>From Steev:
>>3. again, even if you think you're
>>talking about the same rights, Sony doesnt DESERVE the same rights that
>>humans do, because Sony is not a person.
>From Jason J. Tar:
>
>Bah. Now you are getting silly. Sony is a company representing the
>interests of several people. Those people DO have the same rights as me
>and you. They also have the same responsibilities.
>If you want to fight to make them uphold those same responsibilities, then
>I'll support you.
>But this fight to deny them the same rights that we have is silly dumb
>backwards.
Just to keep the discussion on corporations and their existence going,
let me offer a few morsels.
1). Sony is not a company representing people with individual interests.
It is a coproration, which is an ENTITY entirely outside of individuals.
This is why it is not the Sony PROPRIETORSHIP - why no ONE owns Sony.
You will say "The shareholders own Sony," and this is not entirely true
either. You will say "Someone on the board of directors makes the
decisions for Sony, like the one who owns the most shares," and this is
not entirely true either.
The whole blinkin' POINT of a corporation is to create a legal body,
literally a "corpus" which represents a business interest. In this way
liabilities and resources can be assigned to a thing and not an
individual. If "Sony" goes down, no one person is held responsible or at
fault.
The idea that these legal definitions, which are NOT people, can ACT as
people, is one of the strange business innovations that has led to the
peculiar aspects of the 20th century which we now enjoy.
2). Oddly enough, Adam Smith, in "The Wealth of Nations," argues against
the corporation, warning that when enough resources and capital are
"owned" by these nonexistant definitions, it strangles any notion of a
free market system. Check it out sometime. So the "problem" of
corporations has existed for a couple hundred years.
3). Assigning more and better rights to a thing and not a person is a
strange kind of way to conduct ourselves. Imaginary friends are
interesting, but do we want to give them power over us?
4). My personal opinion is that the battle is already lost. Corporate
control extends through every TV set, through every credit card and
communication device, to ensnare us all. I know I am not free from their
clutches, and neither are you, unless you live in a shack in Montana
smoewhere, and even then your exile was caused by the corporate world.
It's like some great science fiction novel where peopl built robots to do
the work and the robots took over. These decisions were made long before
we were born.
Of course, I am not being defeatist about it. The best thing to do when
one lives under oppression is to do whatever we can to strike againts it,
to live under it, and to carve out our existences as best we can within
it. But I think we need to realize that it has already happened.
>From the ECC:
>The CEO explains at a press conference: "While I
>personally would never commit murder, it is my fiduciary dute as CEO to
>maximize profits for the corporation any way possible. It would be immoral
>for me not to kill!" And so goes corporate logic.
5). Even more interesting is the human being who allies with the
non-human entities, becoming their steward. I guess some people will
serve any master, even one who actually does not exist except in legal
terms.
Also from the ECC:
>I like the
>music I make, I want other people to hear and enjoy it too, and my goal is
>to distribute it to the maximum number of those people who would enjoy it.
>If Sony could help me reach that goal, great... though I suspect for
>various reasons (illegal samples; not a hip genre; etc.) I won't be getting
>any A&R people knocking on my door for a while.
6). This is exactly the attitude I'm referring to when I talk about
living nder the oppression. This is an intelligent and hopefully
successful response to the times we live in. No one of us will topple
the corporate structure. In fact, we all have to support them somewhat
in order to live within our civilization. Now how about finding a way to
make THEM work a little for US? Even if it has to be below the radar?
Of course, more aggressive viewpoints against the corporations are
intelligent responses as well. I don't think that under these
circumstances we can afford to be too polemic. Each of us has to figure
out how we can survive, if you ask me.
I have to go back to stealing office supplies now.
Naked Rabbit P.O. Box 36673 LA CA 90036 ||||| http://www.nakedrabbit.com
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