Mega Corporations

I was just thinking about Mega Corporations, and I think /k/ could do with some discussion about them.

For those unfamiliar:

>Megacorporation, mega-corporation, or megacorp, a term popularized by William Gibson, derives from the combination of the prefix mega- with the word corporation. It has become widespread in cyberpunk literature. It refers to a corporation (normally fictional) that is a massive conglomerate, holding monopolistic or near-monopolistic control over multiple markets (thus exhibiting both a horizontal and a vertical monopoly).
>Megacorps are so powerful that they can ignore the law, possess their own heavily armed (often military-sized) private armies, be the operator of a privatized police force, hold "sovereign" territory, and even act as outright governments.

So, think Blackwater/Academi on steroids mixed with the absolute worst parts of Apple, Google and Lockheed Martin, with a light sprinkling of random acquisitions ranging from agriculture companies to biological weapons R&D firms.

Do you think that these will show up in the future? How will war change as a result?

I wish. Anti monopoly laws, laws preventing corporations from abusive consumer practices, blah blah. At this rate it'll take forever to become cyberpunk. I mean the liberals whine about how Google tracks your search history but I say it's not enough until SWAT bursts into my house for talking shit about capitalists.

>Anti monopoly laws
What about AT&T, Alphabet, Apple, etc? They simply drag out court proceedings for years, and the end result is that the anti-monopoly laws basically don't exist.

>war
won't change a thing, except instead of the United States occupying poppy fields in Afghanistan, its going to be Apple

right now megacorps use the u.s. government as a way to subsidize military force. they pay a nominal tax rate and the other taxpayers foot the rest of the bill. think the banana wars in central america, the current mid-east entanglements, and ww2 destroying their german industrial competition.
if they added a military or paramilitary unit to their expenses then their net income decreases.
so as soon as it becomes more economically viable to directly fund their military interventions instead of getting the government to do it for them then you'll see iSEaLs and an exxon-mobil branded delta force

>tfw hiding from Google drones innawoods because your search history from the date of your first gmail account creation indicates you are Threat Level Gamma-Paige 12 due to an interest in off-grid and weapons
>tfw rushing through the irradiated former IBM Partner States to avoid radiation after the Siri-Watson Conflict of 2083
>tfw biofield-disrupter implant you got from an insurgent in the slums starts to reject
>tfw United States of Microsoft shocktroops will never accept you into their ranks because your DNA is not compatible with Monsanto ReadyFite Tactical-9 CRISPR treatment
At least you may have a chance in the Badlands, perhaps finding some gentech to boost your defensive senses. After all, most company soldiers here are just augmented, not like those gook soldiers they grow in vats in the Samsung Trifectate.

>tfw you call the CEO of AlphaMartin a humongous faggot during his quarterly speech so he straight up buys what's left of Amazon Web Services specifically to find all of your cuck porn browsing history and incorporate it into a global advertising campaign

>What about AT&T, Alphabet, Apple, etc?

Corporate death penalty

What do you mean forever? The 1% is already essentially above the law, anti-trust suits don't happen because muh neoliberalist globalist capitalism. And cyber attacks are I'm the now. We're basically ten million neon lights and one Microsoft buyout of the military away from living in the genre

>I was just thinking about Mega Corporations, and I think /k/ could do with some discussion about them.
Good thing this is Veeky Forums.

The thread was moved from /k/ to Veeky Forums. We've had threads about megacities before there, but apparently threads about megacorps are only for Veeky Forums because something shadowrun. The mods are faggots and they have a history of doing shit like this.

Believe me, I am well aware of the current fad of moving Veeky Forums threads to other boards.

>The 1% is already essentially above the law,
Name one point in history where they weren't
>And cyber attacks are I'm the now.
Oh wow computers are important now how fucking profound
>Microsoft buyout of the military away from living in the genre
That's retarded and never going to happen

You think you have it bad? We have one genuinely good trip at /k/, and the mods nearly ran him off the site with their overbearing autism.

>be (relative) expert on nuclear weapons
>like, read all of the publicly available literature and active in the nuclear weapons space expert
>make threads about nuclear weapons since you know how they work
>mods are fine with it
>anons start asking you about the political factors at play when using nuclear weapons
>aka they start asking you how we'd nuke China if we had to
>you reply
>mods start removing threads
>eventually a mod literally says that discussion about nuclear weapons ONLY is okay, but discussion about the use of them is banned
>apparently that should go to /pol/
>said expert made a thread on /pol/ a total of once and promptly left
>he lowered himself to posting in threads occasionally and responding to anons who ask for him directly
>he posts like once every two weeks now

>and I think /k/ could do with some discussion about them
Did ya get moved, or forget which board you were on?

