I would go farther and argue that companies don't make decisions either. They are also not people (legal nonsense notwithstanding). Individual actual humans make decisions and they're the ones who should be held accountable.
I think that when there are not explicitly stated attribution of liability for decisions that are at the core of a problem the general rule should be that the accountability should be proportional to the additional benefit that each agent or person receives for that decision. That rule is in the context that each agent is responsible to read information and communicate to others in the chain about the risks that decisions entails. The overall structure of an organization should have the goal of making such information about risk available for all agents in the chain in a way that the amount of information can be digested by the agents without much problems.
Through what mechanism are they accountable for that if not corporate liability? If I pay a taxi driver to take me home from the airport, and he hurts someone by driving in a negligent way, I'm not accountable for delegating my driving decisions.
You just have to say that you need dedicated figures for some decisions, like you already need for GDPR or financial compliance or certifications, and ultimate responsibility is always of the ceo.
...like it already happens in europe, or at least in Italy.
This is basic law and risk management in society. Let's not pretend we have just invented corporations and don't know what to do with them yet.
Of course the modern company (legal nonsense withstanding) exists specifically to limit that ability to hold any people accountable for the actions of their company.
And I would go farther and argue that governments do not make decisions either.
Oh, wait, that was a core concept from "Mein Kampf": parliament are bad because nobody is responsable, hence nobody care about doing the right thing ! (probably the only concept from that book that I can agree to)
Yeah, when someone is literally a Nazi (I hope in 2026 we can all agree that at least Hitler was one), it's not really surprising that they would prefer a dictatorship over a parliament full of elected people.
Over the year, "a parliament full of elected people" has lost more and more of its meaning (with regard to original intent)
Regardless, this is less about dictatorship and more about personal responsibility and accountability
A solution, perhaps, would be to ensure that such decisions are not anonymous and that, if the decisions had bad consequences, then the related people would be accountable
Of course, this would make the politic business less attractive. Would that be a bad idea ?
I always thought Wallace was a self-portrait of Nick Park. If your find a video interview with him, the way his mouth moves when he speaks is totally Wallace. It's uncanny.
Nick Park has said in interviews that Wallace is basically his dad, who was always inventing and tinkering with things in his shed, though he didn't quite make the connection until after he'd made the film.
> His mother was a dressmaker (“She still is really. She’s a spry 88”) and his father was a photographer. He was also — didn’t I read somewhere? — an amateur inventor. “ ‘Inventor’ might be too strong a word,” Park says. “He was always in the shed. ‘Oh, I’ll make a shelf’. ‘Oh, I need a stool, I’ll go and make one.’ ”
> Park’s father sounds like the inspiration for his own most famous inventor character. Yet the director didn’t realise the dad-and-Wallace connection until after making his first film featuring the suburban boffin and weird dog. That was A Grand Day Out (1989), his graduate movie project for the National Film and Television School.
> “He loved being compared to Wallace. I hadn’t realised the similarity till that film. It was after Wallace had built the rocket to the Moon in his living room that I thought, ‘I’ve made a film about my dad!’ ”
I can believe Wallace's gestures (and mouth movements) are Park himself, as that's likely the only reference material he had to hand.
The author mentions it briefly, but I'd like to see more exploration of what we can do differently now that we're all online all the time. I think that could potentially enable a Git-level revolution in the way we do things, similar to the way unlimited disk space did for Git.
