I’ve been thinking some about the nature of corporate governance, and how it relates back to the state, civilization, and the cause of human flourishing. Suffice to say, I don’t think we’ve done a great job as stewards of our civilization. If we’re going to turn a corner and make the world a better place, we need to get real about how corporations are ordered and how they relate to the wider world they inhabit.
The State
The modern conception of the state is in a bit of trouble these days. Across the world, democratic institutions shudder under the invasive influence of informational warfare, truth falls perpetually into question, and tribal nationalism (with all its many horrors) once again threatens the gentle and the inclusive. Geographic centrality has been stripped away—terrorists don’t sneak off to the woods to plan their deeds. Instead, they hide out on Signal. Perhaps it’s easiest to say that the state has fallen woefully behind the times; we might also say that the whole global assemblage of states has fallen behind the times.
States have been with us for a while. There’s a temptation to confuse them with governments, but it’s probably better to understand a government as an emanation of the state—in the US, we change governments every 4 to 8 years; we’ve been working within the same state for over 200. The state is something like an organizational chart—it creates its own logic of identity and promotes an endless cycle of repetition. In this way (to follow from Deleuze and Guattari), the state territorializes time and space, imposing its logic on a given population.
But any cycle is only driven by the combined interactions of its component parts, and the apparent static power of the state is almost always and in all cases threatened from inside and outside. The seeds of its dissolution are found in us—each of us, all the time. The notional impulse that all of social experience, from states on down, is in some extreme sense the outcome of the workings of a collective subjectivity.
Modern subjectivity is a funny thing—less generous writers describe modernity as fundamentally psychotic, constructing its own reality rather than reacting to it. The age of the internet has, if anything, only accelerated this trend. The shock and surprise most Americans experience when it dawns on them that so many of their fellows actually think that the world is ordered as “Q” proclaims needs to be as understandable as it is humbling. The age of “common context” is behind us. Now is the age of “perpetual differentiation.” And this brings rising radicalism: as old orders fall apart, ever-smaller numbers will cling to them with increasing desperation.
The Corporation
But it’s not just governments that are under pressure. Businesses too, also subject to these forces, will increasingly be responsible for maintaining a kind of social order, both within their ranks and in how they struggle against other organizations. The corporation becomes a kind of state and, like any other state, is riven by the conflict between the apparatuses of governance, the intuitive drive of the individuals within the organization, and the mythmaking that sustains company happy hours and community service days.
Maybe we can extend this field to incorporate the conflict between corporations themselves. Competition might breed a kind of efficiency, but it also breeds contempt. Contempt is one of those things that can pretty quickly get out of hand—wars get waged in its name. The entire cyberpunk genre is largely built around the idea that corporations will ultimately represent the main competitors for resources and will do so in the same reckless way they do today. This is learned behavior, of course—corporate culture is as constructed as any other; an amalgam of individual impulses and inherited directives.
And why do they behave this way? Perhaps Ripley put it best in the sci-fi classic Aliens: “You know, I don’t know which species is worse. At least you don’t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.” Corporate leaders are often fighting not just with other corporations, but internally. Most I’ve encountered are rife with useless infighting, with executives scrabbling desperately for influence, usually doled out by some wildly narcissistic Mammonite to whom they have become slavishly (and hysterically) devoted. And under these conditions, even if your senior leadership is made up of decent, well-meaning people, they probably shouldn’t count on much of what middle management tells them: too many of them are sycophants who made their careers by pushing down talent in the name of bravado and bottomless insecurity. The modern corporation seems to love falling into these traps. After all, divide and conquer might not be supremeexcellence, but it works in the short run.
And perhaps this was always true.
As we know them, the modern corporation was birthed in the 17th century. The Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) was one of the first—a state-run monopoly engineered to crush Dutch trading rivals and dominate the seas. Spice trading was an incredibly lucrative industry back then, but it was also incredibly dangerous and required considerable upfront capital investments. Building and provisioning ships was expensive, journeys could take years, and the risks of failure were incredibly high. By uniting the hodgepodge of Dutch merchants under a single legal umbrella, risk could be spread out and capital centralized around an extra-national institution without the risk of dragging the Dutch crown into whatever legal and political messes might follow Europe’s aggressive expansion of trade. The VOC acted, for all intents and purposes, like a state in itself. It could raise capital, deploy armies, and enter into treaties. Other nations quickly followed suit (most notably the British East India Company, which ultimately conquered India), making the corporation an essential agent of European imperialism.
So corporations came into existence not to stimulate competition, but rather to eliminate it. They began as an exercise in mercantilism and monopoly, enjoying considerable power in the name of their host state. They were nationalist in composition and ambition, built to enrich the monarchies they served.
