II. The Grimoir of Artificial Personhood
[Part I is here]
The concept of corporate personhood has been bubbling up across the information swamp lately, and I'd like to get one thing out of the way: corporate personhood isn't just for Bank of America. It's also for things like labor unions and advocacy groups. A certain portion of the polity tends to forget that the legal terms of art which animate great shambling behemoths like Goldman Sachs, Enron, and Fannie Mae also give life to the Service Employees International Union and MoveOn. We've created similar structures within the legal and political realms to account for collective, coordinated action and to attempt to answer certain questions about legal responsibility (poorly, as it turns out). These structures are called creatures of statute--or of state, if you prefer--and they're everywhere. A modern corporation is a centuries-old refinement of the same organizational urge that led to tribes, village councils, towns, municipalities, cities, states, and national governments. When humans want to get big things done, they tend to band together. It's a primate thing.
Which is not to say that a modern for-profit corporation is exactly the same as, say, the Federal government. However: to see a major consequence of the common metaphysical roots shared by the two institutions, look no further than the various career paths of certain presidents and presidential candidates, vice presidents past and hopeful, secretaries of defense, and so on. No matter which party is "in power," the pathways from the boardroom to the various halls and chambers of local, state, and national power are well trod. The question of "How, exactly, is the Federal government different from a corporation?" is being asked in the public square, right now, and when trying to make such a differentiation, it is sometimes helpful to appreciate the similarities.
The United States Code is the codification by subject matter of the general and permanent laws of the United States. It's a grimoire, like the APA's DSM-IV-TR: full of words strung together to define things and move action from within the minds of its creators out into the world for the rest of us to deal with. This book of spells is over 200,000 pages long, and the law in question is 1 U.S.C. §1. That is, Title 1, Chapter 1, of the United States Code. This particular spell is, quite literally, the first law of the United States, and it declares, among other things, that:
Words matter. Words have power. Humans use them to define the boundaries of that power, and to bring things into being. We've given ourselves the power to create entities that can function within our society with some of the rights of naturally-born human beings, and we've given our government the power to direct and control those entities, supposedly on our behalf. All it takes to make one is some paperwork, a few legal incantations, and the exchange of some of our other great fictional creation, money.
We've been through this sort of thing before. In the 16th century, the chief rabbi of Prague was one Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and like Rabbi Eliyahu of Chelm before him, Rabbi Bezalel took a form of inanimate matter--clay from the banks of the Vltava river, in this case--and gave it life through Hebrew ritual and incantation. Upon its forehead he scrawled the Hebrew word for truth (or reality), "emet." This golem was intended to protect the Jews of Prague from the depredations of the Holy Roman Emperor. It killed a wacking great pile of gentiles, but eventually grew ever more powerful and out of control, forcing HRE Rudolph to beg the rabbi to stop his creation and promise to lay off the pogrom. Depending on which version of the legend you hear, the rabbi had varying amounts of trouble turning the thing off. He eventually did so by rubbing the "e" off of "emet," leaving the Hebrew word for death, "met." Then--again, depending on the version of the tale--he stored the deactivated golem in the attic of the synagogue in Prague, in case he needed it again.
This is of course a legend. Magic, after all, isn't real.
Yet we, as a society, have codified a long series of words, given them power, and used them to create not-human entities, great conglomerations of people that collectively do things like dump 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, destroy national economies, and "speak" to politicians. They even have certain "rights." Similarly, we've conjured a national government that, in addition to paving roads, providing for sanitation, clean food and water, and a host of other services that are in general beneficial to the polity, occasionally projects massive force out into the far reaches of the world and kills lots of people. In each case, these entities are composed of natural persons, but the consequences of the actions of these entities are not the same as the consequences of the actions of natural persons. If you or I went out on our own and spilled 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf or jetted off to Iraq to kill 100,000 people, we'd be in jail or dead. States and corporations alike operate in the world, and take real action in the world. They have power, but they're without true moral consciousness, and they can run amok.
The systems that surround and support them have become so complex that they are escaping the control of their supposed masters. As just one small example: there are computer algorithms which conduct automated trades on the world's markets at speeds measured in microseconds. Back in 2006, I did some work with a company that produced what are now considered primitive trading algorithms, code written by humans. There were also algorithms that hadn't been coded by humans, but by other algorithms. Some hadn't been designed by a human for a dozen iterations. Programmers would set them loose in simulations and see how they did, then release the most promising ones out into the electronic wild of the markets. One programmer told me, "Sometimes they exhibit really weird, emergent behavior, and we don't even know why, because we didn't write them." I thought about that last year when the Dow rapidly plunged by nearly 1,000 points and then rebounded within minutes, for no apparent reason. Why? Algorithms. In the legislative realm we call that sort of thing "unintended consequences," and we're seeing more of that as our created systems of interacting non-human entities grow ever more chaotic.
Many of our great modern economic and metaphysical challenges flow from this fundamental, structural flaw in the methods by which we conjure our institutions: our ability to use language and incant ever-more-complicated spells has outstripped our understanding of their eventual effects.
And now, we've taken that particular bit of spellworking--evocation, the ability to create an artificial entity--and we've given it to anyone with a computer. What was once arcane and occult has become common. We've dispersed the magic.
But we haven't necessarily promulgated a new grimoire to go along with it.
In Part III, I'll tell you a bit more about how you might have already conjured your own golem, and about how that could affect your weekend.
