Dystopian near-futuristic cyberpunk settings depict megacorporations as the bad guys in most cases

Uber Green is people!

Tet Corporation from Dark Tower Series.

Wait, when did Musk become a supervillain? The last thing I paid attention to that he did was installing that fuckheug battery in South Australia to try and fix a problem our retarded government wouldn't.

make them have some kind of code or order

Have them act in the interest of creating a stable market base for time to come, people can't buy your shit if they're struggling to pay for food.

Ethical investing is actually a thing that's growing in popularity these days. It's not at all a stretch to believe that at least some of the megacorps would go out of their way to pursue this investment, or be headed up by the type of people who have a good moral code behind them.

>Google two years ago or google today?
I would say Google 10 years ago

>Wait, when did Musk become a supervillain?
Sorry, what year is it? It's 2028, right?

Make the company do the right thing for selfish reasons. Say there is some world threat and they are the ones with the resources to fight against it while either working in conjunction with or independent of the military. They get to not only gain a huge surge of profits from the purchases of wartime products but also political influence and a good public image. Once the war ends they already have locations throughout that can be repurposed for mainstream commercial ends.

Simple; good management with effective oversight by the board

There's good plot there too

>Juicero

>Juicero is a machine that only and exclusively squeezes out Juicero juiceboxes
>The boxes cost about $20 a pop
>The machine is $400
>The juiceboxes can be squeezed out with your bare hands with little to no difference in quality
You can't make this shit up.

I like how all you can do is repeat memes.

The reason the ingredients were proprietary was to make sure the fruit was properly sourced, fresh and the ingredient mixes were healthy.

On those standards even fucking De Beers are good guys.

>I like how all you can do is repeat memes.
Explain how two handy bois being able to replicate what a $400 machine does is a "meme". It's a design flaw that elevates the product to meme status, but a real design flaw nonetheless and a pretty bad one. No wonder the company is shutting down, it's asking hundreds of dollars for what you can yourself do for free with next to zero effort.

Get off Veeky Forums Doug Evans, you've got some investors out for your blood.

300 years ago these people would hire a servant to squeeze juice for them so they can feel good about themselves. And it would probably cost just as much.

'k, remember gulp down your cup of raw water and eat your activated almonds while shitposting, m8.

Simple.
> Have the megacorp employ the party.
> The employer is honest about their objectives
> They are the same as other megacorps'...
> ...but without ruining what's left of Earth's biosphere, salary-enslaving the employees, or scamming anyone
> The employer does not deceive the party
> The CEO and other top managers are all nice people (not without their kinks though, but nothing extreme)
Not him but Google six years ago.

Literally impossible Randian wankery. Mega corporations do not care about people except in as much as fake goodwill sells more products. Their entire point is to turn a profit at any cost, and that necessitates crushing their laborers underfoot. Any mega corporation that isnt essentially lawful evil just reveals the writer to be out of their element.

The Triple Bottom Line helps here. They are driven by profit but they are also driven by the desire to make more profit in the future. You don't shit where you eat and you don't get such bad PR that people don't want to buy your product.

Making genuine charitable donations and doing such work is good for that and a lot easier than trying to fake them and won't backfire if you get found out. The core of it? If there isn't a reason to be evil, don't be evil. You are driven by profit and there are often times 'What people want' and 'Profit' align, especially if you are a brand that sells itself on it's image.

I think you just described the real world... At least, that's how it is here in the third-world nation I'm in.

Oh, I like this one. They may perhaps not be 'good' in the traditional, entirely altruistic sense but their looking for profit over such a long term that they're indistinguishable from genuine good guys in all but the most esoteric cases.

2018, the nuclear pulse launchers aren’t even a proper design study yet.

You could always have a young economist/businessman kikcstarting a corporation that fights evil corporations to help his waifu, giving jobs to do to the players.
But as says, you really can't have shareholders unless you archieve having a group of economist paladins happen.

That all has value, it just doesn’t have enough value to justify the cost.

Nah, nothing beats De Beers. Nothin'

I don't know how these people would even make a profit.

You can be a good force without being altruistic. To quote Stephanie McMahon's twitter where she was quite blunt about it.

>philanthropy is the future of marketing, it's the way brands r going 2 win

Look at what Microsoft does with students. They give fantastic deals for uni students to get access to Microsoft programs and they have an entire system set up for helping uni students with IT-related assignments (They helped me locate some good pricing for a Business of IT assignment where I needed to estimate costs of a new system for the company). Those students generally go on to buy Microsoft products because they are used to them and Microsoft helped them in the past.

There is plenty of purely economical reasons for a company to not be a dickhead all the time.

I was part of a builder game where we played megacorps.

I was going for a bio-engineering corp that was run by the grandson and later great-grandson of the founder, who were both respectable in the research and development aspect of their business.