How the times have changed…
Escaping the State
Since those days, corporate leadership has, by and large, lost all sense of long-term viability. The corporate monopolies of the 17th century were built to offset the risk inherent in long-distance trade. Today, most corporate leaders don’t bother thinking much further downrange than a quarter or two. The people who run so many modern corporations focus on short-term gains and usually ignore the past—this is especially true in the tech space, where disruption has come to be prized over consideration. I don’t meet many people who take a moment to consider why a system has been made to work the way it does before deciding that it needs to be broken—consider the activities of Trump, Musk, and DOGE today.
And this may simply be a symptom of the larger malaise that infects the modern corporation: the institution was originally conceived as an extension of the state, a tool for the projection of power and trade; the British East India Company effectively conquered India and made Victoria an empress. The modern corporation holds no such bonds and has spent most of the modern age evolving into a kind of political parasite, with many now dependent on government largesse even as it commits itself to undermining anything the state might demand of it in return.
This means that, for all their efforts, most corporations never actually reach escape velocity. At the end of the day, they need the protection of politicians, apparatchiks, and police services, if nothing else to enable shamelessness and inefficiency (Epstein made millions providing elites with underage hookers and blow; capital investment opportunities be damned). In theory, public corporations should be subject to a range of checks, both legally and through the fiduciary interests of shareholders. Of course, we all know how well these things work. The investing class has repeatedly shown a taste for memestocks and fast returns that is, like the leadership they prefer to keep in place, myopic and short-sighted. As for the law, corporate interests have become strikingly adept at bribing lawmakers and promoting the election of ignorant toadies who don’t properly understand what’s going on.
All these trends are essential for understanding the vector by which corporations have run from accountability and deterritorialized (or maybe simply destabilized) the modern state. In America, whose democratic institutions have finally started to fail under this persistent onslaught, the consequences are especially severe: all three branches of our government are effectively broken. The legislatures have been overrun by grasping, ignorant reactionaries, the judicial branch has been packed with amoral hacks, and the executive function has become little more than a catharsis machine for an especially broken and banal polity desperate for someone to blame they can actually hurt.
Getting What They Want
Of course, all of this is stupid. But also understandble. Most corporate institutions have no reason to exist aside from acquisition. As such, they can’t really be understood to have an interest in long-term viability. They fight against the state, somehow hoping that lawlessness will work out to their advantage. Consider the Mexican cartels—these enterprises have done an impressive job of unwinding the efficiency of the Mexican government, leaving a trail of misery and carnage behind. What happens if they succeed in supplanting it entirely? What do their leaders say to the children of that nation once they’ve effectively broken civil society?
The same could be asked of men like Elon Musk and the rest of the Trump cabinet. This gaggle of billionaires and millionaires, most of whom haven’t had to deal with real humans for decades, honestly think they understand the essential functions served by the government they’re so determined to sweep aside? We should be very careful about giving too much ground to the ambitions of this class of people. After all, they don’t know when to quit (literally—most of our tech oligarchs could do enormous good by stepping down and leaving their creations to better, more responsible people).
But then, the thing about power is that it has something to do with getting other people to do what you want. This is perhaps the thing that poets have in common with CEOs—both work toward a similar end. The poet, being of an earlier kind, uses words. The capitalist uses money. And money is way more effective. After all, it’s much easier to understand. Which rather brings us back to Epstein. Most people want the same things, and you don’t build financial empires without a little bit of insecurity. Which probably means you feel better when your hooker is a little too young, a little too inexperienced, and scared of your NDA. Someone with a little more maturity might be faster to recognize your shortcomings. (And yeah, if you think I’m talking about you, I probably am.)
But I digress… corporations become dangerous machines because they only want one thing. And regardless of their niche, are legally obligated to stop at nothing to get it. How can such an institution possibly be good for the long-term health of society?
Getting Back to What’s Good
The short answer is that, under existing frameworks, it can’t be. What started as a tool to expand the powers of the state has morphed into a parasitical monstrosity that can no longer be trusted around its host. In short, the culture of business has ossified into the very thing it was designed to overcome. The question to ask is whether or not anything can be done. Corporatized private enterprise has accomplished some amazing things; the technologies we enjoy today are almost entirely the result of thousands of corporations coordinating the efforts of millions of workers to find innovative solutions to the complex problems of human existence. As such, their revolutionary potential is very real. And a few, in deference, are helmed by genuine visionaries—people who built systems that have actually improved the lives of countless people.
How do you build a corporation that sheds the worst impulses that the institution has picked up? How do we balance the mad drive for profitability against the needs of people and the planet? It start by redefining success and rethinking the ways we organize ourselves in an age when the landscape of competition and innovation will only shift faster. So what does this look like?
