It’s not often that I get a chance to accuse Charlie Stross of being stuck in the past, so I should take it — especially because it’s a way to avoid (a) commenting more on the tax debacle and (b) finishing the redraft of the monetary policy chapter in Krugman/Wells 3rd edition (how the heck do we get quantitative easing in without totally muddying everything else?)

So: for those who don’t know, Stross is a spectacularly good contemporary science-fiction author, brimming with ideas, who also has a stimulating blog, where his latest entry asks why things are so messed up. His proposed answer is that we’ve been invaded by alien organisms — namely, corporations:

Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.) Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.

I like it; it’s fun (although William Gibson said much the same thing, I think); but it’s so 1960s, if you know what I mean.

No, really. There was a time, back when John Kenneth Galbraith was writing The New Industrial State and all that, when the notion of the soulless corporation transcending individual will was big stuff. But much of what JKG wrote then if anything evokes nostalgia now. There’s a fairly extensive section of The New Industrial State explaining why abuse of corporate position for personal gain was no longer an issue, with “the rise of the technocracy with its new professional attitudes and its widely diffused power acting as a safeguard against individual avarice or larceny.” That was then.

These days, we’re living in the world of the imperial, very self-interested individual; the man in the gray flannel suit has been replaced by the man in the very expensive Armani suit. Look at the protagonists in the global financial meltdown, and you won’t see faceless corporations subverting individual will; you’ll see avaricious individuals exploiting corporate forms to enrich themselves, often bringing the corporations down in the process. Lehman, AIG, Anglo-Irish, etc. were not cases of immortal hive-minds at work; they were cases of kleptocrats run wild.

And when it comes to the subversion of the political process — yes, there are faceless corporations in the mix, but the really dastardly players have names and large individual fortunes; Koch brothers, anyone?

If you ask how it’s possible that a handful of bad actors can get their way so often, the answer has to be, wasn’t it ever thus? What we call civilization has usually been a form of kleptocracy, varying mainly in its efficiency (the Romans were no nicer than the barbarians, just more orderly). Yes, we’ve had a few generations of government somewhat of, by, for the people in some places — but that’s an outlier in the broader sweep of things.

So never mind the hive-minds; good old greed still rules.