The incorporation of division.

We are at a fork in the road. The technology built to unite us, divides us. We find ourselves forced to question our trust in each other, in our country, and in corporations. And there’s the rub, incorporation.

Incorporation is a legal algorithm which enables concentration of goods, ideas and people. Add profit-seeking, platform economics and network effects, and you get a formula for wealth creation on a planetary scale; for a fortunate few. Make social-democratic values an option, and you get an economy, and a society, that will eat itself. We are here.

We expect too much of the wrong things from our corporations. They aren’t people, they are abstractions which, by their very nature, are prohibitively expensive to hold to account.

Corporations exist to grow the wealth of a shrinking minority* through a process of resource capture. Unfortunately, resource capture kills trust.

Capture is an act of defection, and too many of us are being forced to defect because we see no other choice. And so each day, in exchange for bread and circus, we choose corporation over community.

Our species’ superpower is not corporation, it’s cooperation. Cooperation.

So what if we took the social algorithm of cooperation, and added that to platform economics and network effects? We get a formula for wealth creation on a planetary scale, and a community that can help itself.

There is nothing to stop us. Morality, mathematics and science are on our side. It is time we got started.

* According to figures published by the US Federal Reserve, the Top 1% now owns almost 55% of the US stock market, of which it controls 100%.