New Corporatism

Nathan Heller explores the “new corporatism” touted by Apple, Google, Amazon and others in The New Yorker : These companies are “proud models of novel efficiency, and yet, in the same breath, they claim that efficiency isnt their real priority. Brad Stone says that Bezos touts his companys purpose as ‘missionary’ rather than ‘mercenary’ (a wishful distinction). Google takes pride in a corporate culture of ‘sharing’ (even though its out to take over your mail, your work files, and your glasses).”

Heller shows that in practice these tech giants act a lot like giant corporations of the past. The ambiguity is whats new in new corporatism; a company that wants to be the champion of arty, quirky individuation and also wants to grow toward enormous profits fits no widely held social world view that we know. Despite Apple’s appeal to”usability and individualism,” its “internal culture runs toward proprietary control. Apple makes money by creating sleeker versions of competing devices and selling them at a big markup.”

But these companies do have a different self-presentation than earlier American corporations, and that they are particularly concerned with control of the “story” that identifies the company. Heller traces this, not surprisingly to the 1960s:

In a brilliant 2006 book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism ,the scholar Fred Turner tried to figure out how the communal idealism of the nineteen-sixties transformed into the business-minded, new-corporate culture of the nineties and aughts. Turner, a communications professor at Stanford, dismisses the idea that the counterculture was simply a rejection of postwar industrialism. Instead, he looks at a frequently derided facet of sixties counterculture: the people who flocked toward the communes and the subsistence movements. These werent the same as the activists known as the New Left. They were, in mood and interests, transcendentalists. They hoped to escape the old-style organizations that kept people dutiful and hived off from one another. Turner zeroes in on Stewart Brand as a bellwether for the groups changing relationship to tech enterprise. Brand was not what we would now consider a techie. In the late sixtiesafter finding his way into an ‘influential art tribe’ and then into the orbit of Ken Keseys Merry Prankstershe created his most famous product, the ‘Whole Earth Catalog,’ a photography-heavy compendium of craftwork tools, ethnic artifacts, and new-technology reports, which he imagined as an L. L. Bean-type catalogue for those ‘starting their own civilization hither and yon in the sticks.’ If you had some use for wholesale buckskin, Brands guide would tell you whom to contact. If you needed the new Hewlett-Packard tabletop calculatormaybe your abacus was brokenthere was that, too. New technology, in the eyes of the ‘Catalog,’ wasnt the crushing apparatus of the Man. It was a tool for frontier-style living and a medium of creative exchangean ideal that Turner thinks harks back to the collaborative culture of Cold War research. This outsiders idea of tech evolved into the dreamy, sentimental stories of new-corporate idealism, a belief in the defining heroism of creative innovation.”

Brand saw the personal computer “as a path to individualism; communal consciousness would arise from the new connectedness of online life. Tech optimism inherited the countercultural idyllic dream. This way of thinking crept far into the story that technology tells about itself, and found a home there. Jobs described Brands catalogue as a bible of his generation. One of Brands close protgs, Kevin Kelly, was a founding editor of Wired .”

Heller says that Turner’s book explains “why new-corporate guys (and, as the new books make tacitly clear, its an uncomfortably male-dominated world) vaunt their ingenuity and their exceptionalism, even as their business goals are standard issue.”