The article was satire fyi.
O thank god, almost ate the onion
So we can’t have Bezos / Musk compete for world king?
Don’t forget about Dick Suckerberg
It’s satire at the moment, but look at so many scifi works that have mega-corporate states ruling the world. They’re fiction now, but often times scifi is a bit of a look into a potential future ending up partially coming true. There’s no doubt that big corporations do have political influence already for a while now, so it’s just a step up to having them fully in charge, and no one will blink.
Just look at South Korea where Samsung’s revenue is equal to a whopping 17% of the entire country’s GDP, making them hold enormous power over politics, education, journalism and the legal system.
And before anyone thinks “who cares, they’re just a phone/appliance company”, one of the most advanced autonomous sentry guns ever developed, so much so that almost everything about it is still highly classified, was made by a company that was at the time a subsidiary of Samsung.
I’ve translated their marketing and greenwashing shite for a while and hated every word. They are 100% dystopian.
Imagine if 20 years ago you wrote a sci-fi story where people spend a most of their time staring into rectangular devices that sends information that corporate controlled AIs decided they should be seeing. After staring at these rectangles for too long, people become angry and paranoid. Sometimes hypnotized to the point where some people commit mass murder or try to destroy their own democratically elected government.
If you wrote that story 20 years ago it wouldn’t be published because it would be too unbelievable. But here we are.
The People’s Republic of Walmart
Republic?
House Walton will hear of this treason against the Royal Family!
Excuse me? What the hell?
Satire now but honestly doesn’t seem very far off, with how willing people are to give up their privacy to megacorps
Wasn’t there recently a city in the us that wanted to give corporations the right to vote? Or was that satire too?
Not satire, but the City of London has done something similar for a while. The thought process is you might not “live” there but you use it’s infastructure and facilities while at work. Giving the employees of the companies the right to vote within the city.
“City of London” is the really small (like 2 square mile) area in the middle though isn’t it? AFAIK barely anyone is resident there so it might make sense if employees got to vote.