First, a successful corporation must be more than profitable—it must be adaptive. The world changes. The markets shift. Leadership turns over. The best organizations are:
- Anti-fragile, not just stable
- Able to learn and evolve without collapsing their identity
- Designed for change as a core competency, not as a crisis response
Second, they possess a sense of purpose and meaning. A successful corporation creates a myth around itself that the people around and in it can get behind. This looks like:
- A clear internal mythology—not just “what they do” but why they do it
- Consistency between stated values and actual behavior
- Rituals, symbols, and stories that create cultural coherence
Third, corporations are really networks, connected by a constellation of nodes (of which shareholders are only one). Successful ones are designed with this in mind and consciously function as a kind of social organism. As such, good ones need structures and systems in place that enable them to honor their relationships. This includes:
- Employees being treated like humans, not assets
- Customers trusting the brand and product
- Communities benefiting from its presence
- Ecosystems (natural or digital) being respected, not exploited
Because corporations are working networks, complexity and network theory offer useful metrics by which to analyze their effectiveness. And so, for a modern corporation, success depends less on hierarchy and more on signal clarity:
- Information should move quickly and accurately across teams
- Leadership should be responsive to data from the edges, not just the center
- Feedback loops should be tight, honest, and acted upon
Remember that the VOC started out as a shipping concern, effectively coordinating the activities of hundreds of ships. Centralized control would have been impossible—it was literally an institution in flow.
Which also suggests that a degree of cultural cohesion is essential. People need to know what the right thing to do is when there’s no one around to tell them. And so, a successful corporation should cultivate a self-sustaining culture. This means:
- Psychological safety for dissent and innovation
- Space for informal networks and “nomadic” behavior
- A culture that can withstand the departure of charismatic leaders
But to be truly successful, a corporation needs to remember its connections to the wider civilization it inhabits—to the communities that sustain it and give rise to the need for it in the first place. This means:
- A truly successful corporation gives something back to humanity
- They commit themselves to leaving the world a better place than they found it
- They take pride in rendering value (or at least taxes) back to the public systems that sustain them
Which also suggests another essential point: corporations need to do a better job of knowing how and when to end gracefully. Many corporations rot because they don’t know how to:
- Split off parts that no longer serve the mission
- Wind down legacy models without denial
- Accept obsolescence with dignity
It’s not just about making money—if corporations are people, they need to become people that others want to emulate, join, or remember. And they should probably know when they’ve worn out their welcome.
Org Charts into Flow Charts
Terry Pratchett was one of the great English satirists, a man of wit and keen insight. It was because of his book Making Money that I first became aware of one of the more interesting inventions in the history of economics: the Phillips Economic Computer (or, delightfully, the MONIAC). Invented in 1949, the MONIAC (short for MOnetary National Income Analogue Computer) was a hydraulic computer—an assembly of tubes and reservoirs designed to simulate the movement of money through the British economy. It turned out to be not only a handy teaching device, but (unsurprisingly) a surprisingly accurate tool for modeling economic activity.
The trouble with being human and living in the universe is that, as much as we might like to think in terms of static permanence, everything around us is in a state of perpetual motion—of flow. Just as spacetime boils around us, so too do our lives flow through the years, culminating in death, disillusion, and reconstitution. Money is just another system in flow, with the most acquisitive among us acting a bit like blood clots (which means Elon Musk might be considered, in terms of political economy, a stroke).
As previously mentioned, a corporation is a social organism—a living network for moving information and directing activity toward specified outcomes. More than mere exercises in project management, modern corporations need to understand themselves not as fortresses but as systems for modulating flows: flows of capital, affect, information, desire, and the people who make these things move.
In Deleuzian terms, corporations need to embrace an ethos of becoming. To thrive in our post-structuralist age, they must embrace change as a basic component of organizational existence. They must recognize their role as assemblages in motion rather than petrified economic territories. They should slip around fixed identities, seeking out new spaces with the same ease they abandon old ones.
This means becoming flatter, more egalitarian, and more responsive to shifting conditions both within and without. They must focus on developing distributed agency across the workforce. A corporation that seeks out monopoly or single-stream domination is setting itself up for disaster by means of atrophy. And frankly, if a corporation is successful in completely dominating a space, its functions should probably be turned over to the state. There’s a strong case to be made that firms like Amazon and Facebook have succeeded to such a degree that they need to be subsumed into something multinational and democratically accountable. (Again, most shareholders are too shortsighted to be trusted with anything essential—once a thing becomes essential, it’s probably time to rethink its governance. Consider the advantages public healthcare systems offer over private insurance schemes. Hyper-focusing on profitability can do a lot of harm.)
Seen this way, corporations become emanations of the plane of immanence. They emerge as machines built on connection rather than hierarchy, empowering people by distributing agency and creating a space where innovation arises from within—from the bottom up. The right question isn’t “Who owns this?” but “Where is this going?”
