Children are naive to the power of corporations – how about a lesson in ‘profitics’?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/29/children-corporations-schools-apple

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In the time it takes you to read this sentence, Apple will have made enough money to buy the rights to your firstborn child. I may, of course, be miscalculating the market capitalisation of firstborn children; but the fact remains that Apple is making shedloads of cash. On Wednesday the technology giant reported record quarterly revenue of $74.6bn and record profits of $18bn, topping the $16.2bn made by Gazprom in 2011.

This string of dollar signs doesn’t just mean that Apple is richer than most companies; it means that it’s richer than most countries. If Apple’s earnings continue apace its annual revenue will be almost $300bn; a figure comparable to the GDP of Israel, Greece, Denmark or Hong Kong.

It should be noted that GDP measures the value of goods and services produced in a country and is not identical to a company’s revenue. “Apple Is Not As Big As Israel, Greece, Denmark Or Hong Kong, Please, Get A Grip,” grumbled Forbes. But just because GDP is different doesn’t mean the comparison isn’t useful; indeed it highlights an important shift in the power balance between countries and corporations.

The influence of corporations is particularly pronounced among our kids. Although “kids” is a somewhat parochial term – in business speak they’re the iGeneration, “digital natives” who have grown up with constant connectivity and who are defined less by their national citizenship as they are by their global consumership.

There has been a lot of talk about the need for schools to teach coding to children early on so as to better equip them for a digital world. But there has been less talk about the need to rethink how schools teach geography, politics, and citizenship in light of the growing sociopolitical influence of big business. Which is ironic because, while school curriculums largely ignore corporations, corporations are trying to insinuate themselves into curriculums. IBM is opening high schools, Starbucks has partnered with Arizona State University, and McDonald’s has taught nutrition to elementary school kids and thrown McTeacher’s nights.

If we want to educate kids about corporations, rather than have corporations teach our kids, we need an educational paradigm shift. Basically schools need to teach a class that helps kids understand business jargon (Corp BS™), navigate corporate cartography, and recognise that corporate governance has as much of an impact, if not more, as governments on their future.

So what would such a class look like? Well, let me introduce “profitics”, a new and improved version of politics, which examines the way in which the search for shareholder value creates new markets, new behaviours and new ideas of value that could make you very rich or (more likely) quite poor. Profitics is a complex discipline; nevertheless it can be broken down into the following key components:

1. From the social contract to the social media contract

In political philosophy the “social contract” is the idea that people voluntarily surrender some of their rights and freedoms to the state in exchange for the protection that society provides. This has evolved into the social media contract; today people voluntarily surrender some of their rights in exchange for the entertainment and convenience that the likes of Facebook, Google and Apple provide.

2. Everything is for sale

It’s not just our rights to privacy or the ownership of our personal data we’re yielding to corporations, sometimes it’s our first-born children. Last year F-Secure, a Finnish security firm, conducted an experiment exploring the dangers of public Wi-Fi use. When people connected to a public hotspot, the terms and conditions they were asked to agree to included a “Herod clause” promising free Wi-Fi but only if “the recipient agreed to assign their first-born child to us for the duration of eternity”. Six people signed up.

3. The decline and fall of corporate empires

While all this may seem depressing, take heart in the fact that no matter how omnipotent they may seem, all corporate empires eventually fall. Take Nokia, for example, which accounted for a 4% of the Finnish GDP in 2000 and had 41% of the mobile phone market worldwide in 2006. Know anyone with a Nokia now? Exactly.