Just finished reading Mark Arax’s The King of California, which is awesome and you should all read. It’s a biography of JG Boswell, the man and the company, which is the largest farmer in the country.
The company is not only massive, it’s insanely ambitious and innovative. They, along with other Central Valley farmers, get rid of the largest lake in California. They literally make it go away.
They’re leaders in mechanized farming and wholly upend how cotton in particular is grown and harvested. They also pay far better than any of their competitors and inspire intense loyalty from their employees.
Reading the book, it’s hard for me not to feel totally inspired by the man JG Boswell. He’s a visionary, incredibly ambitious, an effective delegator, and a huge philanthropist.
The company is also horrible. They got rid of a Lake (lotsa government support for that, still largely their doing) creating untold ecological harm, they’re crazy racist, bust unions, and vacuumed all the wealth out of farming towns in the Central Valley effectively killing them.
The close of the book is billionaire JG Boswell concluding that his town would have been better off had the largest farming operation in the world not been centered there but had been small local farms instead.
Anyone reading this knows the beer parallels I’m going to draw and they’re worth noting: giant corporations are terrible for communities and they know it. Small businesses keep communities alive. Fuck ABI.
But a newer thought I pulled from this book is how hard it is not to root for the Big Guy. JG Boswell is slowly crushing a community and it’s ecosystem, but does so with incredible brilliance. The accomplishments are big and notable and the motivation totally relatable.
Boswell is more instructive for seeing this because his name is on the company, unlike ABI which is completely faceless and so renders less personal appeal. He’s an individual and easy to understand why you’re rooting for him, ABI less so.
It was always perplexing to me why people who know what ABI is don’t avoid it like the plague, but I think this is it: in another industry, all you have to do is slap a family name and inspired leader on it and I’m onboard. We all like winners.
So much so, that winners will do insane shit like run the country’s largest farm and talk about how it would be better to not exist. The winning is good, so the winning cannot be stopped.
The constantly infuriating “yeah but own an iPhone so nothing matters” argument makes more sense in this light too. Steve Jobs was so effective at branding Apple as smarter and therefor good, that any other company that large must be as good.
And it certainly seems resonant with the Cult of Elon this country is currently suffering through.
How do we get past this? How do we move to a place where winning is supporting a community and living contentedly, not removing lakes? How do we get beyond a definition of winning that accepts grandeur at the cost of community?