Because at the end of the day, a corporation is a kind of legal fiction. They aren’t really people. Instead, a corporation is a story—not simply a product. The narratives they conjure maintain a coordinating function, a vector for desire. The mythology a corporation adopts will shape its future and the future of those who interact with it. The important thing is that myths aren’t destiny unless you let them be. To thrive, a corporation needs to accept that destiny shifts. The Fates have always been known to be fickle. Embracing that is a way to ensure relevance.
The War Machine Within
The history of development is written in terms of competition. But we need to be careful in how we compete. History is rife with examples of people forcing the bar down rather than upping their game. And because most things are trapped beneath a ceiling called “diminishing returns,” competition can quickly wind up ruining everyone involved.
To wit—and at the risk of alienating my reader—I’d suggest that this is ultimately what makes professional sports boring. The best players have reached a limit that doesn’t allow for much variation; the games are simple; the strategies, well-tested. And because of the enormous amounts of money that circle around them, I watch every Super Bowl quietly understanding that the whole thing, after a certain point, is fixed. (The fact that Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce is pretty solid evidence that entertainment culture writ large is kind of a joke.)
So the question confronts any enterprise: how do they avoid the foregone conclusion? How do they escape the slow suffocation of their own success—the calcification of process, the idolization of the org chart, the inevitable transformation of inspiration into dogma?
Deleuze offers a kind of answer in the war machine—explored through the figure of the nomadic raider, someone from beyond the walls of the city, riding across the steppes of history, untethered from the logics of the state. In this way, the war machine isn’t just violence. It’s motion. It’s the force that resists capture, the creative exteriority that pushes against bureaucracy, hierarchy, and repetition.
In contrast, the state apparatus is about fixity. It codifies roles, generates identity, and rewards loyalty and compliance.
In the corporate world, this tension plays out between the nomads—product visionaries, rogue operators, cross-functional weirdos—and the border guards: middle managers, compliance officers, and HR professionals trying to protect their bosses. The border guards aren’t all villains, necessarily. They’re trying to keep the walls intact, to maintain coherence, to protect the system from collapse. But in doing so, they often suppress the very motion that keeps the system alive.
The problem is not that the war machine exists—it’s that the enterprise forgets it needs it.
When an innovation team is allowed to roam, to connect seemingly unrelated nodes, to act outside the map, something vital emerges. But when the system tightens, when KPIs become surveillance and every Slack message is watched for tone, the nomads either burn out—or break off to build somewhere else.
Success, then, lies not in defeating the war machine, but in learning how to ride it without trying to own it. A good corporation is one that’s learned to let the borders flex.
The Obligation of Care
The trouble with engineering corporations along these lines is that designing a system capable of perpetual change is hard. Theorists might valorize fluidity and deconstruction, but they often forget that people live in the wreckage of transformation. So how should leadership reconceive itself in relation to the chaos it unleashes on the people who depend on it? The answer is found in that earlier claim around adaptation: corporations should engender, empower, and promote the same resilience in the people who work within them.
After all, the days of our grandfathers are over. No one can really rely on having a career, or falling into a job that provides security for their families over any sort of term. Especially now, as most corporate titans chase incentives and disruptions in a way that renders employee loyalty into a liability (thus the twin post-millennial axioms: never trust your boss, and HR is the enemy; forget these at your peril).
I don’t know that we can really buck these trends. But we can handle them with a little more grace. We can learn to make the transitory nature of employment a thing of value—to the institutions doing the employing and to the people who pass through them. If we’re to build a better world out of this mess, leadership needs to rethink itself in terms of stewardship—not simply demanding results, but caring for the people in their charge. Exits should be made gracefully; transitions honored.
If the modern corporation is an assemblage—shifting, unstable, and always becoming—then those who lead it are not commanders but stewards of flux. Their job is not to impose order from above, but to listen at the edges, trace emergent patterns, and protect the people who inhabit the flow. Because here’s the truth: most people don’t want to live in a permanent revolution. They want enough stability to plan their lives, to raise their kids and to care for their bodies. If we ask them to ride the war machine—to embrace uncertainty, improvisation, and relentless iteration—then we owe them shelter, clarity, and respect in return.
The moral failure of leadership today isn’t just a matter of corruption or incompetence—it’s a question of abdication. It’s mistaking agility for disposability. It’s treating human beings like lines in a spreadsheet, while preaching transformation from the main stage—a transformation they themselves are struggling desperately to avoid.
A good leader in a nomadic system doesn’t promise permanence—but they do promise presence. They make space for dissent, offer protection without control, and accept the responsibility of creating a livable rhythm inside the storm.