The Crime of Cooperation
Pamela Jones of Groklaw gives her award for “The Stupidest Lawsuit Since the World Began,” which features a French bus company suing ten cleaning women and claiming damages of €2 million (over US$3million) because said ladies dared to form a car pool. Says Jones, the suit is not just the stupidest…
But also the meanest. When did business get so mean? And so stupid? I think it’s safe to say that those ten women will never use that bus service to get anywhere on planet earth again, no matter what happens in court. And frankly, if the only way to stay in business is to sue your departing customers, furious at them because they’ve found something better, it’s time to look at what you are offering.
I suspect business has been mean a long time. It sure isn’t new this year. Remember that in 2001 Bechtel sued the government of Bolivia for cancelling the contract by which Bechtel supplied water to the city of Cochabamba. Remember that the reason Bolivia cancelled was that it wasn’t willing to kill more than the one person who died in the crackdown that occurred when Cochabambans protested. Remember that the reason they protested was not only that their water bills had risen enormously, but that legislation accompanying the contract had made it illegal for these citizens to collect rainwater in their backyards.
Now, suing cleaning women for car-pooling is pretty outrageous. But forbidding the poor (and in Bolivia, poor is poor like we in the US can scarcely conceive of) to collect rainwater… well, I can only ask how many steps it is from there to simply stuffing people into ovens. I can’t see many. And Bechtel was suing the government of Bolivia because it balked at collecting that much blood on its hands.
Next to these lawsuits, it seems trivial to remember the Archie Comics organization suing a family for naming a website veronica.org, for their daughter of that ilk. Archie Comics had the good sense to drop the suit, but not before leaving a nasty taste in the mouths of many thousands who heard of and were outraged by the action.
The Veronica suit isn’t trivial only because it was dropped. Outrageous though it was, it lacked the common thread uniting Bechtel’s and the bus company’s suits (and the SCO lawsuit which is Groklaw’s actual subject): These suits all seek to make cooperation an actionable offense. (If this isn’t clear in the Bechtel case, perhaps I need to mention that the Cochabamba contract was the result of the World Bank’s insistence that water be privatized; the people had thought water ought to belong to the people.)
When the Cluetrain Manifesto was written in those dawning years of the blog-bound world community, its authors preached only at a poorly-defined entity called “companies,” urging that they recognize the inevitability of vast and powerful communities built on open conversation. Did these writers realize that the very existence of conversation, based as it is on cooperation, would come under threat in courtrooms? That someone, somewhere, would dare to stand before a judge and, without blushing, plead that cooperation, which is the foundation not only of conversation, but of everything good about human existence, ought to be punished?
It isn’t just amorphously defined “companies” that need to get on the cluetrain. It’s all of us. This isn’t about marketing any more. This is about our very lives.