The best part about looking at the corporation as a technology or medium is that, in the process, we remind ourselves that it didn’t just emerge as a natural phenomenon. It’s not as if businesses were getting so big that they evolved a corporate structure in order to keep growing properly. Quite the contrary: the corporation was invented by monarchs to stem the tide of a burgeoning middle class and its thriving new marketplace and usurp the growth they were enjoying. The fact that corporations were invented should alone empower us to _re_invent them to our liking.

So, then, what were corporations invented to amplify? The power of shareholders and the primacy of their capital. Feudal lords, who had lived off the labor of peasants for centuries, were getting poorer as the people began to make and trade goods with one another. The aristocracy needed a way to preserve their wealth and position in an increasingly free market. So they invented the chartered monopoly—a piece of paper with a list of rules—through which a king could grant exclusive dominion over an industry to his favorite merchant. In return, the king and other aristocrats got the right to invest in the enterprise. This way, they could use their wealth alone to make more money. Did the merchant need investors? For the most part, no. But he made this concession in order to get the king’s charter and protection. The investors were like shareholders, and the merchant was like the CEO. Except these shareholders were also the ones writing the laws of the land.