I should return to writing Whiteout, even though my new job and some other responsibilities have left me feeling drained.
It’s sort of weird sometimes seeing how cyberpunk works dealt with the relationship between people, corporations, and government. I always figure it say some interesting things about people’s politics when you see how they construct their cyberpunk world.
One of the weird things I always notice is the status of the government? Do they still exist? Are they overtly weaker than the corporations? Being your marxist inspired leftist, I always sort of feel a failure of verisimilitude when corporations overtly take over. The corporation doesn’t want to do the things that government has to do. It’s great when the government breaks up a riot or strike and the corporation can have clean hands, publicly chastising the government while benefiting from the social order it creates.
Then there’s the issue of mercenaries, the corporate security forces that are ubiquitous in these settings. I always figure them as having the same problems that Machiavelli identified, namely that mercenaries are shit that will desert you if things go bad and you really need them. They’re fine for quashing protests, but if it’s devolved to the point of full-scale war, I wouldn’t count on them. To have them be dominant or unstoppable just seems strange.
Finally, there’s the old joke about sufficiently large corporations becoming central planning. If it’s large enough it conducts a lot of it’s business itself, it basically becomes a command economy with all the interesting issues that has. That’s especially the case for some works where basically everyone works for one corporation.(Although that’s more in weird dystopia than cyberpunk per se.)
But, those issues at one point made me think of something that I can only describe as a syndicalist-inspired megacorporate cyberpunk world. It’s what you might get as corporations realize they have to take up the slack of governments fully. You can think of it as if, rather than “Germany”, the region becomes “United German Carmakers” and the ideology and culture of the entire country are bent towards car production. It would control the ideological institutions, having media and schools tell people that prosperity of the entire nation/corporation is dependent on making cars, basically an attempt to build actual loyalty to a company rather than just the corporation being something you join to pick up some cash. It could have elections, perhaps using a principle like employee-ownership model but with the problems of
bourgeoisie
democracy heightened, as your prosperity is linked to that of your department and boss and those are manipulated to keep certain policies on top. It could become regionless, where you live next to citizens of other corporation/nations and yours basically negotiates the status of citizen-employees with other corporations in a sort of polycentric legal order.
You would be born into the corporation and would be expected to die there. I could expect something like a jobs-guarantee, although the jobs at the bottom will probably be shit. There are all sorts of weird things that you can see as corporations have to take control of issues of legitimacy and defense rather than just inheriting them from the government. I would expect the corporation itself to become more democratic, even though there may be less democracy in total due to the lack of external government.
And the thing is, I sort of see shades of this in our world. I chose German carmaking for a reason, Germany’s national pride and economic future is tied to it’s cars at this point and it is very defensive of this industry. And corporations do try and build loyalty beyond simply paying people, I’ve seen retail establishments do what basically amount to loyalty chants and pledges of allegiance, and it was in the news awhile ago that Amazon was basically doing self-criticism sessions that were likened to Maoism.
I sometimes see bits and pieces of everywhere, and actually the real “Cyberpunk” works seems to have bits and pieces of this type of thing. It’s actually the cyberpunk-adjacent works that are the worst, those that use a generic corporate future merely as set dressing for their story. But I still see this type of work do things that just seem wrong or impossible, and I do a double-take.
