Corporations are not your friend
Neither are governments, social movements, ideologies or TV shows
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Sometimes I say things along the lines of “Corporations are not your friend.”
By this, I don’t mean “The people working at Corporations are big meanies :(“
What I mean is that it is a type error.
Corporations, governments, groups, are not the kind of things you can be “friends” with.
You can be friends with individuals.1 If you think you are friends with a corporation, or a corporation cares about you in the way a human or a friend cares about you, you are confused.
This doesn’t mean corporations can’t act for good, they often do, but the mechanisms that cause them to act well are extremely different from the ones that cause your friends to treat you well!
If you used the same tactics you use to get your friends to treat you well (e.g. hanging out together a lot, exchanging favors, asking nicely, promising you owe them one, just generally looking distressed, genuinely loving one another, etc) on a corporation, you will generally get screwed.2
You can even have a friendly relationship to every single person in a corporation or other type of group and the group can still functionally be your adversary.
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The claim is not “corporations are inherently evil and/or should be abolished.”
Quite the opposite: A massive share of the good of the world is created by corporations doing corporate things to deliver cheap and quality goods to consumers!
But it is important to understand that markets/corporations/capitalism are one set of tools in our toolbelt for solving problems, and it’s a different tool from the kinds we use in interpersonal 1:1 relationships. And it’s not the only one at our disposal for solving problems.3
And I would generally recommend it!
And many people do do this and then feel utterly betrayed when corporations do extremely predictable things. “But I defended [megacorp] on reddit for so long, how could they do the thing that would make them more money but screws me?? :(“
Other toolsets include: Government, regulation, military, religion, culture, art, ideology, family, friendship…