The Corporation

The Corporation (2003) Directed byMark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott

3 out of 5 stars using Qi's 5-star system

I enjoyed watching The Corporation, a documentary about the impact on society made by the legal/business structure known as the corporation. The structure of the movie consists of a series of interviews with prominent thinkers from the fields of business law, management and ethics. The interviews are interlaced with a series of vignettes on corporate behavior and misbehavior. I was attracted by the luminaries among those interviewed, including Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky and Peter Drucker. I was eager to see how the directors would combine material from such divergent viewpoints.

The directors begin by describing the fundamental legal definition of the corporation as a “legal person” that inherits many of the legal rights of an individual such as buying property, suing in court, borrowing money, etc. They provide a brief but interesting legal history tracing the modern rights of the corporation back to 19th century legal interpretations of the newly established 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, originally established to protect the rights of slaves freed after the civil war. The film cites legal rulings from the 19th century based on arguments that the corporation is a legal “person” and thus could avail itself of the individual rights provided by the 14th amendment.

Noam Chomsky says these legal persons we have created are “special kinds of persons who have no moral consciousness”. The directors tilt their focus significantly towards the pathological aspects of the corporation, most notably externalities such as pollution.

In a clever play on the legal definition of a corporation as a legal “person”, the directors conduct a psychological examination of the corporation as if it really were a person with a personality that we can analyze. They ask folks on the street about what the personalities of some well known corporations might be like. “GE is a kind old man with lots of stories” and “Nike is young and energetic“. Based on a review of corporate crime and misbehavior, the directors methodically evaluate a range of the corporation’s personality traits. The results lead the directors to categorize the corporation’s “personality” as that of a psychopath. One amusing device is the use of black and white film clips in the style of the naïve and oversimplified 1950’s high school Civics 101 material. These are used often in the film to introduce some characteristic of the corporation prior to interviews and examination of the characteristic.

One complaint I have is that the directors don’t establish a benchmark for organizational pathology against which we can evaluate corporate misbehavior relative to overall organizational misbehavior. If we think of the corporation as only one of the many forms of organization society employs to marshal its resources, then analysis of corporate pathology is only a subset of the overall analysis of organizational pathology. We should be able to benchmark corporate misdeeds against misdeeds by the other forms of organization such as government, partnerships, communes, individuals, etc. For example, I imagine we could establish a long list of horrible acts committed by business entities other than corporations. Perhaps by the overall standards of organizational behavior corporations are rather well behaved on a relative basis?

I'm disappointed that the directors don’t spend enough time developing and making accessible to viewers some of the potential solutions to externalities. One example is the idea of forcing corporations to face the costs of pollution they create by forcing them to buy the right to each “unit” of pollution in a market for pollution rights that allows anyone in the market to bid for the rights. To their credit, the directors do include this idea in their interviews but the interview limits comments on this idea to the observation that trading in these rights is a potential solution. The directors should realize that this proposal can easily remain abstract and puzzling without more elaboration. Anyone without an economics background will need to hear a few more simple details and think about this for a few minutes before the heart of the idea emerges. For example, they could have mentioned a scenario in which a private consortium of environmental activists enters the market for pollution rights and could conceivably bid up the price of pollution rights until the polluting corporations in the market are forced to realize the proper costs of their pollution, limit their production or even shut down and stop polluting altogether if the altruistic players in the market bid up the rights to a price above that which the corporation is willing to pay. This should be an exciting and visceral idea to activists desperate for a voice in the interplay between business and the environment, yet it is left as a dry and abstract scheme in the context of the interview in the movie.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

