I’ll admit I’m stealing this question from an r/cyberpunk post but I thought it was an interesting question and wanted to ask it here.
To quote that original post:
On one hand, the CEO being essentially an omnipotent, untouchable king elevates the class differences to their logical extreme, but on the other hand, a corporation that is so large it feeds itself, a company so weighted and full of momentum no human can ever hope to come against it feels almost lovecraftian.
What do you think?
The really interesting thing to me is less the weight and size, more the complexity. Humans love to specialize, and the integration and diversification of megacorps would inevitably reach such a scale that no single human could ever keep up with the various aspects of the business.
We already see this in the modern day, with less-than-qualified administrators and directors giving counterproductive orders to doctors and engineers.
But cyberpunk pushes that even further. How could a single CEO ever understand enough science, tech, and strategy to tell cybernetics research teams what tech they should focus on, netrunner teams what vulnerabities to worry about, and military teams what defenses they should build and ops they should run?
The answer is obvious: they can’t. Not really. They can sign the paperwork that’s given to them, sure. They can give commands, yell at peons, and even fire scapegoats.
But like the King in his throne room, they live in a peculiar state of isolation and faith. Faith that the Kingdom is still there, faith that the captain’s reports are accurate, that the advisors are well-informed. What else is there to do? The King doesn’t have the time to ride around the whole Kingdom himself now, does he? He’d never get anything done!
Cyberpunk takes all that and ratchets it up to 11, where literally silvertongued snakes, futuristic hypergeniuses, and bonafide war criminals compete and kill to see who among them can convince their dystopian sugardaddy to greenlight their pet projects because the CEO thinks its in his own best interest.
Cory Doctorow had something relevant to this in one of his blog posts a while ago, but I can’t recall if he was quoting someone else. The gist of it was about how corporations already exist as the uncaring, unfeeling, immortal tyrants that everyone is afraid AI will eventually become, and humans (including CEOs) are insignificant gut flora who survive by helping their hosts consume the world’s resources. I’ll add a link later if I have time/remember.
To answer the question, it’s the second one and we are currently living in that dystopia.
I’ll also look for that link. Sounds interesting. First to find it wins.
I think in proper cyberpunk, no individual is able to meaningfully change the system/improve world circumstances on their own, including a CEO of a gigantic megacorp. So a CEO can make things worse with their megacorp, but they can’t make them better.
I feel like the latter is pretty unique to cyberpunk. The powerful, possibly technologicaly immortal CEO controlling a megacorp is not a whole lot different than fuedalism.
I think my favorite depiction of a megacorp treats it as an entity. A living, breathing god of capitalism, that seems to operate almost of it’s own accord. Like a giant machine, with all the employees acting as cogs in the machine. It makes it seem more immortal and terrifying. You can kill a man, but can you kill a corporation?
Johhny Silverhand tried and look where that got him.