The corp was capable of attracting top-tier talent by offering support for "pure" research (represented by me dedicating a research action blindly) that didn't pan out very much very often, but kept the researchers happy. I was rewarded for my efforts by unlocking the secrets of telepathy that way...

As for outside the corp, there was a terrorist organization that was destabilizing everything and had a propaganda campaign. none of the other players were really interested in fighting it, so I built the "New Deal from New-U" PR campaign to address the dystopic issues and deny support to the terrorist org.

Sadly, the guy running it disappeared and we never got further than that.

The world can be post apocalyptic and the corporations are trying to rebuild the world. They have to face warlords, sects and gangs, as well as a corporate inner-circle that doesn’t want the world to be rebuilt.

The helghast cooperation from killzone comes to mind.
They did nothing wrong.

Lush is a multinational and works like this.
Salaries aren't that good, though, so there's that.

stockholder primacy isn't a law of nature, just the current culture
just like a state doesn't not necessarily exist to funnel wealth to the aristocracy a corporation doesn't necessarily exist for the sake of the investors.

You don't know how people would make a profit without scamming, pollution or salary theft?
Shuck, I don't know. I think most real-world companies manage.

All you need is for those megacorporations to operate in a competitive market and in a setting where outrageous practices (dumping poison in the river) causes scandals that hurt the brand badly enough that no-one wants to risk it. Without having them being particularly moral or immoral, you'd have a bunch of groups working relentlessly to provide goods and services for society as efficiently as possible, raising the living standards of their customers and society as a whole.

Basically treat them as free marketers envisage them working ideally.

I work at a place that sells energy storage and we all laughed our asses off when we heard Musk had promised that. It was his typical "tweet something outlandish to make myself seem super powerful" deal. That was nothing but a PR move, and he didn't actually do a damn thing.

But a megacorporation would be big enough to be able to ignore that right?

On second thought. You don't really don't need any justification for why they're benevolent. They just are. Just like a fantasy kingdom has good kings and nobody questions it a megacorp can have a righteous board of directors.
>why?
why not, why do you need the history of this company? they just happen to be nice people, jeez

You're so naive lmfao

One of those is a zombie, not a lawyer.

>But a megacorporation would be big enough to be able to ignore that right?

If anything, a mecacorporation's sheer size would underscore the need to stay profitable to prevent collapse. And to stay profitable, they have to make stuff or provide services that people want to pay for.

Stepping away from fantasy to the real world for a moment, consider the effects of corporations on societies. While there is a long list of sins they commit in the drive for profit, it is nonetheless overwhelmingly the case that people are wealthier the more contact they have with corporations in their daily lives. The people with the least contact with corporations are the poorest on earth.

>just like a state doesn't not necessarily exist to funnel wealth to the aristocracy a corporation doesn't necessarily exist for the sake of the investors.
But isn't the idea behind this that the principle of no taxation without representation, and that therefore the government represents all those who are taxed and therefore pursues all their interests? This is different from the situation many corporations find themselves in: they only receive money from shareholders in the form of purchased stocks, which in turn act as a right to a certain percentage of all profits. They don't 'owe' anyone except the law anything in the same way a state doesn't 'owe' anyone but its own electorate anything.

The Union seeks only to secure the future safety of humanity, and the planet.

This mission is an essential step in the realization of that goal.

You replace nations with corporations. And then you make something worse.

>If anything, a mecacorporation's sheer size would underscore the need to stay profitable to prevent collapse.
Well, a company that doesn't suffer from scale benefits will just split up. Unless it's being mismanagement by someone trying to gain prestige with high profile aquisitions and projects.
But I guess inidividual departments would function pretty much like smaller companies and not be able to count on headquarters to drive an extensive conspiracy just so they can be lazy and cheap when such a thing is expensive and the eventual decision makers have too much of a conscious to even come up with the idea. So public watch-dogs are a credible explaination I guess.

>wealth and corporation
corporations and business in general are production drivers, corporations in particular just being a type with an equity construction for large scale production
production = wealth creation
in a capitalist society it might be a bit to abstract to perceive directly, but every transaction of goods and/or services slightly increases the welfare in the world

A corporation’s only raison d’etre is the profit motive. It has no morality. You moron.

He exploits factory workers. Basically said ”they don’t need holidays or sleep, they get free froyo!”

By law they owe shareholders their dividends, debt holders their rent and employees their wages.
Stockholder primacy is when they choose to maximize the perks for one of these stakeholders at the expense of the others. It's a combination of management being stockholders themselves and selfishly inflating certain priorities beyond what would be necessary to retain capital and the business practice being so widespread that all those investors have better investing options if the company does leave.

