A Corporate Run World
Corporations are quickly becoming a defacto world government across the developed world. Here's how this disaster happened.
Last month, a community member tipped me off on a critical new research report called the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer that touches on many of the ideas we are tracking on Global Guerrillas. For example, they found that a majority of people across 27 developed countries now believe:
Governments are untrustworthy, unethical, and incompetent.
Corporations are trustworthy, ethical, and competent.
Corporations should take the lead in delivering prosperity and social progress.
NOTE: Edelman is a global communications firm that works with many of the biggest companies in the world. I interacted with them as a newly minted Internet analyst (my first commercial job after special ops) when they were running the launch of Windows 95 for Microsoft (when Microsoft was still the most aggressive company in the world), and they impressed me with their intelligence, aggression, and insight. Like them or not, they know their business, and companies listen to them.
It is gratifying (we got it right) and discomforting (oh suck, we got it right) how closely Edelman’s findings track with Global Guerrilla frameworks. Here are some examples.
Distrust of Government. The report did an excellent job capturing the decline of trust in governments in this and previous years. In particular, it picked up the public perception of governments as incompetent and unethical, a perception likely driven by how governments have responded to permacrisis events — from terrorism to the financial crisis to COVID. Surprisingly, this was across most developed countries where less than 30% of people see their lives improving in the next five years.
Political polarization. It did an excellent job of picking up on a steep rise in political polarization across most developed countries (showing that it wasn’t just in the US). As predicted, permacrisis non-performance and unmitigated globalization (since it drives the adoption of alternative primary loyalties/identities) caused this polarization. NOTE: political polarization and government ineffectiveness are now in a recursive negative feedback loop (each feeds into the other).
Networked political tribalization. The report also provided a good measure of how bitter this polarization is at the personal level (see graphic below). This finding reflects the impact of networked tribal identity on how we view each other — within this frame, people who disagree with us aren’t just wrong; they are evil. Note that this is across 27 developed countries.
The Rise of Corporations
The most interesting (and scary) part of the report was the growing belief that corporations should take the lead in governance (at the national and global levels), with most of this growth occurring in the last three years (COVID, Ukraine).
Corporations need to govern. The report discovered that as the most trusted institution, corporations now have the legitimacy to govern. There appears to be an aggressive demand for corporations to take decisive action in areas usually reserved for governments — from the early efforts by banks to limit gun purchases using credit cards after the Parkland shooting to broad efforts like ESG (environment, social, governance), DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) compliance, and energy conservation (demand reduction).
Corporations need to control society. As expected, the report found that support for corporate censorship is widespread — from controlling access to information and analysis to actively coercing firms that aren’t aggressive in censorship (for example; Twitter) to using corporate network control to influence political outcomes. This outcome conforms with earlier GG Reports on the corporate takeover of public discourse and politics after the 2020 elections (the Twitter files have the receipts to back up these earlier reports). NOTE: it’s interesting how corporate speech, ala Citizens United, has shifted from promoting less control (friendly to the right) to aggressive social activism (friendly to the left) nearly overnight.
“Voting” for Corporate Governance. Interestingly, in the most advanced western countries, there is a growing belief that consumer and employee choices can serve a similar role as voting in democratic countries. “I won’t buy from or work at a company that doesn’t govern the way I want it to” Unsurprisingly, a majority in polarized countries don’t believe a corporate can avoid politicization if it chooses to govern.
What This Means
Here’s some thinking on how this rolls out.
China, Russia, and a handful of autocracies don’t conform to this model. China and Russia have responded to the growing power of corporations by coercing corporate leadership into alignment with state goals. In China, non-aligned CEOs are retired (Jack Ma), and in Russia, they have unfortunate accidents (too many to name). They have also responded to the collapse of shared identity, creating the political polarization seen in other developed countries, by clamping down on divisive social reforms and adopting muscular cultural identity programs.
Weak governments in western countries won’t stop the spread of corporate governance (they can’t turn to institutional media, their traditional allies, since the media is the least trusted institution in the world now). Instead, these politically polarized governments largely approve of corporate activism (networked coercion) and social controls (algorithmic suppression and control) since corporations can skirt the legal restrictions that constrain governments. Corporations understand this and will trade their involvement in government for more freedom from government oversight of their commercial activities.
Networked swarms are a significant danger to corporate-run governance. These unthinking swarms, leveraging open-source organizational dynamics, can form quickly to coerce governments and corporations into alignment with their goals. In so doing, they actively negate the “voting” preferences people make through purchasing and employment behavior (the swarm-coerced advertising boycott of Twitter was an attempt to negate consumer choice). Worse, the autocratic absolutism of these swarms, in combination with the inherent amorality of corporate bureaucracies (no intrinsic ability to resist moral coercion from swarms), will result in increasingly draconian action by corporations against a global population unprotected by rights that protect their freedoms.