CORPORATE AI IS HIVE MIND
At some point, Drucker must have realized there was a glitch in his matrix. Operationally, the theorem of management failed to adequately replace the hero, the charismatic flawed leader. Although tested thoroughly and proved in many societies over many decades, management did not prevent the second great depression. It turned out to be the cause.
The free market is unofficially a shattered myth. Greenspan is disgraced. Friedman is a laughingstock.
What of the best practices? I guess they seemed like good ideas at the time: culling middle management; crushing labor; opening the floodgates of immigration; minimizing shareholder governance and building a market on short-term gains; unfettering monopoly; gutting or eliminating pensions and benefits for employees; disabling the New Deal social safety net; replacing it with stock portfolios; uprooting the society; downgrading the rights of citizens in the workplace; turning dollars into free speech; marketing for the immediate gratification of any perceived need; copyrighting anything that moved, breathed or otherwise expressed; practically deifying CEOs; creating a profit-focused culture… At the height of this madness, if you asked any smirking MBA, Adam Smith was the only founding father America had. No one’s laughing now, as gun sales go through the roof.
Corporate image turned out to be a happy face sewn onto the head of a corpse, and at the heart of the corporate enterprise, there was no heart. Corporate Man came to be represented in the social topology as a zombie, dead but animated, feeding hungrily on the living.
Corporate mind is a hive mind. It is John Marshall’s golem, not Rabbi Loew’s. The corporate golum is unfettered by the limiting agency of the sacred. Both Loew’s and Marshall’s creatures are made of the earth by man in the likeness of man, with an intelligence that is only as good as the maker of it. The problem, though, is that intelligence, by definition is generative. In biosystems, generative change, depending on the frame of reference, can be described as mutation, or, alternately as evolution.
In theological terms, a secular golem is the ultimate blasphemy, a manifestation of man’s desire to be the possessor of land and power, and the people who live on land or who are subject to power, and the control of the resources that flow from land, power, and people. In the vacuum that is the unmeasured Epistemological, or Cartesian mind, reason can justify anything a man can do, because what a man does is not who he is. Certainly, a theist confident in the sanctity learned or ascribed to in faithful reason, will estimate the virtue of character to be greater than it is, especially under duress, as when a man is contorted in his behavior by hunger or the horrors of war. We have ample proofs on either side of the ledger of good and evil, courage and corruption, by man in his relations with his fellows and his environment.
Frankenstein’s monster provides a literary analog for the artificial intelligence of the corporate hive mind, but there have been many penned by brave writers, since 1819. What is artificial intelligence other than the mind of the follower, the “dittohead?” No sooner had democracy formed in America, than did the forces that oppose freedom gain the foothold in our governmental apparatus, through which the whole mighty experiment might be undone. That the actor responsible is considered a hero (one cited by Drucker) today, should not be surprising to those familiar with the term samsara.
The artificial intelligence of the corporation is the social topology of human beings subsuming their native perceptual and conceptual qualities to serve an entity that is artificial, composed to produce an effect: profits. Or, in the case of the social sector corporation, the corporate composition is designed to replace the native service orientation, the spiritual motivations, of people, acting within their natural and independent collective topologies. A corporate artifice that performs services that assuage the consciences of corporate people or further erode the independence of individuals, and their trust in their ability to govern themselves.