Management must keep in mind the needs of the investors, if the workers are properly unionized they must keep in mind their demands too. Same with debtors, suppliers and customers. But not only will the expectations and demands of these groups differ depending on the zeitgeist and culture, so will the feeling of personal responsibility of the decision makers themselves.

If a corporation existed solely to make money it would be a hedge fund.
Corporations have mission statements. Those usually aren't to maximize returns. It has to do with their business and what change they want to see in the world.
When a plasma flatscreen mogul says "a television in every household" sure, his mouth is watering thinking about the returns on that, but it also conforms to his vision of the future. He wants to see widespread adoption of this technology and build towards a future where that is realized.
A corporation needs to make a profit to survive, not the other way around.

>You replace nations with corporations. And then you make something worse.
terrorists work

Basically this. Companies that have dynamic "personality" leadership can often stay on a positive path for a while because the leader cares more about his "vision" than baser comforts like money and power. Unfortunately this state of affairs will rarely survive that first generation of leadership.

Also note that, in anything large enough to be called a Megacorporation, you're going to have lots of internal politics and competing factions. You're talking about tens (or maybe hundreds) of thousands of white collar / management employees, in addition to whatever ground-level operation they run. As always, people can be expected to act like people.

>All you need is for those megacorporations to operate in a competitive market
By definition, competitive market doesn't really come in to it. Anything large enough to be called a "megacorporation" probably has a monopoly on (at least) one industry, extreme vertical integration, and the economic weight to buy politicians and judges at all levels. They are the Power in the settings they occupy, so outside pressure usually can't curtail them.

Coporate alignment.
>supportive vs exploitative
the internal morality, do squeeze their employees for all they're worth or are the employees highly prized and handsomely rewarded (even at the cost of profitability and growth potential)?
probably somewhere in-between

>constructive vs destructive
the external morality, is the coporation making the world a better place? do they drive innovation to improve the lives of future generations, do they introduce projects that serve just to make their customer's lives better? or do they pollute, sell private information and perpetrate a hostile litigation environment?

Wether a certain behaviour is because of PR reasons is not important for this scale. It cements the corporate culture even if the the initial spark was coldly calculated.

>supportive constructive
funding a charity run

>supportive destructive
wolf of wallstreet

>exploitative constructive
wallmart

>exploitative destructive
the mafia

If news agencies in real life could be depended upon to provide the most impactful, relevant information on the good and bad activities of corporations before any other kind of information those corporations would have to start being better simply out of fear of being eliminated via moral, economic, social, and political darwinism. So you'd have to explain how and why the news agencies aren't being compromised and corrupted.

And if you could come up with that sort of explanation you'd have a panacea for all the world's ills, so good luck.

>Copy the company that removed "Do no evil" from their manifesto
Really.
Really?
Really.

This sounds like an interesting game, if you come back to this thread for some godforsaken reason please tell me the name of it.

>Following Google's corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, Alphabet took "Do the right thing" as its motto, also forming the opening of its corporate code of conduct.
They weren't that bad 10 years ago

The Carlsberg company was sorta this in Denmark back during the industrial revolution. Thus when the strikes and big fights came, their employees just kept working since they already had what the strikers wanted.

That's why he said 'early' specifically.

AI awakens and takes it upon himself to keep information online clean?

>Can an institution driven purely by profit for its shareholders be morally righteous?
No.

I mean, just... really, no. Not in the corporatist form you find in America, at least. Companies are legally required to maximize revenues for shareholders. That's from term to term too - long strategy be damned.

The only way a "Corporation" can be moral is if it's NOT a corporation, ie, not publicly traded. If a company is owned by a single individual and they call the shots, that individual can run the company however they goddamn want to.

that doesn't go too well either

>tfw JUICE HACKERS squeeze your juice box before it reaches your flat
>your isometric cyberfruit healthpod has been hacked by domestic darkweb cyberpunks

Yes, that was the idea but I was thinking more overt. Like An AI awakening and going "All your internet is my bitch now, so I don't want any of your dirt here. Be nice to your electronic neighbor and I won't share your browser history."

I was under the impression that organized crime syndicates do value their members.

Sure, if you could create a totally loyal and incorruptible AI with a good grasp on human morality that would work. Now go do that in real life.

Interestingly enough i'm currently in a game where we MAY have created a benevolent AI god. See first we had these pseudo AI cyber elf like programs, but one guy was really worried about the terminator problem, so he basically took one, added supercomputer processing power, and then just had it start crunching philosophy and moral theory, juiced it up, and then put it in a place out of synch with time (long story)

So essentially this program spent millenia pondering the mysteries of the universe and human morality. We Megaman X'd it, to be absolutely sure. Her name is Suzie and she wants to help us

Depends on the member. They want members loyal to them but loyalty to the members themselves is rarely important.

