http://amultiverse.com/comic/2014/07/02/peoples-court/

I honestly like the idea of a Shadowrun setting where the megacorps do not enjoy their balkanized extraterritorial status in most places, and instead they used the chaos of the Awakening to seize and hold land under arms, in their own name. So you'd have the UCAS, the NANs, CalFree, but you'd also have the corporate state of Ares, the corporate territory of Shiawase, etcetera.

When everything shook down, the nations realized that while they could take back that land, doing so would be a risky, costly affair that might well lead to them losing. So they agreed to normalize the mega's territory as states in and of themselves, and not bar the megas from conducting trade and business within their own territory, as usual, but without the extraterritoriality.

Seattle, of course, would remain the same patchwork landscape we know and love.

And why should they do that? This only makes them liable for all the public services people tend to take for granted and which, despite what Anglo-Saxons think, cannot be turned into profit (look at the way the US' infrastructure went since the 80s). Much easier to adopt a puppet state for the dirty works and keep them between them and a potentially angry populace. Like, you know, it's being done today, in reality. Corporations are real cherry-pickers, and exterritoriality (which just means that any government laws do not necessarily apply in their juristiction) suits them much better than maintaininig territorry. I even doubt corps maintain a complete judiciary; if someone is murdered on corp turf, they probably hand the case to local police and assign corp investigators to keep an eye on them.

Not to mention the giant sums militaries devour without being any good in terms of profit. Military is dead capital, and profit-oriented corporations, even the more hegemonial Shadowrun Trade Companies (as opposed to real, contemporary shareholder-value-driven corporations), wilol think twice before burning billions a year on the upkeep of an aircraft carrier when they could also lease it to a government of their choice, which would then bleed it's citizens for the upkeep.

The Shiawase Decision is total batshit. Because corporate security guards ALREADY, in every state, have the right to use deadly force under the circumstances described.

Especially with things like cruise missiles, small smart munitions, easy and cheap VTOL drone setup, and all sorts of new mechanical mayhem in the SR universe. There is absolutely no need for a dedicated full-time military naval presence when you can take any cruiser or freighter and easy convert it into a smaller, cheaper platform from which you can easily do most of the jobs you'd do from a modern carrier anyway.

To be honest, I really like the Hardwired model. In that universe the Orbitals (Megacorps) had launched a few small asteroids to show the governments who's boss. The governments tried to counterattack, but got cut down in droves by the microwave power transmission satellites and/or the orbitals own fighter aircraft. By the time it was over a few hours later a few "Oops!" asteroids still hit after the ceasefire to properly punctuate the point and the governments were the Orbital's bitches.

I was thinking that with the huge financial pull the Megas have in SR, they would do that same but with the economy. Pretty hard to argue with a group of hyper-aggressive corporations that can pretty much collapse your economy at will, especially if they all band together in a temporary truce to put the screws to any governments that get too uppity.

"We want a free zone at this location without taxes or tariffs, please. No? OK."
*Local tricast news show* "The markets in France just took a huge tumble today as their stock market plummeted by over 40%. Failures in the auto-lockdown system meant that the feeding frenzy continued as various shell corporations and off-shore interests suddenly dumped massive quantities of stock onto the market. In related news, foreign wheat and other grain imports have suddenly dropped by 75%, forcing many supermarkets to start charging massively increased prices for all grain-based products. Massive lay-offs are inevitable and all Gendarmerie officers are being recalled to their units for the expected rioting."

It kind of sucks when the government responds by arresting the board of directors and every c level executive, and taking their family into "protective custody" as well as having police seize and occupy every company factory and other facility. Which is precisely the low end of what they would do. The high end has the next board meeting at the executive offices abruptly ending in a sound and light show.

What the fuck dude? Why do you insert wrong grammar into my post?


This was written before the rise of the militarized cop. Much like how Tir na nÓg's "super draconian" anti-terror laws are pretty much what is practice today.


Easy to argue actually. They'd blow up their own power base, value, and profits as an aside. All they'd gain is pushing a maker economy that'd replace them. If the government spins this not toally stupidly, they can make the megas the bad guys, and France (as per your example) isn't the most capitalist-friendly country to begin with, so you'd see suits hanging from street lights at a very short notice, especially if the gendarmerie turns a blind eye or even supports the angry mobs. Oh, and the government could seize corporate assets for compensation.

