I have a question about #cyberpunk general world-building. If megacorporations are rivaling states, what prevents them from ignoring the state-imposed business and financial regulations that currently shape their decisions? What prevents them to turn into states themselves?
⇧
kmicu
•Hypolite Petovan
•Some existing companies already issue scrip, so it isn't a stretch to believe they could start to issue only scrip to their employee if national currencies falter, which would make taxes a useful tool to control how much of it is in circulation at any given time.
Ditto for police and armies, another state prerogative. In cyberpunk worlds private security companies or entire subsidies of megacorporations completely take over this function.
I guess my point is that by definition there can't be any corporation actually rivaling major states because they probably would become a de facto state.
lostinlight
•Spencer
•The cyberpunk setting I'm most familiar with, the Android universe, answers your question, "What prevents them from ignoring the state-imposed business and financial regulations?" with "Nothing." Nothing stops them. The megacorps act as their own independent entities. They infiltrate nation-states and interfere with elections, they wield private security forces to impose their will, they lobby and sway governmental decisions to be favorable to themselves.
And I think a glance at 2020 suggests why they might maintain the facade of cooperation with democratic government instead of simply declaring themselves independent states outright:... show more
The cyberpunk setting I'm most familiar with, the Android universe, answers your question, "What prevents them from ignoring the state-imposed business and financial regulations?" with "Nothing." Nothing stops them. The megacorps act as their own independent entities. They infiltrate nation-states and interfere with elections, they wield private security forces to impose their will, they lobby and sway governmental decisions to be favorable to themselves.
And I think a glance at 2020 suggests why they might maintain the facade of cooperation with democratic government instead of simply declaring themselves independent states outright: modern authoritarian regimes tend to keep up the appearances of liberal democracy, in what might be more accurately described as "managed democracy". People are, sadly, quite willing to consent to authoritarianism if they're told it's not authoritarianism, or if they're sold a personal benefit.
So I guess I'm a little puzzled by the premise. I'm curious where this question comes from--is there a cyberpunk work that you've encountered that makes a different point about corporate power? I'm all ears. 🙂
Hypolite Petovan
•While the article "How to create your country for tax reasons" directly addresses this very point, the article "Corporate Contracts in the Far-Off Future Dystopia" completely avoids it and the cognitive dissonance bothered me.
While the current biggest American publicly traded companies are actively working to undermine democracy, wielding public courts as intellectual property militi... show more
While the article "How to create your country for tax reasons" directly addresses this very point, the article "Corporate Contracts in the Far-Off Future Dystopia" completely avoids it and the cognitive dissonance bothered me.
While the current biggest American publicly traded companies are actively working to undermine democracy, wielding public courts as intellectual property militias and trampling individual rights to increase their revenue and profits, there still are miles of red tape they have to comply with or having to face the SEC. So we aren't yet at the point where the biggest corporations could just disregard mandatory filings, public disclosures, as long as their share value keep growing. Stock markets already are private endeavors, the only remaining government regulation enforcement is through the SEC that I know of.
But once we will have the Amazon Buck or the Apple iScrip compete with the US Dollar, US companies will have less incentive to follow the US rules. With near certainty, yet another national debt reduction program will trigger the next recession as the previous ones have, and then what? Militarized ex-cops will have to find work again because their pension will have been nuked, investors will start relying more on the yuan, Apple will try to save its massive treasury which value probably still depends on the US dollar, and I have no clue about the exact nastiness that can ensue, but I know it will be bad.
Shelenn Ayres
•Hypolite Petovan
•Shelenn Ayres
•Hypolite Petovan
•Granted, the movie is better than the book it's adapted from, but it's mainly because the book is abysmal. It is a constant pop culture name-dropping festival, and none of the references are outside the 1980-1995 period or so. The movie gets away with it by showing rather than spelling the references, and by expanding the period the references are taken from to more recent franchises. But what's left is a naïve and shallow critic of consumerism even though the original work is entirely based on it in the narrow historical scope of the author's childhood.
The book is trash, the movie is entertaining, but I don't believe any meaning can be derived from either.
Shelenn Ayres likes this.
Spencer
•Hypolite Petovan likes this.
Hypolite Petovan
•Spencer
•Hypolite Petovan likes this.
Shelenn Ayres
•Hypolite Petovan
•Digital Ape
•Much of the world's territory has been carved up into sovereign enclaves, each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong", or the corporatized American Mafia), or various residential burbclaves — quasi-sovereign gated communities.
This arrangement resembles anarcho-capitalism, a theme Stephenson carries over to his next novel The Diamond Age.
Hypolite Petovan likes this.
Shelenn Ayres
•Hypolite Petovan
•Shelenn Ayres
•Hypolite Petovan
•However, while loosely lifting the same premise as Snow Crash, RPO awkwardly grafts to it an unbelievable god-like figure in the creator of the Oasis and a cartoonishly villain corporation, stripping all nuance and substance from it. On top of that, it goes nowhere with it. Once the shallow hero gets his pointless pop culture knowledge validated at the end of the ridiculous treasure chase, he does exactly nothing to challenge the glaring inequality of this incoherent system.