Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Corporations as Nations
Science fiction often predicts future technologies, quandaries, or at least identifies a general direction of development. These days, the genre is most often associated with off-Earth adventures, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Another common theme has elicited fewer comparisons to reality in mainstream press: government by mega-corporations.
We limited-government conservatives and libertarians recognize the problems and dangers of regulatory capture. We know that over-regulation of industries can lead to revolving doors and cozy deals that give the largest corporations unjust advantages over smaller companies.
The fictional concept of mega-corporations, perhaps most popular in the cyberpunk subgenre of sci-fi media, goes further. It proposes scenarios by which corporations become more powerful than governments; or that corporations become fully equivalent governments, complete with private militaries and exclusive control of entire cities. These companies brutally enforce obedience among their employees, battle other companies with espionage and with bullets, and either control politicians overtly or completely ignore them while acting without regard of civic laws.
Is this enduring theme predictive of future dangers or merely imaginative commentary on current concerns? Like zombie fiction, does it host real problems (ex: survival amid anarchy, such as currently witnessed in Venezuela) within an unbelievable setting? Or should we indeed worry that historical examples of corporate espionage, company towns, and the like are precursors to much more frightening developments in corporate corruption?
Some examples of all-powerful corporations are found in the Dune novels, in the films Blade Runner and The Terminator, and in video games like The Syndicate and Cyberpunk 2077.
Published in Entertainment
It seems to me that Corporations as nations make sense in our storytelling because they are fuedual in nature. There is a King and Lords that run things.
I don’t know if they can happen though. Look at Blade Runner. Atari? These things come and go. Nations last a lot longer.
Sometimes. As Mark Steyn reminds his readers, European peoples are very old, but many European constitutions haven’t been around even half-a-century. The East India Trading Company endured for generations. Some of today’s CEOs maintain direction of their companies while politicians come and go.
What conditions would be necessary for one or more corporations to take control of civil districts? Is that at all similar to the gangster politics of post-Soviet Russia?
The Church became mixed up with medieval governments after remnants of the Roman Empire collapsed and people turned to the priests who were already caring for the poor, the sick, and the elderly.
Today’s corporations in the US participate in charitable activities and provide extensive benefits from healthcare to daycares for children. If our society collapsed from socialism, plague, or some other grave disaster, might giant companies like Walmart provide crucial support that affords them extraordinary power?
The original megacorp.
Also somewhat relevant:
Another “corporation” that essentially operated as a nation state was the Hanseatic League an alliance of merchants in the North and Baltic Seas. They actually waged war against Sweden.
Because otherwise, who would control the spice?
I see very little reason to suppose cyberpunk megacorporations aren’t possible. I do think we’re unlikely to see private armies; governments are sticklers about competition.
I thought this was going to be about Facebook taking over the government’s role as Big Brother.
Spying? The government don’t mind that, long as they get to wet their whistle. Private security forces complete with blue thumbs up armbands? Odds are they’ll have words about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_military_contractors
Although I’m not entirely sure I would agree that all of them are.
I was thinking more of their role as the nation’s censor and good-behavior enforcer.
Why should the government worry about us oppressing each other? It saves them trouble.
Conceivably, a mega-corporation and government could exist separately on paper but be managed as one.
I mentioned the revolving doors that already exist among regulatory agencies and the companies they regulate, with representatives of one later hired by the other. When negotiations between two entities are constant, cooperation can become conspiratorial.
In a society with as many disparate sources of power and wealth as ours, such conspiring is more likely within a particular industry or a locality. A degree of isolation might be necessary for such power to coalesce into a permanent fixture.
But if the East India Company indeed fit this concept, then evidently the scale of such powers can be immense.
There have been company towns in the past in the U.S., and although the companies didn’t run the government, they sometimes ran everything else. Cities are established by charter; corporations are organized with contracts. Governments have contracts with their citizens: laws. There are a lot of parallels and they can make for good ingredients in fiction. If corporations did usurp nations but there was also some degree of collective bargaining, it might not look too different from liberal democracy.
We just wouldn’t have to deal with taxes.
Optimist.
Both parties of our government indulge in political favoritism, both by action (cutting out exemptions for companies) and by inaction (failing to enforce laws against particular persons or groups).
Evidently, voters will not revolt over many justifiable grievances, even as we shout about it. Our every complaint dissolves into threats to merely withhold votes or otherwise remain within the legal process.
Americans are no longer shocked by war-like numbers of murder and violence among street gangs in some major cities. Might there be some sequence of events that would lead people to expect and so become apathetic about violence or lawlessness in inter-coporation “warfare”?
They had an army.
And a navy.
Governments do worry about that, at least when there is violence. The U.S. government went to a lot of work to keep the Sioux and Sauk/Fox from fighting each other in the 1820s and 1830s. It was not because of benevolence, but because wars have a way of sucking in other parties, and their fighting was interfering with plans to take over their land in an orderly fashion. When the U.S. was fighting the Sauk/Fox it used Sioux as allies in fighting them, but that’s because it’s plan to keep the two at peace with each other had broken down. It would have been cheaper if the U.S. could have conquered all of them peacefully.
States and nations are not the same thing.
Corporations can be states (and have been in the past, though that doesn’t always end well) but that doesn’t make them nations.
The best fiction I can think of along these lines is Max Headroom.
This idea is much older than Cyberpunk. Conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds, the Bilderbergers, the Freemasons, the Joooooos, etc., are basically about claiming that they’re more powerful than national governments.
The “megacorporations” of the past like the East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company, etc, were powerful because they were underwritten by the British military. The cost of paying for their own defense would have bankrupted them.
The “company towns” from US history are somewhat similar. They could get away with dominating a municipality because the state and/or federal governments were persuaded that it was in the state’s/nation’s best interest. If they were to defy the “legitimate” government they would find their hold on local power rather tenuous.
At the end of the day, one cannot get around the necessity of securing the consent of the governed unless one has a monopoly on the use of force.
They weren’t above getting the U.S. military called out to act as enforcers for their contractual disputes.
Indeed, but they didn’t have the authority to order the US military to bash heads around. They needed the support of the “legitimate” government for that.
I am perennially skeptical when people blame a corporation for acts of government. Feel free to blame the politicians for being too cozy with the corporation, sure, but at the end of the day the buck still stops with the politicians.
That assumes those CEOs didn’t have the clout to force politicians’ assent by non-legal means. “Don’t help me and I’ll stop funding your campaigns / pay for campaigns against you / publish the dirt our investigators dug up on you” or whatever. The point is that there is power beyond legal authority, so the chain of command is not always accompanied by a formal hierarchy or a neat paper trail.
Yup.
Again, at the end of the day that depends on the politician being corrupt in the first place.
Rollerball. 1975. Except it’s too prescient to be considered pure fiction.
Quite possibly the most underrated film of the 20th Century. Watch it.
No. They would fall.
Most corps. just die off. The longest running companies are all family owned.
Companies are not gangs. That is just a modern version of warlordism, which is a type of feudal rule by strong man. No board of directors is going to run things based on a charter. It would be a group of people struggling for control, and murder would be the tool of the day. If you had a boardroom scene, it owuld be out of the Godfather
As far as I know, the oldest continually-run company is the world is Twinnings, the tea company. It started in 1706. Lloyd’s has been around since 1688, but only as an informal arrangement. Twinnings was a family-owned company that became a corporation. Lloyd’s was an informal assembly that became a corporation.