The financial market depends on everybody to conform to the rules. In fact, it is nothing but a very, very elaborate game. If one side flips the table and starts yelling? No more game. Then, money and all those abstract values lose any worth, and it's back to boots on the ground and machines in the warehouse. Which means the corps would lose big time. They're entirely dependent on the financialm market to work.

As for the orbitals? That would only make sense if orbital facilities were entirely self-sufficicent. Which is a hard thing to do in an environment where massive radiation waves happen every other month. Other than that, happy starvation, corpers.


Not to mention the seizing of all available assets.

No, even when Brinks guys carried the same .38s as the cops they were allowed to shoot people trying to hijack their trucks or steal the companies money. I'm not even going to go into the crazy stuff like the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 or the Columbine Mine massacre of 1927, since I don't think those would fly these days.

Pinkerton

The Bremer Administration in Iraq.

However, okay, you win. This shit goes back to the East India companies. Shiawase would just haqve resurrected that.

That said, SR megacorps are zaibatsu in the pre-WW2 sense; they aren't today's Anglo-saxon shareholder value driven companies. That actually makes a world of difference in operation, organization, diversification and political agenda. Or, as Findley's pretty excellent Corporate Shadowfiles describes it, Neo-Feudalism.

Pretty much the way the way I look at it.

An actual SR mega can get away with crazy stuff like the Ludlow Massacre or the Columbine Mine massacre. You go on strike, they have their security forces machine gun the picket line, then hose off the pavement and hire replacements. Now there might be some problems when the host countries "emergency repairs" results in every corp facility losing power, water and having a giant hole excavated in front of every gate, but that's about the limit you can go to without going to war.

There's a lot more a government can do to harrass corporations with far-spread exterritorial holdings. Grounding aircraft, preventing transport of goods, the whole nine yards of embargo and sanctions (jamming the Matrix in the corp's areas, putting their produce unterquarantaine, random-inspecting their employees and corp citizens as soon as they leave the compounds, forcing any corp airplane down on charges that the corp cuts corners with maintainance, not to mention seizing property as compensation for damage the corp has done) ... corporations need the legal framework and infrastructure a somewhat working, somewhat modern and organized state maintains and provides to exist. Otherwise, corporations would flock to Ethnomalia and the Congo zone, because no pesky government would ever bother them there, wouldn't they? This is why corporations work to subvert governments to their whims, not overthrow and replace them.

So what happens when all the corporations flip said country the bird and shut everything down? Oh, you want food? Well, we control all the shipping fleets and "unforeseen circumstances" has forced us to reroute all of those cargo ships elsewhere. Your aggressive flying and forcing our aircraft down has forced us to refuse to service your country because we fear for our employees safety. That country-wide power and communications grid we installed suddenly took a shit when you started fucking with us? Well, all the necessary equipment for the repairs seems to be extra-territorial completely randomly. The places all blew up everything important and damaged them just enough that you can't repair them when you tried to hook shoot around working with us? Well, you know how pesky those Terra First guys can be. Forcing down our aircraft? That's OK. We're pulling out all of our maintenance infrastructure, cancelling and blackballing all of your infrastructure and military equipment contracts for at least the next 10 years, executing clause 127653b on page 7523 in our aviation contract and using our back doors to kill the avionics of each and every aircraft in your fleet...when most of your higher cabinet is airborn completely randomly...and all of the autodrive functions in the ground vehicles...during rush hour...on your version of Friday night. *Insert other Corp-driven PRS scenarios here*

Well, that's okay. Now we're launching cruise missiles tipped with tactical nuclear warheads at all your arcologies, your corporate employees who aren't corporate citizens are hereby charged with treason unless they immediately turn themselves in and start spilling all the beans, and your corporate employee-citizens who aren't in military uniform are now guilty of espionage, because you've clearly committed an act of warfare on us and we're responding in kind.


When corporations go toe-to-toe with governments, governments win. Because at the end of the day, governments will have the vastly larger slice of the violence pie.

(Also, please don't make the mistake of thinking that corps have some kind of monopoly on repairing or hacking stuff. Trying to use that backdoor is going to (a) fail, because they already found it and quashed it, and (b) incite a massive netwar counter-attack.)

And the best part is that after you've done this, the populace of that country will entirely hate you, because it will be transparently obvious that you did this, and launched an attack on their soil. Remember how the U.S. population was dead-set against World War II... And then Pearl Harbor was bombed and suddenly folks couldn't get into the war fast enough? Yeah, it'll be like that.

