[P2P-F] Introducing the T-corporation

Fri Aug 12 06:55:23 CEST 2011

  Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader: Introducing the
T-corporation via In defense of anagorism by n8chz on 8/4/11

T as in transparent. How transparent? Transparent enough to satisfy
Transparency Extremist:

Every ledger, every account, every transaction held or made by a
transparent corporation should be open and auditable by the world.
Commercial confidentiality be damned: we have a right to know.

I propose a “soft anagorist” approach, making this level of disclosure
voluntary rather than mandatory, since mandates violate other cherished
principles. For this purpose, we need only invent a new category of
business—a new paradigm in organizational design—which we’ll call the
transparent corporation, or T-corporation. An example of such a planned
paradigm shift is the B-corporation, or for-benefit corporation. The
purpose of the B-corporation appears to be to serve as a platform for
triple bottom line accounting. The purpose I am proposing for the
T-corporation is absolutely maxing out financial disclosure, all the
way down to the transaction level, and disclosure thereof not only to
stakeholders, but to the world at large; the public record. One obvious
casualty is even the pretense of privacy. I myself consider privacy a
lost cause, but when introducing new ideas, objections must be
overcome. To that end, I propose a minor kludge in the interface from
the journals to the public record. For journal entries documenting cash
flows to or from individuals, the name of the party is overwritten with
the designation “an individual.” These individuals will not be numbered
or otherwise differentiated in the public version, to allay fears of
probabilistically inferring the identity of unnamed individuals through
pattern recognition. In summary statements derived from the public
journals, perhaps the sum total of transactions with individuals could
be labeled as transfers to and/or from the “social domain,” which is to
say, the world of humans. An example of this concept minus the “privacy
policy” would be the OpenBusiness license as proposed by ixnaum.
OpenBusiness might be a good way for those of us who are informational
exhibitionists to volunteer information.

Once a T-corporation or OpenBusiness has been established, it might
adopt a standard operating procedure of seeking out others of its kind
and preferentially doing business with them. This incorporates the
“closure seeking” property of Angel Economics. With a sufficiently
large and sufficiently “tight” network of T-corporations and
OpenBusinesses, it should be possible to shed some serious light on
large portions of the supply chain.

There are a number of ways in which the establishment of several
T-corporations might serve the cause of anagorism. One is by putting
the strong efficiency hypothesis to the empirical test, particularly
expanding its application to the world of tangible goods, rather than
the sterile world of the markets in commercial paper. If price signals
are anywhere near as strong an attractor as is claimed, there should be
about the same amount of variation in prices among deeply transparent
vendors as among conventional enterprises. Even if the results of that
experiment turn out not looking good for anagorism, perhaps the cause
of agorism can be advanced. If the obliteration, at least locally, of
information asymmetry (pdf!) can be effective, the market economy
should in theory be more competitive; closer to the agorist ideal.

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