As part of my ongoing effort to sample most pop cultural representations of corporate/business life, I’ve started watching SyFy’s Incorporated.  Incorporated envisions a dystopian future where, due to global warming and related environmental catastrophes, the world’s governments have become bankrupt, and in their place, “multinational corporations have risen in power and now control 90% of the globe.”

We learn in the first episode that formal governments still exist, but in almost vestigial form; as a practical matter, multinational corporations are in charge.  These corporations compete with each other for resources and market share.  They target each other with espionage and sabotage; when one’s stock price falls, the others’ stock prices rise.  Employees lead a comfortable life within the corporate compound, so long as they adhere to the rules set by their employers; outside of corporate compounds, life is poverty and anarchy.

I get where this show is coming from; I mean, fear of corporate control of government represents a particularly timely anxiety.  And there are lots of sly jokes about today’s political environment – a television news report, for example, tells us that the “Canadian Prime Minister is constructing a fence after 2073 became a record year for illegal immigation.  It is estimated that already 12 million US citizens live in Canada illegally.”  Ha, ha.  But the show perpetuates what I believe is the very damaging misconception that corporations can exist independent of government systems.

For example, it is clear that these corporations have shareholders, and that the shares trade publicly with prices that respond to new information.  So, what legal rights do these shareholders have?  How are they enforced?  What are the regulations that govern the market in which shares trade, and who enforces those regulations?  If corporate managers have that much power, why would anyone invest without fear of exploitation – and if there are limits on their power, so that investors are more confident, where do those limits come from?

The backstory of this universe – as described on the SyFy website – is that governments, under financial pressure, sold various police powers to corporations, and exempted them from taxation.  The implication must therefore be that the government either taxes everyone else to pay the corporations for their service, or allows the corporations to charge private citizens.  But by now, most people are unemployed and surviving as part of the underground economy; the U.S. government, at least, is unable to raise funds to pay for its operations.  Wouldn’t the US dollar have collapsed?  Wouldn’t it be replaced by corporate scrip?

And why are employees treated so well?  In a world where corporations rule, the constituents are the shareholders – not the employees – so that’s who I’d expect to live in luxury.  Certainly, today’s corporate theory would suggest that shareholder interests are somewhat adverse to those of employees, so that when shareholders are ascendant, employees suffer.  The world of Incorporated is obviously a world with excess labor; why would corporations expend so many resources on their workers? 

And who are the shareholders in this world, anyway?  Today’s shareholders are – in large part – employees, who have pooled their retirement funds in either defined benefit or defined contribution plans.  But with only a few multinational corporations – and the majority of the population shunted into the underground economy – that can’t be the system anymore.  If corporations are supplying their employees with all of their needs (healthcare, food, housing, presumably retirement plans), it doesn’t seem like there would be much of an insurance market, let alone a need for 401(k) plans, so those investors have been eliminated.

But I keep coming back to the central problem:  If corporations have supplanted governments, then at minimum, arbitration and trust and reputation and guilds must supplant regulation.  That’s a fascinating vision of the future, but nothing in the show even hints at this direction.  I realize that I’m now stealthily engaging relatively unoriginal debates about the nature of the corporation (artificial/concession, association, real) and the role of the state in constructing the corporate form, but the reality is that corporations are a product of their legal environment.  Without something like law emanating from some external source, there is no corporation.  To imagine corporations as independent of law fatally ignores the role of law in shaping the corporate form itself. 

As a result, I find Incorporated not merely irksome, but actively damaging.  It leads lay viewers to accept the current legal framework for the corporate form as baseline, or natural – instead of a set of affirmative regulatory choices.  I’m not talking about particular salient issues, such as political donations or tax policy; I’m talking about fundamental aspects about the form itself, such as limited liability, the role of the shareholder in the governance structure, and the transferability of ownership interests.  The form itself is inseparable from positive law, which means it is subject to change.  Incorporated obscures that fact, and thus – rather than presenting a critique of the status quo – ultimately reinforces it.