The Corporation as Evolutionary Adaptation
The study of biological evolution – the history of life on Earth – reveals an inveterate tendency towards greater levels of cooperation, coordination and symbiosis. This idea may seem surprising at first. As part of the paradigm we inherited – the one we are now leaving behind – many thinkers and scientists placed their focus, instead, on the competitive, aggressive and destructive aspects of nature. This view of biology as a constant struggle for life meshed perfectly with the predatory economic mode of capitalism. This idea has now been superseded by a new view of life as an intricately networked phenomenon, where organisms support each other far more than they compete.
According to biologist Lynn Margulis, author of Microcosmos, who developed the Gaia hypothesis with scientist James Lovelock, “The trip from greedy gluttony, from instant satisfaction to long-term mutualism, has been made many times in the microcosm. While destructive species may come and go, cooperation itself increases through time.”
We can find the most accessible example of cooperation and symbiosis as the pattern of evolution in our own bodies. Our bodies are made out of a hundred trillion cells and vast colonies of microorganisms that work together seamlessly. In a previous stage of the Earth’s evolution, these organisms were fighting against each other for scarce resources. During a period of crisis, they figured out ways to collaborate to construct more complex structures – organs, like skin, eyes and lungs. In a way, all human technologies are just recapitulations of technological feats we already find in the microcosm. Long before the Internet, viruses exchanged information – genetic code – around the world at high speed.
When humans cooperate to build a satellite dish, it is not that dissimilar to the communities of specialized cells and microorganisms that assemble an eye or an ear. ‘As tiny parts of a huge biosphere whose essence is basically bacterial, we – with other life forms – must add up to a sort of symbiotic brain which it is beyond our capacity to comprehend or truly represent,’ Margulis wrote.
Individual cells in our bodies do not hoard wealth – excess energy – but store it in deposits of fat that are freely available to the cellular community as a whole. Cells contribute their efforts to the collective body without seeking more for themselves, as energy flows seamlessly, going wherever it is needed. Without any competition, cells as well as organs work with maximum efficiency for the success of the whole.
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The rapid development of a world-encompassing ‘technosphere’ appears to have been a natural extension of the potential of our species – a necessary stage in our evolution. In fact, most people believe that our industrial system has provided extraordinary benefits, improvements in health and lifestyle, for billions of people. When it works properly, the technosphere functions like a hyper-organic extension of our bodies. What do I mean by this? Let’s take an example.
When I visit my local cafe in the East Village, I find myself at the end point of vast, intermeshed systems of agriculture, manufacturing and transport; global networks of trade routes, supply lines, communications and financial data. The beans used to make my coffee come from Sumatra, Guatemala or Brazil. The cup might have been made in China. The oil used to transport the beans may have come from Norway or Alaska. In other words, the entire world is involved in the seemingly ordinary act of buying a morning coffee – an act we usually perform unthinkingly.
The invisibility of these vast networks that produce the objects of our daily lives is akin to the invisible cellular mechanisms that operate all of the time within our bodies, that maintain us in good working order. We don’t have to meditate on our follicles for our hair to grow, or concentrate on our hearts in order to keep them beating. We are continuously sustained in our existences by vast realms of the invisible and the unseen, by networks of coordination “all around us and by cellular processes within, although we generally only consciously recognize our dependence on these processes when they break down.
If it is true that we are on the cusp of realizing ourselves as a planetary super-organism, continuously reshaping the Earth, according to our collective will and intention, then we must also think of corporations in a different way – as the most powerful creations we have woven out of our social technologies.
A corporation is constructed of legal code, financial data, branding insignia, mission and vision statements. In the abstract, a corporation is a streamlined, hyper-efficient engine for taking ideas and transforming them into material form, then distributing those tools, products and services across the world, at high speed. The world-spanning successes of companies like Apple, Nike, IKEA and Samsung are a testament to that power.
Corporations can be considered the nascent organs in the collective body of humanity. An energy company functions like the circulatory system, spreading blood – fuel, electrical power – through the body. A sanitation company is like the liver or kidney. A media company is like the organs of perception which take in raw sense data, turn it into memes, and transmit it to the brain, so it can make decisions on how to act.
Corporations are artificial life forms that human beings have created and programmed, giving them sets of rules they must follow. We have built these artificial life forms to compete in a game that we also concocted, called the stock market. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia, whose misuse of a spell creates a situation where he has to fight off brooms multiplying to infinity, we have lost control over our creations. If we could rewrite the rules of the game we have created, then corporations could function as efficient organs in the Earth/human super-organism.
This evolutionary paradigm – competition evolves into cooperation through crisis – gives us hope that this could happen on the level of human civilization as a whole, as we enter an existential crisis that may lead to our extinction without a metamorphosis of some sort.
