13 November

Here are some huge companies. If somebody asked you ‘where’ these companies are, what would you say? If you were asked ‘please take me to Coles, the company’, where would you take the person? The corporate headquarters? One of the shops? The point being, I think we assume big things have an independent existence, that they actually don’t. Corporations, or even governments - they’re not a single physical thing, in some place, though we tend to assume they are. They exist in a distributed way, through thousands or millions of people, and buildings and technologies etc. They’re full of dispersed individuals in lots of different places, they’re not an object. We are part of them too. Or in other words, I think we need to stop seeing society as having two levels. Small and big, individual and business, individual and government, local and global. All fictions.