Tell that to the Tipu Sultan.

OK, you've wiped out all the corps in your country, but your modern, thriving country a week ago is now Afghanistan. Pyric victory much? Oh yeah, and the groups that can help you fix it won't touch you with somebody else's 10 foot/3 meter pole.

Nationalization happens. Probably not ideal, bit it's not like Iran stopped having an oil industry when they sent the Anglo oil companies packing. There might be shortages, but, depending on how badly the corporations misbehaved, this might be the lesser of two evil (when asked to choose between medieval islamic radicals and Americans, Sunni Iraqis did not choose American).


And if the country says "your lawyers can go fuck themselves, we'll just take all your shit, put guns to your guys' heads and ask them if they're willing to die for Verizon's bottom line (and grant them their wish if they do, probably execute chief management in public before all workers for good measre)", there's not much the company by itself can do. They could try to trash everything, but it'd be in theri own interest to come to a more mutually agreeable accord before that happens. It's pretty much how China treats foreign investors, for instance, and amazingly, it's not lacking investors.

A shadowrun company could fly in mercs and their own goons, but that hasn't worked out well for them a number of times already (it failed in California (twice), it failed in Manchuria, it failed in the Phillipines). War is seriously bad for the bottom line if you're an actual participant. Look at what two bush wars did to the American economy. We're talking about a significantly smaller economic entity (a megacorp in Shadowrun probably, at most, carries the economical weight of a larger middle power like France) undertaking a much larger-scale operation. It took Imperial Britain 100 years to pay back the debt of the Napoleonic wars.


Not really. More like many of today's emerging powers, or 1970s Japan, with large, national or semi-national companies and, arguably, a good sense of pride and optimism among the non-corporate segment of the population. Whether it'll turn out to be South or North Korea is up to the future, it could go either way depending on the government, but you're really, really overestimating the power of lawyers in an environment where nobody listens to them anymore.

I can see that we have very different ideas about what the Megacorps are in SR. From what I'm gathering, you see them as an extension of today's corporations. Sure they bribe people to get what they want, blackmail, and occasionally break laws, but they're mostly playing by the rules as we see them today. I see them from the Cyberpunk perspective where they do all the aforementioned but I add kidnapped, brutalized, raped, pillaged, and killed to get where they are today. These are not nice people. If you're talking to high-up lawyer from the Big 10 as a governmental official, he's not just a lawyer, he's the lawyer that weaseled, threatened, and killed (most likely through proxy, but maybe not) to be where he is today. Which is common in SR corporations what with their Machiavellian machinations and Ubermensch "nothing is forbidden as long as you win" mentality. In our example, this merciless murderer that is perfectly willing to do pretty much anything to get what his corp wants, is telling several high ranking governmental figures the way of the world when you are a part of the Big Ten, and then there is everyone else below them on bent knee because the government fucking with them will only be a blip on their annual spreadsheet.

As for costs, the stuff is already in place. They blow it up and simply walk away. There is no occupation. There is no protracted insurgency. Maybe a week of high-intensity operations and the corps have Miller Time, leaving behind a country that used to be at the forefront if technology but is now a really fancy looking Myanmar. Your country being completely buttfucked is an example to everyone else, nothing more.
As for "guns pointed at everyone", it's kinda funny how all the really important folks were quietly transferred to other offices, on vacation with their families out of the country, sick relative abroad, etc and the guys they need to run the week-long offensive operations replaced them.
High-power transformers and other high-end infrastructure is made by a very limited number of firms and are hideously expensive. It's very interesting how all these firms are owned by the Corps, and any independent installation companies are told up-front that if they want to stay in business, they best be checking that the places they install at are Oked by their suppliers of this equipment.
Nationalization is great, when the corps you deal with are a pack of chumps willing to spend millions and/or billions on the company assets without any sort of contingency plans to make sure that such assets are unusable in the case of such a clumsy, and ultimately stupid, attempt by the host nation. Megacorps in the cutthroat world of SR are not that naive and they are exponentially more ruthless.

Now, this is a pretty extreme example we have here as I described it. It really wouldn't go down that way except in very extreme circumstances, but it does demonstrate what could happen if you start poking the Megacorp bear in the eye with that nationalist stick and think that it's like talking to IBM today.

So you think they are like the North Korean rulers? Holed up in their decaying fantasyland, surrounded by slaves?

Probably. Not quite the same, but close enough for government work.

