Escape Velocity
Everyone began to enter the room. Approaching the oval shaped stage, those representing a corporation made a right, while the heads of state made a left, splitting the single file line into the shape of a wishbone as it engulfed the perimeter of the empty chairs. One by one, they began to sit down at their designated seat, each station containing a desk plate with either a company logo, or the flag of a country. The attendees of this meeting gathered once a year for what is called “two-so-bas” — T.U.S.O.B.A.S — The United Sovereignty of Business and State. The goal of the organization is to maintain the relationship between businesses and their birthplace, securing cooperation between the two with the objective of creating a fair, safe, and prosperous future. However, this meeting was special, as it marked the twentieth anniversary since the partnership was enacted, prompting a speaker to take the stage before the meeting commenced. A man in a suit walked towards the center of the ovate stage, nodding his head and smiling as he looked towards the roar of the applause coming from the worlds’ most powerful leaders. He placed a sheet of paper on the podium, grabbed the thin neck of the microphone and pulled it down slightly below his mouth, knowing there would be a bit of upward recoil upon its release. “Today marks twenty years, twenty successful years, of global partnership between countries, and the finest businesses that emerged from them. Many of you are familiar with the great quote by Winston Churchill. It reads, “A nation that forgets its past has no future.” And although we have progressed past only nations having the responsibility of studying their history, I believe this quote is perfectly suited for where we are today as an organization. The United Sovereignty of Business and State was founded on the principle of unifying the trailblazers of today, with those sworn to uphold the progress of yesterday. If we are to have another successful twenty years, we must keep our core mission close. As Churchill put so poignantly, we will have “no future” if we fail to do so. Every solution begins first with a problem, and the problem this organization set out to solve was the ever growing hostility between the might of modern technology corporations with that of the countries that birthed them. These corporations, global in their reach, supreme in their intellect, and coursing with immense focus grew frustrated with the taxation, regulations, and leadership within the countries they operated in. This gave rise to a divide in our world, causing many of these great businesses to look for new soil. But, as both parties soon realized, leaving home was devastating to both. The countries in which these amazing examples of human achievement were founded in suffered immensely without their star pupils inside their borders. The great businesses also began to realize that the grass wasn’t greener on the other side of the pacific (members began to laugh). And so, the leaders of both our physical world and our digital world agreed to work in unison, to show that it is worth building something great and that if greatness sprouts in your garden, you have a responsibility to water it. Ladies and gentle men, I am surrounded by greatness not because greatness grew out of the desert, but because the leaders of these fine countries watered, cared after, and cultivated an environment that nourished the best of humanity. Let us pledge to water the seeds planted by the next visionary, twenty years from now. Thank you.”
The main resource the majority of human intellect is working towards obtaining, is money. With land having been occupied, along with law and order structuring most of the modern world, business has become the regulated arena of modern mental warfare, the stage in which humanity competes against itself for resources. A sober, calculating, and long-term mindset yields the best results, but this competitive dance in pursuit of prosperity would be impossible without standing on the shoulders of giants who raked and watered small colonies into global superpowers, capable of birthing the corporate juggernauts who have matured in our time. Through a confluence of globalization, talent acquisition, technology, and culture, the corporate giants know they have crossed a threshold, becoming more powerful than the civilizations that birthed them, faster than those who wish to compete with them, and more dynamic than the bureaucrats elected to regulate them. For now. As the gap between the strength of private corporations and the weakness of sovereign nations widens, I can’t but wonder if we will find ourselves in the opening paragraph.
Humans use to compete against those within a certain radius of them, often sharing a similar background, education, and life experience. The rest of the world, unbeknownst to those living in it, was still out there, playing by a different set of rules, in its own arena. As the world grew smaller with the invention of ships able to cross oceans, humans found new land to occupy, and new people to compete against. This trend continued to accelerate with the birthing of railroads, the automobile, and eventually, air travel. We now have a planet to think about, to compete with, and to sell to. Each economy filled with endless opportunities ready to generate the highest ROI to those with high hopes and deep pockets. But, this collective force seems hell-bent on pulling us closer in the worst of ways, putting everyone in a jar and shaking it. Our newest, fastest, and most interconnected form of travel is now the internet. No longer is the physical world to be traversed and brought to its knees, but rather the digital world. Hackers battle against those erecting cybersecurity, while influencers, a term I absolutely abhor, battle for our attention. Those preaching truth and disinformation are silenced and promoted to increase eyeball counts. Data is collected in real time, a live digital symphony of humans intertwined in a metaphysical world. And of course, all of this has ads layered on top of it. We have created a new playing field, with new players, and new superpowers. This is, and will continue to be, more and more real.