5 out of 5 stars using Qi's 5-star system

I just finished and most highly recommend Pattern Recognition (“PR”), the latest novel by William Gibson, a highly influential science fiction writer whose first book Nueromancer is considered groundbreaking because it spawned the “cyberpunk” sub-genre (it also achieved the popular honor of serving as the basis for the Matrix trilogy of movies). PR feels a bit like another great science fiction story, but it takes place just after 9/11 and makes use of strictly current technologies as familiar as Google and iBooks. Yet Gibson’s entertaining techno-nerd perspective on the symbiosis between technology and culture in our society makes our present look so exotic that he doesn’t need to invent wild new technologies to make the book read like good SciFi. It’s as if he’s telling us to stand up and notice that we’ve become akin to those “billions of consensual players” making up the Matrix in Nueromancer. How does Gibson make today in PR seem like his science fiction tomorrow in Neuromancer? For one, Gibson points out that if we shift our perspectives ever so slightly we’ll suddenly notice the existence of a technology, cheap and currently available to all of us, that’s so powerful it provides nearly instantaneous transport, with only a minor glitch that tends to leave the soul lagging far behind. Fortunately there’s a parallel technology, also cheap and currently available, that allows one to access one’s missing soul remotely until it catches up a couple of days later. Sounds like hard core SciFi, right? In fact it’s just Gibson’s riff on a bad case of jet lag and the comforting ubiquity of internet connections to home no matter where we are in the world. It’s representative of the twists in PR that take the everyday and shows it in an edgy, hyper sensitive light. In the case of jet lag, Gibson takes a mundane aspect of life and leads us to pause and consider its strangeness, the strangeness of the instantaneous movement from one culture to another that we take for granted, the potential psychic costs of skipping measures ahead in our circadian rhythms; “jet lag…it shrinks the frontal lobes. Physically. Clearly visible on a scan,” observes one of his characters.


This is one of many bizarrely entertaining, even enlightening, observations we share with the delightful characters Gibson has chosen to interact with his exotic perspective on our present day. We spend a lot of time in the head of the heroine, Cayce Pollard, a thirtyish woman who’s literally allergic to bad fashion and cheap logos. She first realized her condition during a childhood visit to Disneyland, breaking out in a rash when confronted with the brand name masquerading as Mickey Mouse. She feels ill at the sight of the Michelin Man to this day. (Cayce reveals to those of us who didn’t know that her tormentor the Michelin Man has a proper name, the rather ominous sounding Bibendum.) At the beginning of the story we learn she’s managed to her turn her allergy into a lucrative career as a consultant to the world’s leading advertising agencies and fashion houses, who pay her big money to see if she’ll break out in hives at the sight of their latest designs. Tommy Hilfiger’s entire product line doesn’t make the cut. “A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountainside of Tommy coming down in her head. My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo kit and regimental stripes. But Tommy is surely the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from source, more devoid of soul.”

Cayce is hired by a Belgian billionaire, name of Hubertus Bigend, to track down the maker of a mysterious sequence of video footage, 135 segments and counting, which have shown up on the web and engendered a passionate cult following of which Cayce is an obsessive member. Bigend, an advertising genius, regards the footage as “the single most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever”, is intent on using the footage to benefit his billions, even though he vows “I don’t count things in money. I count them in excellence.” Although highly suspicious of Bigend’s motives, she accepts Bigend’s backing to better pursue her own obsession with the footage. She’s soon joined on her hunt for the ‘maker’ by a set of partners in obsession, some virtual like a witty eccentric Cayce only knows by his nickname Parkaboy through an online forum devoted to the footage, and one named Boone Chu, a dashing tech wizard bouncing back from a spectacular but vague dot-com era venture that ended badly. The adrenaline starts to increase when Cayce finds her at first merely annoying professional rival has industrial espionage in her past and might be behind the break-in at Cayce’s apartment and Cayce’s alarming discovery that someone is tracking her every move, both virtual and physical.

