this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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It's satire at the moment, but look at so many scifi works that have mega-corporate states ruling the world. They're fiction now, but often times scifi is a bit of a look into a potential future ending up partially coming true. There's no doubt that big corporations do have political influence already for a while now, so it's just a step up to having them fully in charge, and no one will blink.
Just look at South Korea where Samsung's revenue is equal to a whopping 17% of the entire country's GDP, making them hold enormous power over politics, education, journalism and the legal system.
And before anyone thinks "who cares, they're just a phone/appliance company", one of the most advanced autonomous sentry guns ever developed, so much so that almost everything about it is still highly classified, was made by a company that was at the time a subsidiary of Samsung.
I've translated their marketing and greenwashing shite for a while and hated every word. They are 100% dystopian.
They're not fiction, the USSR had and China has even a seat on the security council and state capitalist countries are megacorps pretty much by definition.
Imagine if 20 years ago you wrote a sci-fi story where people spend a most of their time staring into rectangular devices that sends information that corporate controlled AIs decided they should be seeing. After staring at these rectangles for too long, people become angry and paranoid. Sometimes hypnotized to the point where some people commit mass murder or try to destroy their own democratically elected government.
If you wrote that story 20 years ago it wouldn't be published because it would be too unbelievable. But here we are.
Not to say it's exactly the same plot, but Brave New World was published in 1932. Seems that writing too close to the near future is not great for sales, but far enough out and you've got a great novel, and readers will appreciate the vision and warnings it gives.
And then fall for the trap anyway.
CHOAM incoming.
Basically OPEC.