I do sometimes wonder what we’re all going to do if somehow everything works out okay and no-one was planning for that
It feels bleak out there, and Murphy’s stories reflect that atmosphere of cruelty. But they also document a moment when more and more young trans people are taking the plunge, forming real-life communities, making art, and helping each other survive. There’s a push/pull between those two truths in Shut Up, I Love You, and Murphy explores both the power and the limits of caring for each other in a hateful world—the act of holding hands at the bottom of a ditch, to use an image she mentioned at a Q&A in Brooklyn last week. “I kept trying to come back to, ‘Someone should actually believe in the future,’” Murphy told me in August, while I was visiting Chicago.
When we talk about prison reform, we talk about the three main functions of prison: incapacitation, rehabilitation and deterrence. Corporate persons are conceptual, amoral agents incapable of personal growth, so I don’t think rehabilitation is a useful lens for thinking about corporate fines, but I think deterrence and incapacitation are worthwhile. Fines as a percentage of corporate income speaks to incapacitation – a corporation with less money can do less harm – but it doesn’t address deterrence. In a perfectly efficient capitalist economy, we should expect that corporations will take any option that nets more revenue than it costs to implement, inclusive of any fines, and the fine is only deterrent if it makes the offense so expensive as to be unprofitable, which is only loosely correlated with corporate income. I’d say, it’s the maximum of: a percentage of corporate income, the cost to fix the damage, and the amount of profit the corporation derived from the fined behavior.