Relevant
youtube.com/watch?v=xBeoreJr4Yc

Not really. That scenario obliterates notions of good and evil due to the AI fixing all the problems.

A corporation can be good if it is helmed by an individual, or an institution, which does not care about profit.
In a sci-fantasy setting, this is pretty easy:
>The corp is entirely owned by an old dragon who uses it as a plaything
>The corp is owned by an ancient sect of zealots who use it to protect the ancient alien doomsday weapons
>The corp is owned by an eccentric trillionaire who has gone bonkers in his quest to fight crime

thats the point. Literally God is the only thing that's going to solve the problem

No, like I said before, if you could make an AI that was truly incorruptible and loyal it wouldn't try to modify its programming and it'd just do what it's meant to do. So you could make a news AI and humanity would still be fighting with itself.

A true AI would be a person with choice, and those things will fuck up just to put a thumb in your eye. They’ll cut off their noses to spite their faces.
If you want something with zero spin, it couldn’t be a person as we know them. It certainly couldn’t be a person with the capacity to choose to spin.

>righteous
>driven purely by profit
The two are fundamentally incompatible. They can appear to be righteous, they can even do some genuinely good thing, but at the end of the day, they're still morally grey at best.

It was a builder game run on /builders/ in 2^3chan from 2015, called Syndicate Builder.

On the one hand, I miss builders. On the other, some of those dudes were pretty caustic assholes who had a hard time separating IC and OOC banter.

Huh. Would a builder count as a quest, or would it be safe to post here in Veeky Forums?

>if you could make an AI that was truly incorruptible and loyal it wouldn't try to modify its programming and it'd just do what it's meant to do
You're an idiot who knows next to nothing about AI. AI is a broad term of artificial intelligence, but one of the main things about Artificial Intelligence is that it has the ability to modify itself. An "AI" that can't modify "it's programming" is literally not an AI but an expert system.

>A true AI would be a person with choice, and those things will fuck up just to put a thumb in your eye

AIs aren't people, they're self-modifying systems. Stop trying to humanise advanced computer programs by saying they'll have emotions and desires.

Uber is a company that's executives belong in prison.

>righteous
>driven purely by profit
What happens if there's a monetary system that's based around good deeds as a currency?

It isn't incorruptible. It just hates false data. It considers it an affront to himself. An imperfection, that needs to be purged.

Uber is only working because they're betting on being able to A) massively outspend and drive out of business their competition, B) Hope that courts and governments will ignore their skirting of the rules, and C) Make people think that "disruption" is the best way to make money and thus drink their koolaid.

then you get Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

>It just hates false data. It considers it an affront to himself. An imperfection, that needs to be purged.
So it starts by purging the beings that make false data, ie humans. Yeah, nothanks.

Only if they keep making it.

Fake news beware!

>A corporation needs to make a profit to survive, not the other way around.
Corporations are legally obligated to put profit first. They can be sued by their investors if they do it the other way around.

They can be sued by employees if they mistreat them too, or by the public if they pollute.
Besides, laws in your fictional setting depend on you.

>Corporations are legally obligated to put profit first. They can be sued by their investors if they do it the other way around.
Only if the corporation is publically owned.

Here's a setting:

The LifeSpan Foundation is a corp founded by Elliot Yar, a young man who, at the age of twelve, developed a neural interface to the global network (now known as HeadNet, or The Head). His final goal is the attainment of immortality for all humankind. LifeSpan has research into every field of technology, medicine and culture, but remains somewhat underground, so as not to draw the attention of the world's repressive governments.

The player may be either a field researcher\agent for LifeSpan, or a member of the secret organization targeting the company, a group known as the Children of Man (a group of radical Romantics opposed to life extension and human-machine interfaces).

>may sue CEO
pls no

I was thinking that the CEO\fouynder is a figure in the background...the player (no matter what faction that they choose) would never interact with him.

In fact, who's to say if he is even real and not some sort of cover for an AI, perhaps.

Age up the CEO some +25 years.

Let's place the Lifespan Foundation in a post-semi-apoc world, limited WMD usages toppled the larger and powerful governments, leaving for a while only large multinational corps as able to stabilize things. Some are good, some are bad, and the remnants of the government are in competition with them trying to re-assert their sovereignty.

So we've 'The Head', which is totally not a ripoff of Ready Player One or ....I forget what it's called in Snowcrash.

Probably draw some inspiration from the drek that was Earthweb.

>corporation creates a mary sue persona as a "CEO" for PR reasons
>real CEO may be nothing like it, and likely the position changes hands behind the guise occasionally
>regardless of the views/intents/etc. of the real CEO, they have to act somewhat in line with the mary sue to maintain the image
>this leads to the seemingly uncharacteristicly benevolent megacorp