Globalism has magnified certain outcomes. First, the number of winners has shrunk, while the number of losers has widened. These winners are also more extreme, adding to the increasing wealth gap. We no longer have the majority of a local community owning blue collar businesses within it, creating a larger and more resilient middle class. Those businesses have been bought out, outcompeted, or moved offshore. The children who grew up in these once buzzing blue collar areas now shiver at the thought of ever returning home to visit the skeleton of their once active town. Most now reside in front of a computer, building things that are instantaneously global at the press of a button. They transferred their output from the slowing industrial world, to the fast and growing digital one. Demand pulling on supply. Second, these global winners have become exceptionally powerful and dynamic, making it harder to dethrone them. The young and motivated talent pool, which may have consider an attempt at challenging these corporations, have become disincentivized as they look towards a task that seems insurmountable. The foundation on which this new world was built on has the ability to shift like technological tectonic plates, ensuring flexible monopolies that bend and endure in the face of change. More and more the obtainable goal is a stable position within a big firm, or the privilege of being bought out and amalgamated to one. Third, as most of the world’s intelligence has been focused battling it out in narrow and highly competitive fields, we have unintentionally grown more impotent and void towards ourselves and our species. People are either completely committing themselves to their work, or escaping into the world, leaving this one behind. Before promulgating the effects, we need to examine how these corporations have grown into a position of power, able to demand, and receive, more commitment and devotion from citizens than the very flag they pledge allegiance to.
One of the intrinsic principles of technology is its interconnected nature. Globalism is a derivative of technology, the neural system of manufacturing and distribution across the planet. Structurally, globalism is exactly like “townism” just broken up and stretched across vast distances. In a small town you have a doctor, a church, a trash collector, and local politics. In a global world you have the WHO, the Vatican, Waste Management, and bureaucrats. There is a self-imposed structure to the small town, with skin in the game, and an insulated, more self sufficient supply chain. The global world has a sense of an externally imposed force that weighs heavy on it, with little skin in the game beyond the big players, and a supply chain dependent on a complex number of factors to keep the gears turning. Economically, it allows businesses to sidestep most middleman, and while this is extremely cost-effective, it’s devastating to local economies. It takes the most efficient route in the name of margin, not considering the consequences it may have on the fabric of communities and nations. It is also exceedingly unnatural, and a modern phenomenon that is already showing signs of wear and tear. Globalism hasn’t just crept in economically, but also socially with equally negative effects of alienation, loneliness, and social media dependance. This interconnect existence we are finding ourselves in, like many modern remedies, is having unwanted side effects. Recently, covid highlighted the fragile dependence economic globalism pushed the world towards, only revealing its hand once the system received a sizable shock, leaving the world curious as to why it felt like the clock froze. A global economy works better for certain businesses over others. Mainly, ones who can send and receive products and services through the airwaves, and the fastest, lightest, and most useful thing to transport around the world, is software. A global economy will work for technology, but the industrial world will eventually stretch itself thin to the point of extinction in the search for margin.
Technology is Darwinism on full afterburner. Everything is constantly being created and killed. The only place occupiable is a restless state of not knowing whether you are truly avant-garde or avant-crap. The problem I’ve come to notice that most people don’t seem to have considered is if you were able to create a new cutting edge product or services at a time when our youthful world was just beginning to warm up to the possibilities of technology and its future influence, you were able to attract enough capital and talent early on to keep the tidal wave of innovative momentum rolling into the present. Given this structure of thought, technology essentially reached escape velocity decades ago, with those dominant businesses securing their position as the ever evolving, all seeing eye, capable of turning profits into R&D faster and with more precision and scale than the new startup on the block. And if they didn’t? Well, they would just buy you out, or make you wish you sold.
Of course, the counterargument would be that new technology will sprout new dominant businesses, eager to grab the wheel for a few decades before belligerently driving off the road. What I am proposing is that these businesses, through not only their internal culture, but a portion of the world’s newfound culture of progress, materialism, and prosperity at all cost, will be able to sit at the beginning of the innovation curve with more mental horsepower and resources than their competition looking to enter the field. Empires rose and fell throughout history, whose to say the next iteration of that won’t be global corporations, able to sidestep the vicissitudes of the macro and political world while providing their employees with more support and resources than that of a developed nation.
