Repurposing the Corporation - Cal ACC versus Google, Goodbye Google

Oh god, now Google's buying dark fiber.

Got news for you: I don't feel like buying bandwidth from Enron Google.

(I'm an ISP:) I remember getting a letter from Enron back in the day. Enron? What the hell do they want? So I open it out of curiosity and they're, "Hey! Buy bandwidth from us!" and I'm thinking, Enron doesn't have the first thing to do with bandwidth; they don't know jack about telecommunications. So I say Yeah Right and I throw the letter away with a healthy dose of professional contempt. Back then, everybody's reselling everything and it's multilayers of garbage, on top of invisible actual providers doing the real work. So here comes Enron, trying to get into the game. Basically, company has a big name, let's stamp our brand on every next thing where we think we can push our way onto the stage, and grab market share.

When you form a Corporation, you have to state the purpose of the Corporation. What is the corporation formed to do? As "The Corporation" (Joel Bakan, Free Press, 2004) explains, in the way-old days corporations were formed to accomplish certain specific purposes - like the building of a bridge or a building - and were then dissolved. Since I participated in forming a few corporations, I know that nowadays the purpose of a corporation is stated as broadly as possible. We began making Brake Pads, but now we make military hardware as well, and run a credit information bureau. (That's TRW.) Notice that the activities are no longer related.

And here comes Google. And they're fat-capitalized. And just like Enron, they want their fingers in every pie. Before I go there, though ...

Ya Know, all you need in our game of Monopoly (capitalism), is a shitload of money. It's mere pretense that the actors in this game give a damn what they're doing in particular. These people are automotive experts, those people are IT experts. Their goals are identical, making as much money as possible and dominating as much of their market as possible. It's an accident that they have to specialize in particular areas, and the trend is for corporations to work in any areas where they see opportunity. So there's no confinement of activity any longer, and there's also no requirement for prior experience in the field. It doesn't matter if X company makes good or bad widgets as long as they have a big market share, and to enter the market, you buy company X.

Replace the top management, as much as you like. Get rid of some senior staff, so nobody can figure out what's going on, leaving it to the next tier to do things a little more rote, a little more headlessly. Your staff is a commodity. And ultimately, it no longer matters what it is that they do; you bought them to be able to sell them, you bought the company to be able to cut it in pieces, change its mission, change its character. It doesn't matter who was served or how well, either. Merge the things to pieces. The theory goes, if you play games right with the corporate pieces, you can make deals to get richer. Sort of like Real Estate and Development.

Let's ask ourselves what the Purpose of the corporation has devolved to. Ever-insuring the quality of the product? Ever-serving the customer? It's fairly clear that (the management and direction of) those things belong to that rarified layer in the shuffled company -- Verizon comes to mind, with its customers waiting as long as 105 minutes (one and three-quarter hours) on muzak hold to report a problem. They don't care; they don't need to. They're the telephone company. Strange, isn't it, how we broke AT&T into pieces in 1984 to try to fix their arrogance? And now it's as if that never happened.

What we now have -- I well remember the Thomas Nast cartoon of the Railroad Barons carving up the United States -- is a m\xc3\xaal\xc3\xa9e, a churn, of companies merging and splitting. It's not to produce better service. It's to own you as a client and give you crap that barely works (at their option.) If their customer service sucks, too bad for you, and shut up: pretty soon it'll be illegal to complain about it. Seriously. You are progressively losing your legal ability to defend yourself against corporate malfeasance at the same time as corporations are being given blank checks to violate decades-old laws protecting labor, the environment, fair practice and so forth. What with the current surreality of living in an ''at-war'' police homeland security state, an angry remark made to a, um, well-paid and well-educated representative of the company in just the right mood could get you a visit by whoever visits.

We're the People of the United States. If along the way, we've allowed the laws to be modified to give such power to these entities, constituted as they are, then that's a mistake, an obvious mistake. We deserve for these companies to do their jobs, more than we should indulge the churn. Any teenager grasps the concept of dominate-to-win, embodied in monopoly capitalism (is there any other kind that will survive?) Any teen could play the merge'em game; maybe it takes adults to do it well. It's a stupid and savage game, and anyone can extrapolate over decades of worsening service and vanishing choices to see that the end goals are (a) dominate your own market completely, and (b) spread across as many markets as possible. It doesn't matter what you do when you do everything. Remember, so far as there are competitors in our markets, they suck equally. They're not stupid. You have nowhere to go.