Will never happen.

Instead of having well known corporations hold the power (Atztechnology, Ares, EBM, Arasak, Militech, Orbital Air...), have invisible trusts and holdings running things hidden.

The shitty thing is I understand why the mods killed that line of discussion in it's crib. user is too much a faggot these days to let some things go, I can see the can of worms clear as day.
Even then, the tripfag got butthurt he was told "Yes, you can share your knowledge of nuclear weapons, but not their active use" and stopped posting. He is the one being a fucknugget like the posters back when that got told they couldn't post child models on /b/.

Well, you see that sticky at the top of this board? Not the one with the kittens.

How's discussing the strategic and tactical points of nuclear warfare like quest threads?

>the tripfag got butthurt he was told
But he didn't get butthurt. Half of /k/ did. The half that wasn't 100% faggot. He's our only good trip, and that's true even if you don't like how he would fly into random threads and start acting like an authority on everything nuclear when you just wanted to talk about how those fucking Japs deserved it and the Krauts should have got one too.

>He is the one being a fucknugget
No, not really.

>user is an immense faggot
>user can only take 7 cocks in his ass at once and he wants to take 9, what should he do

>stretch his ass
>fist his ass
>take cocks in his ass
>goatse his ass
>become a moderator

They're not. One is a tangially related topic to the board, and the other was a cancer spamfest removed by a rare act of mod induced justice that has a few shitposters assblasted to this day

Ah, missed I think straight-up acting like governments is unlikely, because who needs the expense? but companies with properly proprietary research may find that it's cheaper to buy security firms outright than just contract them - I think the impetus needed would be an uptick of corporate espionage and probably "hostile" recruiting

Seeing as OP mentioned Gibson, think the situation described in New Rose Hotel, where key individual minds or teams are worth building a campus for and scientists get security teams - when that sort of protection of the bright individuals becomes necessary, then you'll see corps moving things more in-house.

Shit, they tried to kick off Openhiemer? That dude's pretty decent.

But nuclear weapons are related to /k/.

I'm not being rhetorical. I'm actually asking how they're similar since that's the only other sticky we have.

>nuclear weapons

>nuclear
>weapons

>not related
>on /k/, the weapons board

user, you're a special kind of dumb

>where key individual minds or teams are worth building a campus for and scientists get security teams - when that sort of protection of the bright individuals becomes necessary, then you'll see corps moving things more in-house.
We see the first part already with firms running in "stealth mode", but I can't think of a reason in the near term for immediate protection to become important. We'll need a very strong economic impetus for that to happen. I suppose the closest we might come for now is biologists being kidnapped by terrorist groups for their knowledge, and the occasional scientist defecting to another country for one reason or another. Not enough to justify in house security teams beyond some men with radios.

Yeah, this is the thing - Apple and Alphabet and the like, they've not got the level of hunkered-down top-secret research going on really, things haven't gotten THAT tense.

In a wider scope, looking at other megacorps, some security firms also provide other semi-governmental services, such as prisons, because they can pretend to be a good deal, and can relieve governments of expensive oversight and management costs - those would be another place to look for the trappings of a megacorp, but many of these things seem to operate best on a local or regional level - and even at the largest and most widely-serving groups, like G4S, specialisation appears to be the thing. Certainly there's groups that could buy them, but there's little impetus to bunch up and form your classic cyberpunk megacorp at the moment.

>anti-monopoly laws
It's called antitrust legislation, you dullard.

>We're basically ten million neon lights and one Microsoft buyout of the military away from living in the genre
Technology isn't there yet. We lack the transhumanist element that pervades cyberpunk.

Why should Walmart own territory or have an army when it could just bribe the local militias and hire the petty, comparatively poor mercenary corps like Blackwater or Executive Outcomes? Corporations already outsource and move factories to wherever is convenient, why should they care about specific territory unless there is a physical resource there. And in the case of such things, its cheaper to just bribe the locals or accept the losses from bunkering/wildcat mining.

What more technology do you need for it?

I prefer the smaller, Africa oriented corporate battles. Smaller skirmishes between the pro-Shadowrunners against infrastructure and facilities. Some fight in a third world country between the corporations for something small, like a person or a briefcase full of data