Corporations Versus The Free Market

When you consider the place of the corporation in the design of the socio-economic system running our world, it is striking to consider the power structure put in place by these management innovations originally designed to better service the developmental capacity of the industrial complex. Corporations have been given legal living status as entities, with even more empowerments than individual human entities possess. As our species matures, more and more of the power and control that is manged by centralized command-style governing structures preserves the distorted relationship that individuals maintain with the wealth of humanity, held in trust by corporate entities and governments around the world.

A baby born in the year 2040 will be substantially less powerful as an independent entity at birth in relation to the power structure it is born within than a child who was born in 1940 was. This lack of gravity within an individuals inherent socio-economic existence will influence how governments respond to individual human needs, and how much control corporate structures have over the affairs of mankind. The advancements that mankind makes will collectively make our species richer and more capable, and opportunities will be afforded people in new and exciting ways, but the distortion in power between the one and the many will only grow more pronounced.

WalMart is the best example of what is enabled by our current implementation of corporate management philosophy and practices. No small business can compete with WalMart on equal footing, for there is no such thing as equal footing in the marketplace once WalMart enters the arena. WalMart is accomplishing things that violate any notion of a free market, enabling a dynamic wherein only a WalMart 2.0 has any chance of competing with the corporate structure that is WalMart, Inc. The leverage that is afforded the WalMart entity is out of proportion to the benefit it provides to humanity and its varied goals of preservation and prosperity. In a WalMart world, there is a centralized owner of all assets, employees who work on their behalf at the lowest cost structure permitted, and consumers who are encouraged to consume for consumption sake based on the incentive of low prices and limitless supply.

Humanity is not pursuing its best interests on this current path. This truth will bear itself out in time, and already is in enough detail that many people and cultured societies are taking notice. Still however, we do not have a collective notion of the alternative model that will replace our current corporate model.

What could easily be confused as more of the same by defining a collaborative model of socio-economic exchange as 'Universally Distributed Private Ownership', is in fact the essence of two negative values creating a positive outcome. To move beyond our current phase, we need to empower the individual. The most basic way to do this is to inherently provide ownership rights and definitions to the life of all human beings at birth. To reconstitute a nation such as America as a nation of citizen-owners, represented by an Identity-scheme that allows for distributive command and control within an environment that is win-win-win in nature. In such a marketplace, individuals are not simply consumers, they are owners of the very markets wherein all transactions occur. Whether the goal be to empower individual humans en route to empowering societies, or to rebalance the power that corporations possess in relation to those same individuals, the outcome is the same. Universally distributing ownership of the marketplace is a socio-economic game changer. It changes why students learn, it changes how trading relationships are managed, it changes how nations are governed, it allows for economies based on the sharing of intellectual capital assets to flourish, while providing the much needed framework of personal incentive and accountability that our world is in dire need of.

An effective collaborative network maintains a win-win-win structure. 1 + 1 does indeed equal 3 in such an evolutionary environment. Currently our education system would not have the capacity to instruct this logic, for it is designed with a 1+1=2 model in mind. We must move beyond this state of development and begin providing all the powers that we can to the individual members of our global socio-economic system, so that we do not all wake up one day soon living in a manner that violates our sense of independence and personal liberty. There is one state more powerful than freedom, and it is the freedom you own. In a socio-economic universe, you must own yourself, you must own your life.

Life Inc. Dispatch 06: Why Corporations Hate the Free Market from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

What is UDPO?

Universally Distributed Private Ownership is an idea; it is the notion that if all people alive on planet Earth were contrived as entities with administrative privileges equal to those of corporate entities, our world would be organized in a manner that more accurately reflects the inherent intention found within the motivation for inventing every product, service and management system in the world.

At the root of the idea is the belief that you, the individual life, are in possession from your first moment as a distinct living entity on this planet of the core component of humanity. You are born an owner. At that moment of tabula rasa, before any act of man may influence the nature of your life, you possess all of the rights and privileges of a sacred being. Nations derive their existence and vitality from the willing consent and participatory energies of such beings.

Therefore, at the first moment of your earthly administration and inclusion in the digital database infrastructure which will increasingly come to manage your human life on this planet, and in this universe, you MUST be ordained all of the administrative rights and procedural privileges of personal ownership over the data related to your distinct entity.

No other alternative which gives to the whole of humanity prior to giving to the individual is acceptable in so much that it is contradictory to the inherent structure of the human species. Humanity is an organism that grows in value as it grows en masse. However, all of the capabilities that the human organism possesses or ever will possess are the byproduct of individual beings and the expression of their energetic outcomes. Even when working in collective harmony, the creative leadership of humanity is the task of individual beings working within the mass of the whole. Truly, no man is an island, none of us can survive alone for any significant period of time that matters on a survival metric, however, even before the whole of us are given the opportunity to survive and prosper, we require individuals to show us the way.

Read your history well. Put down your private motivations. Cease fighting for your brand of power, freedom or righteous expression and consider the truth of human life. We are I + I across time. To the degree that we empower the individual we empower the whole. To the extent that we are accountable as individuals, we will be well formed en masse.

So UDPO is a strategy for reflecting the true nature of human life in a socio-economic management system. It begins by providing ownership rights to individual human lives universally, and restructures the participatory framework of all markets to better reflect the role of individual owners in all of the transactional exchanges they are afforded the opportunity to participate within. It is a simple matter of implementation, but one that carries with it pervasive ramifications that will be felt across all parts of our species and its varied civilizations.

A day will arrive at a point in the not-to-distant future that will change our notion of what it means to be alive as a socio-economic entity in the universe. Babies will be born owners, and the world will be better for it.