Dear all,
One of the major changes of our time is how the corporation has moved from the center to the periphery of the economy. We’re leaving a world in which the large corporation was the epicenter of our lives. We’re entering one in which more and more shots will be called by an even stronger party: the multitude—another name for the aggregation of networked individuals.
Why were corporations so central until recently? Venkatesh Rao has an interesting take: “In the 1780s, only a small fraction of humanity was employed by corporations, but corporations were shaping the destinies of empires. In the centuries that followed the crash of 1772, the power of the corporation was curtailed significantly, but in terms of sheer reach, they continued to grow, until by around 1980, a significant fraction of humanity was effectively being governed by corporations.”
The reach of the corporate world kept increasing during most of the age of the automobile and mass production. The corporation proved a…