Suppose people angry at Goldman Sachs were
truly angry: so angry that they went beyond posturing and beyond acting against Goldman Sachs only if action were guaranteed to cost them nothing (like writing a blog post). If they ceased to care about whether legal proceedings might be filed against them; if they become obsessed with destroying Goldman Sachs, if they devoted their lives to it and could ignore all bodily urges and creature comforts. If they could be, in a word, like Niven’s Protectors or Vinge’s Focused.
Could they do it? Could they destroy a 3 century old corporation with close to $1 trillion in assets, with sympathizers and former employees throughout the upper echelons of the United States Federal Government (itself the single most powerful entity in the world)?
Absolutely. It would be easy.
As I said, the destructive power of a human is great; let’s assume we have 100 fanatics—a vanishingly small fraction of those who have hated on GS over the years—willing to engage even in assassination, a historically effective tactic
32 and perhaps the single most effective tactic available to an individual or small group.J
Julian Assange explains the basic theory of W
ikileaks in a 2006 essay, “
State and Terrorist Conspiracies” / “Conspiracy as Governance”: corporations and conspiracies form a
graph network; the more efficiently communication flows, the more powerful a graph is; p
artition the graph, or impede communication (through leaks which cause self-inflicted wounds of secrecy & paranoia), and its power goes down. Carry this to its logical extreme…
"If all
links between conspirators are cut then there is no conspiracy. This is usually hard to do, so we ask our first question: What is the minimum number of
links that must be cut to separate the conspiracy into two groups of equal number? (divide and conquer). The answer depends on the structure of the conspiracy. Sometimes there are no alternative paths for conspiratorial information to flow between conspirators, other times there are many. This is a useful and interesting characteristic of a conspiracy. For instance, by assassinating one ‘bridge’ conspirator, it may be possible to split the conspiracy. But we want to say something about all conspiracies."
We don’t. We’re interested in shattering a specific conspiracy by the name of Goldman Sachs. GS has ~30,000 employees. Not all graphs are
trees, but all trees are
graphs, and corporations are usually structured as trees. If GS’s hierarchy is similar to that of a
binary tree, then to completely knock out the
8 top levels, one only needs to eliminate 256 nodes. The top 6 levels would require only 64 nodes.
If one knocked out the top 6 levels, then each of the remaining subtrees in level 7 has no priority over the rest. And there will be 27 − 26 or 64 such subtrees/nodes. It is safe to say that 64 sub-corporations, each potentially headed by someone who wants a battlefield promotion to heading the entire thing, would have trouble agreeing on how to reconstruct the hierarchy. The stockholders might be expected to step in at this point, but the Board of Directors would be included in the top of the hierarchy, and by definition, they represent the majority of stockholders.
We could in fact partition a binary tree in half just by assassinating the root node, the CEO, and this has become a revived strategy in this age of the corporation;
John Robb,
“Piercing the Corporate Veil”:
A worrisome counter-example is
Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost an entire office and 2⁄3 of its headcount on 9/11, but is still around. But this fits into the graph formalism well if we look at the details and notice that the damage was entirely confined to a single group in CF. An office is just a subgraph—losing an entire office meant that the hierarchy was preserved: one subtree was lopped off, and the main tree continued. Every survivor knew where they were in the hierarchy.