If life is a team sport, then nothing is more important than talent acquisition. Try forming any group; a company, a family, and it will quickly be brought to your attention you are as strong as your weakest link. When looking at America, the country responsible for birthing these companies, our unity towards a singular goal, culture, agreed upon values, structure, and rules, has never been more fractured. In contrast, the best in breed businesses comb through the world’s talent pool, onboard people into a mission statement and work extremely hard towards its completion. This has allowed these businesses to leave most organizations and countries, in the dust. Most entities throughout human history were in the shape of a pyramid, having the leader at the top, his or her trusted associates below, and so on and so forth. Businesses follow this structure with one person at the top, followed by c-suit executives, upper level management, etc… There is no debate, and no pettiness. If there is, it’s cleared up, or you’re gone. I am not arguing in favor of dictatorial governments, but there is something beyond sluggish and argumentative to the point of paralysis with our current democracy. Part of it is the media, part of it is scale, and part of it is the interconnected nature of our world. Regardless, something needs fixing. These businesses, with their ability to hand selected employees from across the globe, are cultivating a stronger culture than the one that lives outside the office. Contrast that with what you see in Washington, D.C. along with the plethora of social issues dividing America and it becomes pretty clear whose supremacy is forthcoming. Countries will look prehistoric in the face of multi national technology corporations. Their focus and structure will eventually outcompete, and outlast, the very place they were born. Who do you think people will be loyal to in a globally interconnected world? Entrepreneurs are opportunists. They will seek out the country with the most competitive taxes and regulations, and I promise you, they will be welcomed with open arms.
The intersection of corporations and culture has merged into a single rushing highway, feeding the world its personality not based upon merits, but by how much of it has been quickly and easily absorbed. Not to be mistaken for the jaded old man who doesn’t understand what the kids are up to these days, I am simply stating that corporations’ ability to brand and sprinkle society with new products is becoming increasingly dominant in our world, to the point where it’s beginning to shape our social fabric. Trends will change, but the businesses supplying them will be harder to displace.
The majority of what we consume in America has slid down the pipe of a corporation that has done an excellent, almost supernatural job, of marketing. This wouldn’t be an issue if people were able to hold a philosophy or belief above painless consumerism, but as I sit here writing, I couldn’t tell you what America’s culture is at the moment. I take that back, we all gather around our televisions once a year to watch multimillion-dollar advertisements at the super bowl. We have lost ourselves in exchange for a more carefree and juvenile view on how to go about living. This carefree, fulfill your every desire type of living, is a goldmine for intelligent, rational people looking to make a sale. The problem with this is someone, something, will always step in and fill the void left by humanities appetite for having something worth living for. If we willingly forfeit what we choose to hold in a higher regard than the world, it will not be relinquished, only replaced. It is my belief that although we are currently inundated with logos and slogans, this will eventually become their Achilles heel. How many stories have you read about people leaving corporate America in search for a more simple life? Or the recent college graduate who six months into their career realizes its “not for them.” Something about this focused, rational, productive, and employable part of humanity is innately, inhuman. As the culture becomes more corporatized with stronger incentives to join a power structure that will fulfill personal needs, the more the human spirit will rebel against it in search of an individual and self sustaining existence. There will be a divide, those who welcome the future, and those who view its direction as dangerous and unsustainable. The problem is the former will hold most of the power in deciding the worlds direction.
As this structure becomes more entrenched, one has to wonder where people are going to go to build. Coming to America in search of the American dream isn’t dead, it’s just the wrong wording. If a person possesses a polished resume, strong work ethics, and intelligence, what they really mean to say is they are coming to America for the corporate dream. They wish to join the infrastructure of the modern world, such as building software at Google, designing cloths at Nike, becoming an executive at Meta (help wanted), doing product design at Apple, becoming an engineer at Tesla, or even an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.
But what about the rest? Those who either feel this path is not for them, or those who wish to work a more traditional trade. I fear the gap will widen. If we use San Francisco has a model for the future, we will have a wealthy and powerful upperclass, proficient in modern tech, medicine, and law, and a much larger lower class, unable to afford the world being built by them.
Was America a springboard for a new type of superpower? A superpower not unified by history and location, but rather the future and those focused on building and competing in it. Possibly, and although corporate might, paired with our insatiable appetite for the latest, fastest, and most fun is at an all time high, the waves of our word have a chilling track record of collapsing into foam when their crest reaches its peak.