The Corporation
I watched the documentary The Corporation today, which is a film that examines the history of the corporation as a legal entity, examines the behavior of corporations and their negative impacts, and basically asks us to reconsider whether having corporations, as they exist today, is really a good idea. As you might guess, their answer is no.
I went in not unsympathetic to the viewpoint of the film makers: I agree with the idea that corporate personhood under the law seems absurd and possibly dangerous, I agree that the structure of corporations makes them fundamentally amoral creatures even when the people that make them up may be moral, and I agree that they have a dangerous and often unchecked level of influence over society. At the end I had enjoyed the film and learned a few interesting things, but I also couldn't help but get annoyed over the feeling of being propagandized. It seemed like onscreen visuals were used ot influence the viewer's opinion of what was being said in less than rational ways, and it seemed like their interviews with more pro-corporate people tended to lack any serious arguments (even in instances where it's easy to think of some). On the other hand, they did actually interview a number of CEOs, so I can't necessarily fault them too heavily. It wasn't a totally one-sided piece; it just felt a bit slanted. It's okay for a documentary to take a certain viewpoint, but I wish they had dealt with some more serious responses to that viewpoint so the viewer could feel more certain that it's really robust.
Another problem I commonly have with such documentaries is the presence of some fallacious arguments. I realize that this is probably mostly a reflection of the fact that the time is too short to present many arguments in a lot of detail, but I don't really think that's an excuse to give bad arguments (just give fewer). Even discounting those, there were still a lot of good arguments presented, though.
The last issue I often have with such documentaries probably comes from being a scientist; namely I want sound, thorough studies of things, not anecdotal evidence. For example, the film argues that it's the legal nature of corporations that makes them these amoral, potentially monstrous, entities, but what would have been really interesting to see would have been an actual comparison of corporations with similar privately held businesses to see if corporations really are worse by nature. Another sort of unscientific moment came when they were discussing the use of bovine growth hormone (rBST) in dairy cows. They use the typical scare line about there being puss in the milk as a result. Of course that sounds gross, but it would also sound gross if I told you there was rat hair or an bug in your food, and statistically they will be there at some level. The point is that you'd have to know whether this was a significant increase (over the level due to other factors), and it would be nice to know if this is actually a concern (beyond the gross-out factor). As is typical for most documentaries, they don't really cite any sources, besides noting that Canada and Europe don't allow the use of rBST. Other issues surrounding rBST are also discussed, though.
Even with all those complaints, I think the basic premise, that corporations are essentially extremely rich and powerful immortal psychopaths in our midst and that we ought to consider whether that's really the best social arrangement, is a sound one. The things that bugged me about the documentary seem to be pretty common to the genre, and they do bring a lot of interesting information to the table, so in the end I'm still glad I netflixed it.