Dealing with crazy corporations

I've just seen the most remarkable documentary called "The Corporation", which is based on a book by Joel Bakan called The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

The film is an astounding analysis of the nature of big business, and one of its primary conclusions is underlined by the subtitle of the book -- that large corporations are clinically insane.

Let me clarify that: In law a corporation is an individual similar to you or me. When you compare the behavior and characteristics of publicly held, large corporations to the diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and those of DSM-IV, a standard psychiatric diagnostic tool, you find that these organizations are effectively psychopathic.

Most importantly, this isn't an attribute of one or two large corporations; it applies to the majority worldwide. Even more profoundly, it appears to be the inescapable fate of public corporations because their essential function is to be profit-making machines that relegate all other functions and attributes (social, cultural, political, technological and economic roles) to a distant second place. Essentially, the end (profits) will always justify the means (whatever it takes) because that is how corporations are defined.

A few weeks ago I wrote a Backspin column titled "Google: The immaturity of huge masses" about the nature of large companies. I contended that Google wouldn't become evil, but after seeing "The Corporation" I think I was wrong. What I was wrong about was in using the term "evil." I now realize that, like most other public corporations, Google can't help but become amoral and ultimately psychopathic.

You might wonder if this comes about because bad people get to run what could have been good companies, but as the film repeatedly points out, the gestalt that is the corporation has far more power than the good intentions of any individual or group in the corporation. Moreover, there are many corporate employees who are all too willing to fall in with the psychopathic program that the corporation creates.

This explains, for example, why Microsoft always tries to lock out the competition, why it perverts standards to retain market control and why it finds it hard to stay away from monopolistic practices in general. It's not that the people are necessarily bad, it is the corporation they work for that makes their efforts have bad results.

It explains why all major telcos and cell phone service providers have lousy customer service. ("We don't care. We don't have to. We're the telephone company.") It also explains why MCI was once and might still be "rotten to the core" as I discussed in a previous column.

I say "might still be" because I just got a letter from an ex-MCI employee who claims she was laid off in January last year because she wouldn't go along with certain illegalities that were being committed. While we can't vouch for the veracity of her claim, her story is remarkable for the sheer hostility of management's response.

This view of corporate behavior as psychopathic also illuminates why the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is so aggressively going after alleged illegal music downloaders.

A recent and remarkable example of this is Tanya Anderson, a 42-year-old disabled single mother from Oregon accused of downloading gangster rap. The RIAA allegedly hired a company called MediaSentry to hack into Anderson's computer looking for evidence.

Anderson claims she was contacted by the RIAA's Settlement Support Center, which acknowledged she was probably innocent. But they told her she should settle because the RIAA would proceed with a suit against her anyway "to discourage others from attempting to defend themselves against unwarranted litigation."

So now that we know why these companies act as they do, we can be more rational and less surprised when they do. The fact is the chance of any change in the way corporations behave is next to zero, at least in our lifetimes. Until then, forewarned is forearmed.