The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two. They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.
Venkatesh Rao
The RibbonFarm Blog, A Brief History of the Corporation
The Once Might C & H Sugar Company, Crockett, California
Pure Cane Sugar…
Fiction is not an argument. It is a structured experience. It is a string of actions. It is what is said by the characters. It is an interlocking series of scenes that add up, make some kind of sense. The biggest beneficiary of our war in Iraq may well have turned out to be the Chinese oil companies. Perhaps it is Iran that has benefited most. Or was it Halliburton that has enjoyed the greatest profit? The characters in my current novel live in Nevada. Most all of them are self-employed. The capitalism we read about has flipped into a rather dangerous beast. It evades taxes, seeks to escape regulation and supervision, and tries to kill emerging technologies that may harm its profits. We know about the wonderful things it has done, but we are also learning about the way it can do harm. We know there is a history to capitalism. That for every hero we can find in this story there are villains and the bodies of their victims. A corporation is a construct. So too is money. As is the fiction of private property, or that most everything is better left to the private sector, and that we allow markets to work their magic! We are awash in ideas that are failing us. It is a story of gross domestic product, mercantilism and robotic assembly lines. And it is difficult to think of a world organized in any other way. “It is a codified bundle of quasi-religious beliefs externalized into an animate form that seeks to preserve itself like any other living creature.” Venkat writes. And so it is that one such way a novelist may open the minds of readers is to construct a fictional world and invite his readers into this alternate reality. And did I tell you that Hot Spring Honeymoon is a comedy?
HOT SPRING HONEYMOON
Gretel stood with Lark at the door. She sized up the room. She dug some change out of her pocket, she said in a low voice, “Go put some Patsy Cline on that jukebox, pick a few ballads.”
“Then what do I do?” Lark asked.
“Act like you’d throw the night away if you could only find a man in your midst worth the trouble.”
“How do I play that card?” Lark wasn’t at all sure what Gretel meant.
“Pretend…make believe… be something you’ve never been before.”
“I wish I had your experience,” Lark said beneath her breath.
“It’s your good looks that’s going to do all the work for us,” Gretel was keeping an eye on the men at the bar, “just play along, a man isn’t a complicated thing,”