I'm fighting against a Trader Joe's in Berkeley at the same time I want to stop San Francisco from letting Google/Earthlink run their wireless network, for related reasons. We already have Trader Joe's in Emeryville and what, El Cerrito? Albany? We don't need to infill these things. We now know they are toxic to our communities in devastating ways. A conundrum, it might seem; on the one hand, we'd like to have access to new and innovative retailers. On the other, massive chains destroy small businesses, and that's community fabric.

Look what god-damned ''globalization and the internet'' have gotten you: the destruction of "Cody's on Telegraph", the signal icon of Berkeley businesses, a 43-year-old institution. Look what global warming is bringing to us: the crumbling of huge ice blocks into the sea. Hold that image for the crumbling of all local culture and everything that makes this square mile any different, or for that matter any more historically relevant, than any other. We are being factory farmed and I don't like it. I'm angry with howsoever many of my fellow local-areans who had shopped at Cody's who suddenly found it preferable to shop online. I would figure that the locals should know better to shun Barnes and Noble, but here we have a live and awful demonstration of the relationship of local businesses to the people in the area. I tell you point blank what a horrid mistake it is to have let Cody's down, Barnes and Noble had neither "The Corporation" nor "What Went Wrong In Ohio?", the Conyers report on the theft of the 2004 election, in their inventory, whereas Cody's was right on top of both of them. Consider that: the homogenization of our culture is negatively influencing our politics in plain view, and consider that you watch the process repeat itself. A Borders bookstore threatens to open quite near to the San Francisco Cody's location. Shall we expect to find the other fat chain put to death the next third of what's left of Cody's? Tell them to put Cody's in that mall. Cody's confined to 4th Street doesn't have space for their former inventory. You have savaged your available selection of books you can walk up to, thumb through, like all book shoppers do. No, Barnes and Noble and Borders are not the same. They are capital-C Corporate. I bet dollars to doughnuts B&N/B didn't have near the shelfspace of left books on display in Red states as we did here, and I've documented two rather glaring examples of books everyone should know about that they won't see in the stores. Letting Cody's on Telegraph go is seriously fucked up. You are being leveled.

In plain view. Time to get MAD, goddammit!

What about Trader Joe's? They're a chain. On-hand might vary from location to location, but it'll be the same stuff more or less. Their kind of stuff, why you would bother. If you bring a Trader Joe's in here, it will put Fred's Market out of business, or eliminate any means they'll have to improve their business due to decreased revenues. What we are slowly ending up with is that every service we consume will be vended to us by a chain, and I've decided now that we would be far, far better off as a nation, as humans, as people, to go in exactly the opposite direction. Point One. What's it to you if the person who hands you your dry-cleaning is not the owner or an employee of the local owner but rather a clerk for a corporation? Answer: let that vendor be the corporation, and you're giving your money away out of the community. You're not supporting people who live in your community. You're destroying your local community by not helping feed the people who live in it. You're leaving that to someone else. I wanted to make a polemic out of the phrase "brought to you by", I'll do that quick here: brought to you by who? By someone else? For Free? No. Not free. That's where they have you confused. This fabulous TV program brought to you by someone else on their dime -- and their terms. If the thing you like was not brought to you by you, then what did you have to give up for it? I treasure my attention span and I don't suffer fools gladly. Commercial TV sucks because you have to watch commercials. Brought to me by someone who expects a 0.1% return rate on TV spam. We make it illegal on the Internet, you know. So the stuff you like should be brought to you by someone near you, as near as you can make them. I've never bought a book at Amazon and I minimized my purchases at B&N -- probably $250 over three years, when I dump half that much with each visit to Cody's. I ain't rich neither. I just want to keep my friends alive.

Point Two. How to have the cake and eat it too. Jeez, do we really love the darling Trader Joe's so much? Alright. We know that where we plop one down, it's radioactive to the surrounding area. You'll kill little food shops of all kinds and hurt various restaurants. So we take these things we have to have and sequester them. I suggest piling the chains into malls away from the residential areas and make them accessible by easy mass transit. I'll go get my Starbucks-Borders-Home Depot fix at the sprawl, on the other side of the ridge.

