Corporate Control

The corporation's etymological origin in the Latin *corpus* — the Church designating itself as an undying owner of temporal property — contains a truth that the blockchain governance literature keeps rediscovering without acknowledging. Anderson traces this lineage from Roman ecclesiastical law through British trading companies to General Motors; De Filippi and Wright propose DAOs as the next evolution, organizations governed by code that "maximize their own utility function." But Rifkin, writing about hypercapitalism in 2000, had already identified the real trajectory: corporate control moved from controlling workers (Taylor's stopwatch) to controlling customers (cybernetic feedback loops), and each transition was enabled by making the previous form of human judgment unnecessary. The DAO doesn't break this pattern — it completes it, by making *management itself* unnecessary, which sounds like liberation until you notice that the entity optimizing its utility function no longer contains anyone with the standing to ask whether it should. Ritzer's McDonaldization thesis arrives at the same endpoint from the opposite direction: once you reduce human behavior to machine-like actions, you replace humans with machines, and "the replacement of humans by machines is the ultimate stage in control over people." The church body had a soul, at least nominally. The corporate body had shareholders who could be shamed. The DAO has a utility function and an immutable ledger.