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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

> letting corporations influence our behavior

one of the foundational problems with this sort of analysis is that "corporation" isn't really very well defined for this context.

If I live in some imaginary small town 1800's western America, and the owner of the general store convinces me to stock up on something that they happen to have an excess of, is this "corporations influencing our behavior" ?

If I live in some imaginary mid-size town in 1950's USA, and the local Ford dealer is on the radio telling me all about how their latest cars are just the absolute best, and this persuades me to get a Ford for my next car, is that "corporations influencing our behavior" ?

If anyone says anything to me that changes the behavioral trajectory I might otherwise have been on, how do I know if that's corporations influencing my behavior, or "just what people do" ?

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Corporations are headless. A Sole Proprietorship like the one in your example is tied to a single human agent. The Corporation will swap out any human agent who gets out of line.

Although this definition, like all definitions, brings to light uncomfortable corner cases…

Like, is Facebook a corporation, or a Sole Proprietorship?

(I know legally it’s a Corp, but spiritually, is it just Mark Zuckerberg, since he has the controlling stake?)

OK, so let's take me as an example. For 21+ years, I've "run" a sole proprietorship (i.e. telling myself what to do). Soon, I may convert this into an LLC for various reasons. It's possible that after that, I might actually hire an employee.

At what point along the path from where I am now to being the next FAANG do I become "a corporation" in the sense of the comment under discussion? If I have an LLC and 1 employee, legally I'm certainly a corporation, but this seems to not be what the comment was describing?

Huh? In the real world we're currently living in you can probably track 80% of advertising people are exposed to to like 20 fortune 50 companies. Doesn't get more concrete than that

Sure, there's basically a continuum of influential behavior. But scale and purposefulness tip over a line at some point. The general store owner may be a gifted salesman, but he doesn't have a marketing department full of graduate degrees. The car dealership may have a professional ad-maker, but their reach is local. And both of them live where they sell, too -- if they're sociopathic ass____s, their business will suffer. The contrast with the behavior and capabilities of a transnational business is large enough to maybe be a difference of kind, not just degree.

Right, and I'm noting that because it's a continuum of behavior, you have to draw an arbitrary line to demarcate corporate from non-corporate behavior, and that's always somewhat tricky to do.

I can agree with that, but I'd say insisting on "corporate/non-corporate" is sort of a red herring. People use "corporation" as shorthand -- and maybe you're right that it's misleading shorthand -- to talk about scale.

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