[Part I is here]
The concept of corporate personhood has been bubbling up across the information swamp lately, and I'd like to get one thing out of the way: corporate personhood isn't just for Bank of America. It's also for things like labor unions and advocacy groups. A certain portion of the polity tends to forget that the legal terms of art which animate great shambling behemoths like Goldman Sachs, Enron, and Fannie Mae also give life to the Service Employees International Union and MoveOn. We've created similar structures within the legal and political realms to account for collective, coordinated action and to attempt to answer certain questions about legal responsibility (poorly, as it turns out). These structures are called creatures of statute--or of state, if you prefer--and they're everywhere. A modern corporation is a centuries-old refinement of the same organizational urge that led to tribes, village councils, towns, municipalities, cities, states, and national governments. When humans want to get big things done, they tend to band together. It's a primate thing.
Which is not to say that a modern for-profit corporation is exactly the same as, say, the Federal government. However: to see a major consequence of the common metaphysical roots shared by the two institutions, look no further than the various career paths of certain presidents and presidential candidates, vice presidents past and hopeful, secretaries of defense, and so on. No matter which party is "in power," the pathways from the boardroom to the various halls and chambers of local, state, and national power are well trod. The question of "How, exactly, is the Federal government different from a corporation?" is being asked in the public square, right now, and when trying to make such a differentiation, it is sometimes helpful to appreciate the similarities.
The United States Code is the codification by subject matter of the general and permanent laws of the United States. It's a grimoire, like the APA's DSM-IV-TR: full of words strung together to define things and move action from within the minds of its creators out into the world for the rest of us to deal with. This book of spells is over 200,000 pages long, and the law in question is 1 U.S.C. §1. That is, Title 1, Chapter 1, of the United States Code. This particular spell is, quite literally, the first law of the United States, and it declares, among other things, that:
In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise [...] the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;There it is. Not in the Constitution, no. But at the foundation of American jurisprudence, within its very definition of first principles, this concept is enshrined: the word "person" encompasses non-human entities.
Words matter. Words have power. Humans use them to define the boundaries of that power, and to bring things into being. We've given ourselves the power to create entities that can function within our society with some of the rights of naturally-born human beings, and we've given our government the power to direct and control those entities, supposedly on our behalf. All it takes to make one is some paperwork, a few legal incantations, and the exchange of some of our other great fictional creation, money.
We've been through this sort of thing before. In the 16th century, the chief rabbi of Prague was one Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and like Rabbi Eliyahu of Chelm before him, Rabbi Bezalel took a form of inanimate matter--clay from the banks of the Vltava river, in this case--and gave it life through Hebrew ritual and incantation. Upon its forehead he scrawled the Hebrew word for truth (or reality), "emet." This golem was intended to protect the Jews of Prague from the depredations of the Holy Roman Emperor. It killed a wacking great pile of gentiles, but eventually grew ever more powerful and out of control, forcing HRE Rudolph to beg the rabbi to stop his creation and promise to lay off the pogrom. Depending on which version of the legend you hear, the rabbi had varying amounts of trouble turning the thing off. He eventually did so by rubbing the "e" off of "emet," leaving the Hebrew word for death, "met." Then--again, depending on the version of the tale--he stored the deactivated golem in the attic of the synagogue in Prague, in case he needed it again.
This is of course a legend. Magic, after all, isn't real.
Yet we, as a society, have codified a long series of words, given them power, and used them to create not-human entities, great conglomerations of people that collectively do things like dump 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, destroy national economies, and "speak" to politicians. They even have certain "rights." Similarly, we've conjured a national government that, in addition to paving roads, providing for sanitation, clean food and water, and a host of other services that are in general beneficial to the polity, occasionally projects massive force out into the far reaches of the world and kills lots of people. In each case, these entities are composed of natural persons, but the consequences of the actions of these entities are not the same as the consequences of the actions of natural persons. If you or I went out on our own and spilled 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf or jetted off to Iraq to kill 100,000 people, we'd be in jail or dead. States and corporations alike operate in the world, and take real action in the world. They have power, but they're without true moral consciousness, and they can run amok.
The systems that surround and support them have become so complex that they are escaping the control of their supposed masters. As just one small example: there are computer algorithms which conduct automated trades on the world's markets at speeds measured in microseconds. Back in 2006, I did some work with a company that produced what are now considered primitive trading algorithms, code written by humans. There were also algorithms that hadn't been coded by humans, but by other algorithms. Some hadn't been designed by a human for a dozen iterations. Programmers would set them loose in simulations and see how they did, then release the most promising ones out into the electronic wild of the markets. One programmer told me, "Sometimes they exhibit really weird, emergent behavior, and we don't even know why, because we didn't write them." I thought about that last year when the Dow rapidly plunged by nearly 1,000 points and then rebounded within minutes, for no apparent reason. Why? Algorithms. In the legislative realm we call that sort of thing "unintended consequences," and we're seeing more of that as our created systems of interacting non-human entities grow ever more chaotic.
Many of our great modern economic and metaphysical challenges flow from this fundamental, structural flaw in the methods by which we conjure our institutions: our ability to use language and incant ever-more-complicated spells has outstripped our understanding of their eventual effects.
And now, we've taken that particular bit of spellworking--evocation, the ability to create an artificial entity--and we've given it to anyone with a computer. What was once arcane and occult has become common. We've dispersed the magic.
But we haven't necessarily promulgated a new grimoire to go along with it.
In Part III, I'll tell you a bit more about how you might have already conjured your own golem, and about how that could affect your weekend.
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