"They", not "it"

A while back an editor pulled me up on a tech piece I'd written. There were a bunch of sentences like "Google are changing the way they do business", which he'd corrected to "Google is changing the way it does business". He said, "it's weird that you keep doing that. A company is a singular; an 'it', not a 'they'". I wondered where I'd picked up such a strange deviation from standard English, because it definitely didn't feel incorrect.

I was reminded of this recently when I saw an article on the SourceForge fiasco that quoted a source like this: "SourceForge are (sic) abusing the trust that we and our users had put into their service in the past." Obviously I'm not the only one who can't sneak that particular formulation past a wary editor!

On reflection I think the "they" vs "it" question goes deeper than syntax, and speaks to an important point about the nature of corporations, especially in the context of SourceForge-style malfeasance. We use the plural when we're speaking about a group as a collection of individuals, and the singular to refer to the group as a distinct entity deserving a separate identity. This becomes particularly apparent in business, where a company represents the transition from one to the other: the "they" quite literally becomes an "it" by incorporating.

But there are a lot of issues with creating a magical person. If two people get together and poison a river, they committed a crime. But if they incorporate first, it committed a crime. The dangerous power of being able to create a legal whipping boy as a liability shield is part of the reason why there have been consistent efforts to weaken those protections in recent years.

Legality aside, there's no reason for us to adopt the idea of corporate personhood in our thoughts or conversations. Up until the point where Google's self-driving technology starts directing the company, it's not an "it". Trying to discern Google's character, speak to Google's motivations, or appeal to Google's morality is only a path to confused thinking. It doesn't have those things, rather they are just a bunch of people who do things together. Those actions add up to systematic behaviour, but they don't add up to a new person. Google is a "they", not an "it".

Though I still don't think I'm going to be able to get that in print.