I found the characters very appealing. One aspect that most characters in the book share that I really enjoyed is acute obsession, a condition which has always had a strong perverse appeal to me. After all, surrendering to a great obsession has some major benefits, as many of those annoying obligations of everyday life, e.g. financial responsibility, punctuality, personal hygiene, etc. fall by the wayside in favor of that singular all powerful focus. Pathological, yes, but amazingly comforting too. I had great fun embracing the well crafted obsession that Gibson has provided in compulsion-soaked abundance. Case and Parkaboy obsessed with interpreting the footage for its own sake. Bigend obsessed with exploiting the footage for financial gain. A stray acquaintance named Voyteck obsessed with building a sprawling work of art out of decaying scaffolding and a collection of obscure mechanical calculators invented under duress by an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp. Cayce’s best friend Damien obsessed with spending a fortune (not his own, of course) filming the excavation of WWII carnage from a fetid Russian swamp. Another character, obsessed with early computer technology, is currently “negotiating to buy Stephen King’s Wang.” The characters’ collection of obsessions drives the narrative along at an addictively manic pace.

Beyond the great characters, which are obviously very funny by design, the repartee between the characters is as hilarious as it is thought inspiring. The humor can be clinical, detached and cynical yet one might argue it is the most appropriate, even healthiest, reaction by characters who feel alienated from a world dissociated from its psychic core and left to compensate with the internet and a wealth of cell phone spectrum. Gibson delivers his humor with real compassion for his characters using precisely crafted language and superb pacing that I find a joy to read, and re-read.

The last thing I want to share about PR is the rather amazing critical reaction. The kudos arrive from every quarter, with the Washington Post critic describing PR as “…one of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century” and the Seattle Times critic describing it as a “defying all the usual superlatives…Pattern Recognition is more than the sum of these parts. It’s a whole that examines the wholeness and its lack in the debris-filled light of our post 9/11 lives” [note: Wow, I never realized how silly that review was until I typed it out just now! “a whole that examines the wholeness”. You must be joking!]. Although I found PR tremendously entertaining and highly recommend it I must say that I find the level of critical acclaim very surprising. I say this because I found PR entertaining in the way one enjoys overhearing a debate between accomplished coffeehouse intellectuals, albeit in this case the coffeehouse has WiFi, the debaters have iBooks and they frequently pause to check their Wittgenstein facts on Wikipedia. In other words, while I find Gibson’s “nerd intensity” (words he uses to describe one of his characters) very cool and fun, perhaps we should leave the compliments at that level.

Here’s a link to a collection of reviews.

If you read it, please let me know if you share my impressions!

Andy J

My Recent Read Feb - April 2007

The Whole World Over, Julia Glass (** 2 Star)
This is a very disappointing followup of the excellent Three Junes. It is long, cluttered, self-indulgent and drippy.
Read in March 2007

Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham (**** 4 Star)
Some people go for the moon in the sky, some people go for the sixpence on the ground.
Read in March 2007

The Painted Veil , W. Somerset Maugham (**** 4 Star)
It is a good story told through the view point of a shallow young woman who finally discovered her emotional growth. Very compelling.
Read in Feb 2007

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (**** 4 Star)
Deep in the Congo jungle, a family is trying to survive the elements, people and themselves.
Read in Feb 2007.

A Widow for a Year, John Irving (*** 3 Star)
Epic story of living through loss and pain in the eyes of a strong female character Ruth.
Read in Feb 2007.

Larry's Party, Carol Shields (**** 4 Star)
A good story about an average guy's life.
Read in Jan 2007

To the Hermitage, Malcolm Bradury (**** 3 Star)
500 pages of rambling -- some parts interesting, some parts puzzling. I did not really learn much about Diderot or Catherine the Great, but enjoyed its many wonderful turn of phrases.
Read in Jan 2007

Renew our effort in book reading -- what about speed reading?

One of the most painful conversation topics that I have had over the last few months is speed reading. There are always people mentioning about its wonders but I am a bit sceptical.

I have been traumatized by my previous experience in trying to learn such exulted skills but walked off with weary eyes and wearier spirit. (Those who put me through such ordeal know their blames).

What is your opinoin on this? What is the best way to read faster without sacrifice pleasure in reading?