New and Improved: The Zero-Sum Game of Corporate Personhood

Abstract

Corporate personhood is part of a zero-sum game in which human traits and privileges are transferred to corporations; conversely, actual persons become, largely without their realization, more impersonal and generic, and increasingly defined by their relations to things. Advertising is the life writing of the non-existent corporate person, which is retroactively created by a form of commercial speech whose “author” claims the privileges of political and religious personhood.