Companies are people! Similar to the imaginary number and to the nearly identical exclamation in a certain Charlton Heston movie, the revelation that companies are considered persons by the law (and apparently don’t understand plural forms) drives the youthful mind straight to despair and radical utopianism at least until a couple years after college (taxes drive oh so many to the right). So what does that mean? I’m far from a lawyer, but I sure did find out what it meant last year. Last year. 2022. The year Soylent Green was supposed to have happened. The year of the animal great animal incorporation, almost as dramatic as Kim Stanley Robinson’s bubbles of floating-to-earth creatures in 2312. I’m sure you’ve already heard everything the news has to say about the events of recent history, but I’ll tell you what I saw, heard, and did.
It started with the Addax and the desert. I love the desert. It’s the cleanest place on earth, with sun-bleached sand and no moisture to propagate bacteria or Floridian humidity. Florida, terrible. Anyway, the desert. Great place. I spent months and months in the Sahara, and one of the treks took me to the far reaches of Mauritania. I was trying to dodge the continued conflict over Western Sahara with my guide, an unabashedly anti-authority Berber. His devil-may-care attitude seemed to derive from the conviction that all that might happen to him was the will of god. I could see the advantage of such a stance in the snake-filled parts of the desert we had already crossed. The sun was a quarter of the way through brilliantly passing the horizon when Ptolemy (as much as he hated others having power over him, he definitively loved history) stiffened. We had stumbled upon a small herd of Addax, one of the rarest animals in the world. Critically close to extinction (fucking Minnesotan dentists) the Addax was one of those animals far more suited to the desert than myself. And it was unbelievable that we might see them in the wild.
That moment stuck with me, and when I returned to San Francisco, I did more research. There really were so few left. Reintroduction programs had some success. But I couldn’t get those incredible horns out of my head. And while it didn’t seem as though they would pass off the face of the earth, being wild is a right, damnit.
I was having a beer with a lawyer friend of mine in Dolores Park soon after returning, briefly thankful for a respite from the sun in the fog. I asked what the deal was with corporate personhood (I love prodding my specialist friends about the oddities of their fields – I don’t really have any economist friends left) and got an earful of case law and history. Her firm was in the middle of re-engineering the entity relationships of a technology conglomerate to protect some of the less risky parts of the business from the parts that everyone was up in arms about. I asked if animals could become people; why not? Legal fictions can become human and real, breathing creatures can’t? After a ten minute earful, I had the beginnings of a tiny grasp of the issues.
So you know what came next. I, along with a few collaborators, started companies with the concomitant legal entities in the necessary jurisdictions to incorporate every Addax we could identify in the names we decided upon. So we were cavalier, yes. We probably could have used a better process to name these corporate people that were meant to be shim people for the Addax, who were very much not people under the law and in reality. We raised money for these companies and provided the type of protection that those a little less wealthy than Mark Zuckerberg can buy (including high-altitude continuously patrolling drones with more than just infrared cameras and WiFi beaming for some of our ungulates in higher risk areas). Governments didn’t love it at first, but they eventually made the same concessions that they tend to make to other companies (mountainsides are still a long way from becoming people). The most surprising part of the whole exercise was that the naming had almost a greater effect than the incorporation. When people around the world were able to choose their favorite Addax, talk about him or her by name, and even invest in their personhood through the companies we built, the outrage at a potential or actual murder was a hurricane. So even the region’s less modern governments accepted when incursions resulted in perpetratorial loss of life.
What we didn’t exactly expect was the rampant and unstoppable expansion of personhood and incorporation to animals of all types. There was currently a class-action lawsuit working through the Michigan courts demanding an end to the annual mass murder of the now-named deer across the state; the Supreme Court was set to hear a case brought on behalf of nearly all the American domesticated, pigs protesting their impending baconhood. Zoos were nearly all facing bankruptcy – even the seemingly frivolous suits seeking to free species that could live nowhere else were expensive. Polar bears had bought millions of acres of property after a series of reverse public stock market listings orchestrated by finance wizards wearing Patagonia flannels (who had also done very well out of the whole thing).
The collective awakening to the massive, unforgivable crimes that had been perpetrated against other living things was looking like it would stick. Of course there were those who resisted. Several examples frustrated carnivores killing a well-capitalized coyote or elk had resulted in jail time and bankruptcies. One of the American political parties seemed to have taken its token color literally and nearly every one of their prospective 2024 presidential candidates was getting ready to run on a platform to remove the protections that had been willed (and legally enacted) into being.
Here is where my part in this story ends. I got in early on the IPO for one of the more musical blue whales (Spotify was not excited to pay royalties, but they came around), so I’m retiring early. It’s the rare life that’s worthy of a Wikipedia page, and I’m proud to have earned mine in just one spectacular year. I’m going back to the desert to trek with Ptolemy and try to find the ataraxia that he embodies, happy in the knowledge that we’ll be seeing a lot more addax.
Roman Ryan 