Megacorp : From Cyberdystopian Vision To Technoeconomic Reality

The image of the "megacorp" - the ruthless, sinister, high-tech global conglomerate that's grown so large and powerful that it has acquired the characteristics of a sovereign state - is an iconic element of cyberpunk fiction. Such a megacorp maintains its own army, creates its own laws and currency, grants citizenship to employees, and governs vast territory. By these standards, contemporary companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Walmart aren't (yet) "megacorps"; they're the playthings that megacorps gobble up to use for spare parts. This volume develops an intellectual history of the megacorp, locating forebears of the cyberpunk megacorp not only in fictional works like R.U.R. and Metropolis but in real-world organizations from the East India Companies to the Pullman Palace Car Company, Ford Motor Company, Japanese keiretsu, and South Korean chaebol - as well as in the oligopolistic "megacorp" described by economist Alfred Eichner. By investigating the cyberpunk megacorp as a political entity, commercial entity, producer of futuristic technologies, and manipulator of culture, differences are highlighted between the megacorps of "classical" cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk fiction. Classical cyberpunk megacorps - portrayed in Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, films like RoboCop and Johnny Mnemonic, and games like Cyberpunk, Cyberspace, and Syndicate - are often ostentatiously malevolent and obsessed with short-term profits; such over-the-top depictions serve dramatic purposes and aren't offered by their authors as serious futurological studies. The more nuanced and philosophically rich portrayals of megacorps in post-cyberpunk works like Shirow's The Ghost in the Shell reveal companies that are less overtly evil, possess a more plausible range of strategic goals, and coexist alongside conventional governments in a state of (begrudging) mutual respect. Other works like the game Shadowrun depict companies that combine elements of both types of megacorps.Drawing on such analyses, the volume explores how the post-cyberpunk megacorp anticipated a new type of real-world megacorp - the unfathomably large, fast, and complex "rhizocorp" - that's now being made possible through the exploitation of robotics, AI, and the Internet of Things - and which threatens to become the dominant economic, political, and sociocultural power of our future world.

• | Author: Matthew E. Gladden
• | Publisher: Defragmenter Media
• | Publication Date: Jun 24, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 322 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1944373306
• | ISBN-13: 9781944373306