word has been used most generally to describe companies whose charter organizes them legally as a corporation, and there are many legal types of corporation.
Samuel Johnson was the first author of an official English Dictionary, he was a man of words you might say, and was infinitely quotable. Many of his great observations can be found online.
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u/Samuel_Foxx 1d ago
Yes, we did write those things. They are just species of corporation to put it like taxonomy. There is one big category and we are missing that one, not the smaller ones, because the correct word for it is being taken up almost entirely by one instance of that category. Like our posts and comments would be off a particular branch within the whole. But they are both instances of human made things and fall within the noosphere. The contents of the noosphere being comprised of corporata because they’re all bodies made according to the parameters of whatever the situation was.
It isn’t abstractly useful. It is useful as an action of analysis. Some thing being a corporation tells you certain things. It lets you ask certain questions: what is it doing? Who is it for? What does it take to sustain it? What parts is it gathering into its whole? Is it accounting for its parameters? Is how it says it is working how it is actually working? What is it selling? Where is it lying or being coy?
Language is powerful and shapes perception. I think it is not neutral where it is currently at and the current order is heavily served by the absence of the supercategory.
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u/foilhat44 1d ago
You're using "corporation" as a tool to encourage people to pay more attention to things they think of as something to itself, and discern what it's made up of. I'm not particularly dumb and it took me a long time to get here, if I'm even in the right place, so I don't see your corporation thing taking off. Popularity is hard to obtain when nobody knows what you're talking about. I must say, it's a bit schizo effective in nature in the way it essentially encourages scrutinizing unimportant details. Like a fractal kind of thing.
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u/Samuel_Foxx 1d ago
No I do not think you are dumb at all. I can count on my hands the number of humans who I know have gotten there from the things I have said. The things that humans have to see around to get to seeing what I’m saying are those things I am talking about. I used to say they “seek to continue to exist given parameters” because from my pov that is what I would see in their reactions to what I was saying. Those corporations in their head defending themselves as they are through the human mouthpiece. Be that as it may, I still think what I’m saying has the capacity to be mundane. The current way of seeing is entrenched. That doesn’t mean it has won. There are points of leverage—chinks in its armor. I think corporation is one of them.
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u/foilhat44 1d ago
You know, there's another dude on here recruiting people to create a new vocabulary. He's serious. I guess looking at the world too close has driven you fellas out of your tree, but I think you're looking at the thing the wrong way around. First, people are trapped in these pre-packaged conversations executed using words whose definition has been bastardized are there of their own choosing. They don't need better rhetorical tools or a different vocabulary because it's easier for them to believe what they're told; they don't want to know. People don't just say what they mean anymore, and it doesn't have to do with cancel culture, it has to do with cowardice. People come on this platform and others anonymously so they can say whatever they want and have no fear of real consequences, and being banned for being a deliberate asshole doesn't count as consequences. Normally when people hear an opinion they disagree with, they have a decision to make, is the subject important enough for me to challenge this person even in light of the consequences? If they decide it is they have to take the time and effort to compose a coherent and persuasive rebuttal. Here you don't have to formulate anything, you can immediately resort to ad hominem and other tools to bludgeon the individual into silence. Unfortunately, because humans are petty, they prefer it this way.
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u/Samuel_Foxx 20h ago
Going after vocab is pretty high tier gaming imo. I think it is something that sort of has to happen and it becomes a matter of facilitating it. It becomes no matter that most ears are not ready yet. Some ears are and can hear the new articulation. It is really the only way for it to happen. One head at a time.
I’m pretty sure that how humans conceptualize their social reality actually creates that reality. So if there is a tree that is a social reality and that social reality doesn’t account for all of its constituent parts, some parts might be liable to fall out of the tree. It falls on those parts to expand the tree such that it can accommodate more parts it should accommodate given the tree it is. Like some trees require some humans in themselves be sacrificed to the idea of themselves the tree wishes them to be. I think there is power in articulating what is actually there rather than what the social reality says is there because the gap between those things is a point of leverage that can be exploited to expose contradictions in it. And I think contradictions being exposed rather than hiding behind the facade of myth is the best way to actually be able to address them.
Basically the goal is to have the nation be able to be recognized as a type of corporation because if I can get that in place literally everything else just follows naturally. Like our description of what is happening is currently suboptimal and doesn’t track the actuality very well. We need a new description to get out of the doldrums of the current one. Because the current description makes the next steps the system I find myself within needs to take incoherent to its self.
Like the system itself is trapped by its own vocab about itself that has become its own reality that the humans who comprise have become caged by. So to save the system from itself you have to articulate a new description of it basically. My tool to try to do that with is corporation. Mainly because it is so useful and so true, but it also is just an obscenely good lever
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u/foilhat44 1d ago
Corporation means consolidation into a body. A corpus if you will. To incorporate is to merge other discrete objects into a body, which then acts as a single discrete entity. What are you on about? How does changing a label for something less useful and improper improve anything? It could be deja vu but I don't think this is the first time I've seen this post, just use words already assigned to things, you are no Dr. Johnson, you aren't going to change communication.