If you read my Predictions for 2012, you’ll recall that #6 was “The Corporation” Becomes A Central Societal Question Mark.
We aren’t very far into the year, and signs of this coming true are all around. The “Occupy” movement seems to have found a central theme to its 2012 movement around overturning “the corporation as a person,” and some legislators are supporting that concept.
We’ll see if this goes anywhere, but I wanted to note, as I didn’t fairly do in my prediction post, the role that “The Corporation” played in my thinking. I finally watched this 2003 documentary over the holidays. Its promoters still maintain an ongoing community here, and it doesn’t take long to determine that this film has a very strong, classically liberal point of view about the role corporations play in our society.
If you can manage the film’s rather heavy handed approach to the topic, you’ll learn a lot about how we got to the point we’re at with the Citizens United case. Obviously the film was made well before that case, but it certainly foreshadowed it. I certainly recommend it to anyone who wants the backstory – with a healthy side of scare tactics – of the corporation’s rise in American society.
My next review will be Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, a 2005 book I finished a few weeks ago. I’m currently reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, which is a pleasure.
Other books I’ve reviewed:
What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (my review)
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
I also enjoyed Johnathan Zittrain’s book, and hearing him speak at SuperNova a couple years ago. The event you participated in with him (earlier post) this week sounded interesting too.
Wikinomics by Don Tappscott is a favorite of mine and I’m looking forward to reading his new book Macrowikinomics. There is a new radio series based on the book this weekend, 1/22/12
http://www.macrowikinomics.com/innovation-communities/technology-media/join-the-launch-of-my-new-series-recivilization/
Enjoy
Apologies in advance for the self-pimping but you might be interested in my book Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World (http://amzn.to/vHWiJu) – our core premise is that social media is powered by what makes us human, but our organizations are built to be like machines – with predictable inputs and outputs – and when we try and force one into the other nothing works like it should. We draw from some of the books you mentioned.
Thanks, look fwd to reviewing!