Lovecraftian Corporations

-- By Anderson Dalmeus - 01 Mar 2024

Corporations have become nearly ubiquitous in the every day life of Americans. They are understood by their branding their products and services and the people who work there. The corporate entity can be understood as a kind of legal fiction ordained by the bureaucracy of the state. However we might also consider taking the phrase “corporate entity” in a very literal sense. That is when we say that google is a corporate entity we do not merely mean to say that it is a short hand for understanding the culmination of disparate processes and projects that form google but rather that google does in fact take on a life of its own by the process of incorporation. This may seem like a tortured conclusion and even now as I write it I can feel myself stretching the phrase “take on a life of its own” but it isn’t an unprecedented interpretation either. This thinking should really just be considered an extension of the reasoning that led the Supreme Court to their decisions in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad and Citizens United v the FEC. Corporations law is designed for the purpose of manifesting the capital C “Corporation” as a distinct legal thing from its property and its labor and these cases tell us that corporations also have 1st amendment rights to free speech and 14th amendment rights to protections from the state. However I will have to break with the Supreme Court in one small detail of their characterization of corporate entities. Rather than viewing them as persons or having personhood they should be viewed the same way one views the abominations of a Lovecraftian horror. They are creatures that exist abstractly and even to begin to perceive them in their true forms fundamentally alters the mind away from the natural reasoning of a human. Their machinations are unknowable in their entirety and their goals are not always anthropomorphic. One might consider that the shareholders or the board of a corporation are ultimately responsible for its decisions but that is like saying the neurons in a person’s brain are responsible for their decisions. It is doubtless true but reveals little about the actual person. The same way the cells of the body come together to form a whole person without ever arguably being able to engage with or understand that they do form that person the workers and owners of a corporation form an 3entity that they will never be able to engage with directly. It is why the law imposes fiduciary duties on board members. Because the corporation cannot speak to any individual piece that makes it any more than I can directly talk to my own cells and these duties prevent the entities constituents from becoming cancerous to it. While it may yet still seem farfetched to claim that a corporation literally does exist as a result of the law, is that more farfetched than selling your time to that corporation? If the corporation is not literally real then where does a someone’s time go when they spend all of those hours working for it? Obviously not to that person because then they’d be working for themselves. That person feeds their time, their energy, their hopes, their dreams and nearly everything they hold dear to that corporation but the corporation doesn’t actually exist. What is to be said of a world where a person can give all that they are into nothing? Certainly we would call this madness. But even then we are simply led back to the Lovecraftian description of the corporation and its impact on those who engage with it. One pours their blood sweat and tears into the void and while it would be an emotionally satisfying to say that the void isn’t there the apparent absence of all the effort poured in is evidence that something is there. If that void were not there to speak of then all that was poured into it would also be there. Likewise it is evident that corporations do exist because something seems to be draining humanity of all its energy and productivity. Something is eating the planets resources at a rate that no mere organism could. One might say humans could do that but as stated before humans are the to corporations as cells are to the human. Individual cells could not do what the entire human could and you could have as many cells in the human body as you would like but they all only move when the greater human acts intentionally. This means that corporations the wretched conglomeration of human activity and productivity are inevitable. The horrific conclusion of a Lovecraftian story is that the eldritch creatures pulling the strings of society are unavoidable and cannot be defeated by humanity. In the Lovecraftian lens this is because they are like natural disasters. Devastating though they may be they are merely a part of life that are simply beyond the control of mankind. But I will take it a step further still. The corporate entity is not merely a force of nature mankind must contend with but rather it is the human nature of any group that grows to be a size large enough to have that complexity. The corporate creature awakens at some point after enough human mass and activity comes about and it begins to consume all that there is to consume. The only choice on the individual level for humans is whether to be part of the entity or to go off the grid.