Point Three. Too far, to have to go over the ridge to get a $3.50 cup of coffee? Maybe that's the point. Maybe I can get some nice coffee at my local vendor's place, and make my own $0.10 cup of coffee. Maybe I can spend $2.50 at the local vendor's place. Isn't the draw of Trader Joe's that it's eclectic, beyond their making sure the food doesn't suck? Well, what happens when you have a bunch of little vendors in a row, all getting weird crap from other little vendors that they know? There's eclectic for you and a much larger selection. You pump $3.50 into Starbucks and what you get is one measly brand of fair-trade coffee after so many years. I like their little pastries, but ya know, a whole tonload of nice local people know how to make sweets like that, and I bet you $3.57 that if I tell my local vendor to stock fair trade coffee and I'll pay the extra, or I'll quit buying coffee from him/her, note it's one person and not a corporation and they're likely to do it, rather than mouth someone else's line why they can't. Gandhi intended to rescue India with 'cottage industries'. E.F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" gives an example of a company that splits into independent units, by charter, when it reaches a certain size. The economies of scale that suit corporations are not the economies of scale that suit humans. Economics be damned, if its first axiom is not "in service to humankind." Verizon sucks because it's too large to be accountable. The solution to the corporate menace we face is to smash them to little bits. They'll be answerable then.

One way to smash the corporations is to limit them by size. Another is to nationalize from them some part of their function. And another is to constrain them -- to limit their purpose. Finally, they can simply be destroyed with the stroke of a pen for being bad companies or for being of no further interest to the state in which they were incorporated. That tool has not been developed, but any old day's the time to start killing corporations willfully. I don't imagine it will be an easy process, but we have to push to do it so we show it is doable. So we should strike down the foulest ones first, and Wal*Mart is an easy suggestion. Destroy a corporation with a pen, and bringing the rest to heel should easily be in the imagination of all citizens. They (the corporate management and the shareholders) have treated us and our societies as commodities for long enough, we need shed no tears to show them what being commodities means. Remember, what these companies do will not cease being done. We can afford to suffer some disruptions along the way toward curing our world of its organizational ills. Step by step as companies are 'busted' and rightsized, services will resume under local or more local control, with more accountability.

So finally, back to Google and the fiber: Tell them to divest it. They are not an access provider, they are not a transport provider. They have no business being involved with the SF wireless thing because they don't know the first thing about it as is already reasonably manifestly evident. They should confine themselves to what we know they do: they run a decent search engine. Any jackass with enough dollars can play monopoly with anything - in this case fiber and mass rape of consumer privacy. So the answer to AT&T SBC and Comcast and all that ilk who refuse to open access to their facilities, is they're not your facilities anymore. We're going to nationalize the copper, cable and fiber infrastructure in this country and make SBC compete with little guys like me on even terms. In fact - nationalize the copper and the switches and we don't need SBC, and when customer service from the government sucks, you can scream at your representative who will have authority to do something about it. If you want to solve the SF wifi problem, I'll tell you how to do it. Tell the FCC we get some spectrum we need, and bring in the Japanese. They already have streaming video to their handhelds wirelessly. Implement that and give out free phones to the less well off. Solved. Tell all the telecommunications companies in this country to f**k off because they are lamers and thieves and slackers. Right. Back to Google. Any jackasses with money. It's entirely alright to set a limit on how freaking fat Google can get, and for what? Hundreds of Billions invested in Google because they'll be able to pull in much more money than that. From you, mind you. I don't know anything about the founders but I can tell them what would be next if they are our wonderchildren as the press vaunts them: better cognitive processing of queries, since their recognition still sucks compared to what a human can easily expect from a query entered. But, um, are they busy doing that, or are they busy making money? Well ya know if they're not in the labs then how about retiring then, dammit? Because we don't need you around to guide an entity on a rapacious run against our future. Make a better search engine or f**k off. We don't need for you to do anything else. You don't need to be paid by us, directly or indirectly, for anything else.

Enough for now. No, one more thing: stop Borders in SF.
STOP BORDERS IN SF.

No, I forgot the punchline. If Google doesn't behave, then I hope it's our luck that they're incorporated in California. Because I would love to see them vanish from the face of the earth in one instant at the will of the People of the State of California - organized by the California AntiCorporate Campaign, the Cal ACC. Hello, Seattle!