Curiouser and Curiouser! on corporations

The Corporation

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 08:18:39 +0000

The Corporation. Several people have mentioned the new documentary "The Corporation". It was screened at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival. It is premiering in a few theatres in Candada around now. Read the review, it is very cool.
A lot of documentaries get a rise out of their audience. Some even invoke social change, or at the least some serious reflection upon our place in the world. But I can safely say I've never seen an audience so moved, en masse, to explore actual social activism on a grand scale as the audience who watched this three hour masterwork. The first standing ovation I've seen delivered at the Vancouver Film Festival was not only deserved, but also very long, and what followed the screening overshadowed even that outpouring of emotion.

The Corporation could never have been made in the USA. It took a Canadian team to put this work together, and it'll take far more than legal threats and intimidation to kill it. An almost three hour look at the past, present and future of corporations as a business entity, you'd be forgiven for rolling your eyes and giving the thing a miss if you only had a loose synopsis to go on.

But where this documentary matters is in the details - the nasty, disgusting, gory details of what the corporation has done to this world, what it's doing today, and what we can expect it to do tomorrow if we don't get our freaking act together.

The extreme right 'love it or leave it' crowd are no doubt already starting to yell "Lefty propaganda," but this isn't an Anti-Bush attack on all things capitalist. This isn't hippy rhetoric or new age spin or a call to the communes. It isn't hoity toity technospeak or boring talking-head PBS filler. What The Corporation is, is a healthy dose of well-researched, deeply explored, stunning information that can not possibly leave you, as an audience member, in any condition but stunned, dismayed, and outraged.

Maybe you know it all already. If you're like me, you read the papers, you know who's buying who and that the unstoppable bulldozer of globalization is hurting a lot of people. If you're like me, you're disgusted that TV news has become a wrestling match to decide which party has the best 'spin', and you might have even learned enough about global politics to be sick to death of what you're seeing in the world today.

But The Corporation will teach you things you never dreamed of. it will change you. It will ruin your day, but give you reason to get up in the morning - determined to make change.
I can't wait to see it, and I hope it somehow manages to get wide distribution, even in the U.S. I have no doubt it will play in the theatres here in France. Even Noam Chomsky shows in regular theatres here.

And for the record, I think corporations should be banned ASAP. Not business, not free enterprise, not groups of people doing things together, but the corporation as an artificial legal person. [Ming the Mechanic]

I'm with Fleming on this. Corporations should not have the legal status of people. They especially shouldn't have the protections without the responsibilities. If a corporations conscience is it's shareholders then, as we have learned, we are all in big trouble.

After watching a number of long mass market pics over the last few years I have made a pact with myself not to go watch over long films (i.e. longer than about 1hr40m). I broke it to go see LOTR III and heartily regreted it. So few films are worth the discomfort and fewer yet justify 3 hours of my time. But I think i'd go see this.

Terminology: The management in KM

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 15:30:04 +0000

I've been pondering the term Knowledge Management a little. In particular the use of the word manage.

A dictionary search for 'manage' brings up, among others, the following meanings:

to direct or control the use of
to exert control over
to make submissive to ones authority, discipline, or persuation
to direct the affairs or interests of
to make subservient by artful conduct
to bring around cunningly to ones plans
to exercise in graceful or artful action

with the following synonyms:

to direct
govern
control
wield
order
contrive
concert
conduct
transact

From the latin manus meaning hand.

To me this terminology sounds all wrong. It is the language of control, of dominance. It is the lanuage of the scarcity mentality which says "I Win, You Lose" or "You Win, I Lose". That's not how I want to think/talk about knowledge.

Unlike, say, Plutonium, knowledge is only as scarce as we make it. As I impart my knowledge to you I don't lose it, instead we both have it. And maybe more, between us we may synthesize something that I could not have created alone. Giving my knowledge to you has, at the very least, increased the total amount of knowledge, not reduced it. (Fortunately Plutonium doesn't work this way!)

So I think the terminology doesn't fit. In the context of a healthy organization knowledge isn't something that we should want to manage. Rather I'd say it's something we want to plant and watch grow.

What is required, I think, is to recast the principles of knowledge management in a language which emphasizes abundance without unduly frightening those people who may tend toward a scarcity mentality. I'm still thinking about how that goes...

Casting some light on backroom deals

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 13:42:16 +0100

Another example of how our security establishment (including NASA) is riven by sweetheart backroom deals with companies run by former employees. No security "transformation" is possible without ending this process. Elon isn't the only person worried about this.
Someone who worries about this is Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal, a highly successful online-payments firm, who has also founded SpaceX, which builds cheap launch vehicles for satellites. He criticises the space agency for recently awarding, without an open tender, a $227m contract for launch services to Kistler Aerospace, of Kirkland, Washington, which last year filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and, says Mr Musk, is packed with ex-NASA staff. What sort of signal does that send to the marketplace? he asks. So indignant is Mr Musk at what he calls this backroom deal that he is looking at the possibility of buying Kistler to get his hands on the NASA contract, which he believes he can fulfil at a much lower cost. If Americas spirit of free enterprise can be harnessed to exploring space while also relieving the burden on taxpayers of NASAs extravagance, so much the better. [John Robb's Weblog]

What a fantastic story! Go Elon!

Was it something I said?

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:36:35 +0000

I'm living with the fact that Google have decided my blog is mostly worthless. None of the changes I made to try and address search engine considerations seem to have made the slightest difference.

But now I hear that GTalk is available in the GMail client? News to me. I mean, I don't want it but it would have been nice to be able to turn it down. And, at the weekend, I saw that my Dad's GMail client has a shiny delete button (which I do want). But, no, I don't have one of those either.

What's up Google? Was it something I said?

Wakeup

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 01:35:14 +0100

If you live in the US you really need to wake up and smell the coffee right now:

Now, if you're a little confused as to why Congress would be so attracted to the idea of replacing effective state laws on identity theft with weak federal ones, then you just haven't been paying much attention to how your government works. It is of course the banks, databrokers, and other financial institutions whose indifferent security practices keep exposing our personal information that don't want to have to notify us when it happens. And it is of course the credit bureaus, credit card companies, etc. who don't want us to be able to freeze our credit files just because identity thieves might have our information. So we're talking about a lot of big companies with a lot of influence -- i.e., money -- that they can spread around our nation's capital. -- Ed Foster

All kinds of bad legislation gets passed by US law makers on a seemingly daily basis but this one looks set to cause misery on a new scale. And of course by making sure that nobody hears anything you can expect that misery to go on for a long time.