Shares in misfortune

Life isn't all bad all of the time, and although I found life in the cube strange, the security section omnipresent, and my colleagues over-dependent upon email, I at least was able to spend most of my spare time satisfying some of my curiousity about what is out there in the great big user-created mess we call the internet. I was once again becoming fascinated not with the mysteries of missing mountaineers or sunken submarines, but with the seething interest that these generated amongst people who now had a medium by which they could quickly publish their theories, no matter how odd or out of line they might be.

I wandered across a website one day while I was sitting in my cube, waiting for a batch of software to finish compilation checks. I can't even remember the search string I had typed in, it was probably something to do with the Everest mountaineers or the Hunley, but I found myself looking through an intriguing page about a group of European Gypsies trying to sue IBM for complicity in the holocaust. It seems that a spin-off company sold the Nazi authorities sets of census machines which used punched cards to record, collate,and analyse the data collected by thousands of officials in the 1930's. This information was subsequently used to determine who was sent to which camp, and what was then done to them once they were out of sight behind the barbed wire.

IBM were resolutely defending their position by arguing that the company was a completely seperate entity, and therefore not under their control, or in any way their responsibility. The gypsies, using research by several historians, felt that they could show that the parent company not only knew exactly what the spin-off company was formed for, but also knew week by week throughout the war exactly what was still going on behind the war frontiers. The Swiss court also felt that there was enough to it of interest, and on appeal, granted the gypsies leave to proceed with their case.

I showed the article to my cube-colleagues, explaining a bit of the technical background for them since they were all too young to have heard of Hollerith cards. Their reaction was uniform; it was wrong to hold IBM accountable for something that had happened so long ago, and it was also wrong to hold a mere manufacturer of computing equipment responsible for the actions of those who bought and used the equipment.

I explained that the last argument was not as simple as it first appeared, because these early computers required teams of engineers to service them, and to add extra codes to them whenever the German authorities required an extra classification for those souls they were sorting and slaughtering in their camps, and since the equipment was located within many of the camps, the visiting engineers must have known a good deal more about the purpose of those camps than mere salespersons.

It didn't convince my cube-colleagues, they still felt the court case was wrong on a matter of principle. A car-maker was not liable for the death or injuries caused by its creations, neither was a gunsmith. I wondered for a while whether this same concept explained how none of the large Japanese corporations had ever been called to account for alleged abuses of prisoners of war. Whatever the reasons, there are still plenty of people around with grievances against remnants of the German and Japanese governments and corporations, and despite time winnowing their numbers, they won't lie down and go quietly into history.

A couple of things happened recently that got me thinking about the concept of associative guilt, firstly the case of the shareholders in the company who purchased products from a second company which carried out animal testing. Are such shareholders obliged to question the morality and ethics of their company, or are they able to invest their money and pocket their returns whilst claiming innocence of all wrongdoing? Initially, I felt much as my cube-colleagues did about IBM and the census machinery. Then I read about the GTA affair.

GTA, or Grand Theft Auto, was a computer game in which the players stole cars and raced them through the city streets trying to evade police and rival gangs. A crack for the game surfaced in Germany, whereby the game could be made to display scenes in which some of the characters had sex with each other. In case you're still stuck at the keyboard playing Dungeons and Dragons, modern graphic computer games are getting incredibly realistic, super-realistic in the case of some of the special effects, and these sex scenes would probably have been a lot more interesting than a typical triple-x video. The uproar in America was considerable, and many games stores decided not to go to all the trouble of putting the game on the top shelves and insisting on purchasers providing proof of age. They stopped selling it.

No action was taken against the company responsible for creating the game by any outside bodies; there was no censorship imposed on them, no corporate penalties were imposed. Instead, the shareholders of the company took action against the board, citing loss of profits resulting from the retail outlets pulling the game from their shelves.

Does this mean then, that the shareholders in a company have a duty to scrutinise the actions of the company to see if any ethical or moral actions might compromise the company's financial state? If so, does their taking no action imply that they are happy with and accept the board's decisions? In which case, are they not also in some way complicit in the actions of the board? Because if so, then I feel that they must also accept some of the responsibility for the actions of the company.

"We were only following orders" was not accepted as a defence for war-crimes, and I feel that "We were only collecting our dividends" is similarly unacceptable.