The corporation exists solely to make a profit. It is not an organization of social good, though social good may come out of its operations. Jousting on the open market, like sallying forth with a lance against enemies near and far, brings one no closer to victory. The game must be fought again and again, with a view to surviving economically and beating clever men intent on destabilizing one’s own front.

The profits of the corporation — and the energies gained from outmaneuvering the competition on a quarterly basis — get plowed back into operations, that which isn’t squandered as dividends or stock buybacks. Although highly educated men are employed by all major corporations, working on different projects at different times, they seem not to want to form into unions. Take the engineers and programmers at Apple. Apple makes record profits out of their efforts, but these workers don’t seize the profit on their own initiative; they are content with what they have.

In eschewing the unionization drive, the Apple elite are maintaining a professional veneer, avoiding unnecessary confrontation, and taking the easier route out. But if an automobile company is ripe grounds for unionization efforts, why should high technology be any different?

Economically, the IT industry has a maturity that is locked into place, but by transcending borders (with Third World nations like India taking more and more of a part in the proceedings) it serves to undermine itself drastically and irrevocably. This undercutting which has been going on for decades through the globalization pantomime has not yet affected North America’s core group of computer programmers, as evidenced by the fact that layoffs are rare and wages are still high. The STEM professions, heralded as the “wave of the future” and celebrated for their high-IQ requirements, take things in stride. They make the major profits of the economy. Old-line traditional industries such as steelmaking suffer by comparison, and few IT workers want to join these moribund institutions. The profits and prestige just aren’t there.

If, in the course of business operations, a gap opens up between management and high IT talent, it will be because a foreign country has monopolized a technology that was previously American. For it is in America that computing had its birthplace, and in America that the profits from the Information Technology business are the highest. At the borderline between dreams and reality stand the computer programmer of today, driving profits for the biggest corporation — renewing his contract with his employer in dramatic fashion. When welcomed into its fold, the new coder becomes initiated (albeit without hazing) in a kind of reverse-Darwinian kindness, his conduct encouraged and bred by his fellow coders’ older ways. The profits wrung out of the new coder are given to shareholders, and the stock soars. Because of the stock market’s oscillations, stock-vested workers may feel a sense of vertigo as their place of employment virtually soars or plummets. Other than withdrawal from the procedure, there is no cure for stock-market queasiness.

Despite the energetic movements of the market and the market’s inherent instability — no one promised an easy ride to the stock-vested workers who make up the majority of the IT firms — there is a kind of resignation that accompanies the tech worker’s mandate, an acceptance of the fact that nothing good can last forever. The profit motive is eternal, but the profit itself shuffles away in a haze of illusory mistiness that can only be termed “hallucinatory.”

What prefigures this loss of profit is that the general economy appears to be entering a pre-recessionary slump. This derangement — coupled with a fear of the unknown, paranoia bred from soft working conditions in a vicious global environment, and anticipations working their way through the system — does not mean that competition is at an end. In contrast to Apple, where the profits have become an accustomed part of the Cupertino way of life, the loss of profit elsewhere is grounds for panic. Money is being lost; the society of the workplace undermined; and chance is working, grinding, against oneself. Monetary policy on behalf of the national governments do not help either.

In the final analysis, it may be said that profit’s undertakings are lost only to assume new prominence in the next quarter. For the business dies so that it may be born again, phoenix-like.