Skip to main content

Trust, again

In his book “Sapiens — A Brief History of Humankind”, the historian Yuval Noah Harari  talks about the cognitive revolution, which he defines as the point as which “history declared its independence from biology” because human beings gained the ability to think about things that do not exist, such as Consult Hyperion. He says

Corporations do not exist in nature any more than Catholicism or human rights. These are stories. Lawyers are shaman who tell stranger tales.

Well, yes. Limited liability companies are, I agree with Mr. Harari wholeheartedly, one of our species most ingenious inventions.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

There is no excuse for not taking cards

So we went to the pub. For lunch. Seven of us. Say £20 per head. £100+ quid. Say £50 quid gross for the pub. Colleague goes to order food and drinks and pay at the bar. Apologetic barmaid comes over to explain that their “card machine” is down, so she can only accept cash. Under normal circumstances I would have simply walked out, feeling it wholly inappropriate to reward such a poorly managed establishment and, as a functioning actor in a capitalist economy, done my duty to depress their lunchtime takings. Here’s what we wanted to say: This is absurd. This is 2016 not 1916. Your card machine is down? Well, so what! Are you seriously telling me that mein host has no mobile phone number capable of registering for PingIt or PayM? That none of the staff or the pub itself have a PayPal account that I can send the money to? That neither the owners nor managers not contingency planners thought to tuck an iZettle behind the bar to use when the clunky and expensive GPRS terminal fails for o...