For some reason we think of corporations and governments as different things. but an incorporation is a government, and a government is an incorporation. that is the whole point, that is why a cooperation is formed.

A group of people want to run their enterprise under rule of law and this requires a government. this legal entity we call a corporation. it may be a for profit endeavor. it might be a public good physical area monopoly(a town, county, state, country). It might be a for profit physical area monopoly(these were some of the first licensed corporations, but you don't see it much now days). anyway there are many types of corporations.

Usually to achieve the desired legal protection a license is acquired from a parent corporation that lets you form the government needed to run the corporation. it's corporations all the way down. At the top level they are peers(nominally) and must guarantee their protection the hard way(armed force). Organized crime is an example of an unlicensed cooperation, there is still a government, but the endeavor is run unlicensed, in rebellion to whatever larger entity claims jurisdiction over the area.

> For some reason we think of corporations and governments as different things. but an incorporation is a government, and a government is an incorporation. that is the whole point, that is why a cooperation is formed

This lens is increasingly the norm in the PoliSci and Management spaces, with Institutionalism and research into administrative capacity being extremely vogue rn.

Economists like Daron Acemoglu, Yasheng Huang, Ramesh Khurana, etc have dug into this.

Hence my view that even private enterprise is inseperable from it's host government. It is my belief any prohibitions on activity that apply to the government should trickle down to corporations it instantiated. Not privileges, but definitely restrictions.

> For some reason we think of corporations and governments as different things. but an incorporation is a government, and a government is an incorporation.

Most corporations have owners, most governments don’t.

It depends on how the group was formed and what rule of law it operates under on who the owner is. where owner is defined on who gets to pick the leaders.

One person grows their operation organically from nothing, they then are the owner and get to be the king/dictator.

A group pools their resources to finance the organization, as such they are the owners to each a share according to their amount.

A group decides that all members of the group are the owners without regard to how much they financed it. this is a democracy.

The point being every group of people has an owner.

Isn't that basically what the article is saying?

The article is using the vocabulary of sociology, where "legibility" in reference to the state is a well-known concept. The article specifically references Seeing like a state and James Scott's other writings, but he's not the only one to think in terms of such concepts. Foucault's idea of the Panopticon is very similar - it's about the state maintaining control through the citizenry always knowing that they're watched - while Habermas's idea of a "lifeworld" ("metis" in this article) which is "colonized by expert systems" is the same phenomena.

That’s the whole point, though. The need to make things interpretable from the center is what it means to “see like a state.” A society doesn’t need to be interpretable to exist. Large groups of people can relate to one another peerwise.