Free Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

static bags of capital. And in doing so, it has taken a liquid medium necessary for our economy’s circulation and frozen it in corporate accounts. Farmers know to leave fields fallow or plant restorative crops so that they can repair and remineralize. Aggressive extraction leaves nothing.
    From a traditional economics perspective, like that of a recent Standard & Poor’s report, 18 the income disparity between people and corporations has gotten too wide. The logic used by the forecast is straightforward. The researchers broke down income into four main categories: labor, capital gains, capital income, and business income. In a healthy economy, there’s a balance among these forms of income, with most people making money through labor or small-business income while a wealthy minority makes money off stock as either dividends or capital gains. If corporations convert too many assets from the working and business economies into pure capital, then the whole system seizes up for lack of fuel.
    The main figure they cite, the Gini coefficient of income inequality, measures how much income has been monopolized by the shareholders at the top. A Gini coefficient of 0 would mean that everyone has the same amount of money; a coefficient of 1 means that all the income is being taken by just one person or corporation. According to Beth Ann Bovino, chief economist at S&P, once that coefficient goes above 0.4 or 0.45—wherewe are as of this writing—it hurts growth for everyone. “It’s good for a market economy to have income inequality but to extremes, it can actually damage growth long term and make it less sustainable.” 19 Bovino showed that it’s not just the extreme of inequality that’s to blame but the decline of labor and business income in the face of rising capital gains. Simply stated, it’s harder to make money by working or creating value when the scales tip too far in favor of investors and shareholders.
    In a sense, though, the aim of the original corporate program has been achieved: those who create value have been utterly subsumed by those who passively invest. But as Bovino is trying to warn us, corporate shareholders can’t take this much money out of circulation without killing the goose. Those who run real businesses or, worse, work for a living end up like the musicians on the bad end of the long tail. Meanwhile, passive investors who depend on economic growth end up sitting on their bags of money, unable to find new productive investments.
    That’s why the S&P cut its growth forecasts for U.S. corporations, which are still flummoxed by the whole situation. Corporations saw themselves as so abstract, so foreign to any real place or market, they had no idea they were destroying the economic ecosystem on which they were themselves depending.

THE PLATFORM MONOPOLY
    A corporation can’t really see itself or gauge its overall contribution to the economy, much less society. It has always depended on people in order to execute its functions. No matter how much like a person the corporation became, no matter how many rights of personhood it won from Congress and the courts, it was still entirely abstract. It needed our arms, legs, mouths, and brains to function.
    Digital technology, though, might finally give corporations the autonomy they need to make decisions without us, and even the bodies they need to execute their choices in the real world. What they want from us and for us is being determined right now—in most cases by corporationsthat are already running without fully conscious human intervention. They will soon be software running software.
    No question, digital technology has created tremendous new avenues for growth. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and many other corporations have created new opportunities and new millionaires. But as a result of their extractive, monopolistic practices, the landscape is left with less total activity and potential for growth. The pie is smaller, or at