More and more discussions are arising about corporations and their "greed". The term "corporate greed" is an error in personifying a machine.
When we personify we make a grave mistake in empathizing with a machine who by-definition can never empathize with us - can never care about our interests, much less act in a way recognizable to humans. Greed is after all a sin reserved for humans, no other animals are capable of it in any significant way - let us keep it that way! To extend the same feelings to a corporation is insane and reductive.
The need for an emotive and concise description for a powerful entity behaving destructively is necessary - Greed is just off the mark in a dangerous way.
Millionaires are not greedy.
Billionaires are not greedy. Trillionaires are not greedy...
No one has a billion dollars in their checking account. No - financial institutions are created to protect, reinvest, and continue to build the machine. Human-centric values are removed from the equation. The algorithm-language can reduce all externalities to cold-steel variables. Variables which can be calculated to either be good for the machine's power, or obstacles. The most successful algorithm destroys its obstacles. Even if the obstacles may have existed for a reason, or deserve to exist on their own merit? That is not an issue for the algorithm - the obstacle should have thought of that before it decided to be poor!
These machines are
acting in the same accordance that any other life
is - to survive under
external pressure and to propagate for future generations. However
when one becomes a x-ionaire the magnitude and scale of the power the machine applies is different. It becomes a disconnected entity that propagates itself like a living creature. A creature that no longer speaks the human language - only the language of money - money which must be consumed to survive. Consumed on a daily and exponential basis.
Given the opportunity all life will try to overcome its obstacles to survival. Since it no longer speaks a human language it will expand its power in every way to gather more power.
The costs of survival in ever more extreme environments for common multi-cellular life are met with diminishing returns. However when everything has a price tag, and the machine has more currency than anything, there is only this outcome.
The creation of insulating layers seems justifiable with the objective of survival. However this analogy breaks down as we recognize the machine's life is incomparable with our own. The creature gathers layers of bureaucracy and management to enact it's only brutal objective - to survive. The enormity of the creature will make it's choices less and less recognizably human. Machines are not greedy -
they are expressions of natural tendencies.
---
Fortune set in motion by
luck or genealogy continues to warp our one world into the
grotesque.
Taking suggestions for a new word for this type of life - this monster-machine.