Uhm, no. You said they'd turn off utilities and file lawsuits if governments grounded them. Please do not put words I did not say in my mouth again, like when you edited my post to include spelling errors for whatever bizarre reason you did that. I said that, if a government of some development - which SR corps depend on for a lot of things, reading any SR corp book ever, was to go total war on a corp, they could masively hurt that corp. The megas might omega order the government, which would probably at least coordinate their response, but that is not what you brought up. You brought up that they essentially turn off utilitiers.


How is that different from most major corporations of the real world?


So it'd be like ... talking to a politican?


The way Colloton bowed before Renraku and let them keep the arcology, I presume? But it seems we're talking about two different things: the canonical setting and your home setting, which sounds a lot more like CP2020 than SR.


Uhm, that assumes corps build EVERYTHING basically from explosives? And that corps somehow are perfectly organized - which I can tell you from personal experience: They're not, and it gets worse the larger a company is; SR megas are state-sized and very likely to have at least state-level inertia. Probably more, since companies see much more infighting, especially in a cyberpunbk setting, where disruptive events like murder are relatively common. Wreaks havoc on command structures you need in such an event.


So the corp also has access to teleporters? Seriously, thast's just not gonna fly in a surveillance society like Shadowrun (or reality, for that matter). Besides, important deciders in protective custody have a very hared time relaying orders to executive organs. If the brain runs off to the Caymans, the body goes into headless chicken mode.


If the company is made up entirely of red-eyed, white-haired god-demon Mary Sues maybe. With people? Not liklely to happen.

Look, we can go about this for a very long series of posts, but ultimatelyx, I think we just fundamentally disagree on the setting. My view is basically shaped by the setting's canon, which strongly favors a corp/state symbiosis. Yours sounds a lot like CP2020, which is far more "corps replace nations". Best, let's agree to disagree.

Oh, and please, don't insert spelling errors into my posts again if you quote them. That is just plain weird.

Sorry about the typo thing, that was my three-month old slapping my tablet to auto-correct and I didn't catch it. As annoying as auto-correct is on a PC, it's ten times as bad on portable devices.

Point one, I never said a single thing about a lawsuit in any of my posts. I said shut it down. How that happens depends on what the government chooses to do. If they come back to the bargaining table, a few brownouts. They try hardball, it can get to major regional blackouts. They try nationalization...boom.

It takes less than 500g of mil-spec explosives to take out an entire power station and force a complete rebuild/replacement of the necessary very expensive to install and manufacture equipment for it to function if you know what you're doing. And look, the schematics are right here because we designed, installed, and maintain that equipment. Less than 750 per station to make sure that you have them by the balls is money well spent, no?

Agreed. I wish to point that it's what could happen. Being able to do something and that something being smart are completely different animals.

Totally. I have sent some very interesting texts to people thanks to auto correct. And I wasn't angry or offended, it was just ... so bizarre.

You seriously think the Corporate Court would let that happen? They're quite aware that Zurich Orbital would eat an ICBM the moment it looked likely. The First Rule of war in the modern age is never to threaten someone with weapons of mass destruction with their own annihilation. Someone in the system is crazy enough to damn the consequences and fire anyway.

ICBMs are so low tech, and provide too much warning. Gigawatt lasers are more likely.

True enough. I also did qualify my example as all of the Megas agreeing to start turning the screws. This would basically be an end-game scenario where the all corps decided they had to go to guns to shut down an entire country and then blackball the rebuilding.

There are limits to MegaCorp power. My point is that the Megas being what they are in SR have gone to making all of the low-down and dirty tricks today's Corps have done in the third world and basically made it "business as usual" and cranked it up to 11. The governments can do what they want...after checking with the Megas. Not because the Megas have everything and everyone in their pocket (but it's close enough to true to always be a consideration in your plans), it's because they hold a quasi-symbiotic relationship with the various governments simply because the government being there makes the Mega's job easier.

Blowing up Zurich Orbital would be a complete suicide run for the country that did it. Not only would you crash the world economy and have every other country ready and willing to toss a punch into the boot party, but you would have every Mega pulling out everything in your country in a true scorched earth scenario. It's nice to imagine the entire world simultaneously giving the social finger and declaring open season on the Megas, but you're talking about a world where the country count is ours times around 4, there are far more and ever smaller slices of the pie to go around, and the true economic powerhouses of the entire planet are the ten groups you just declared war on...and they have everything important rigged to go up in a fireball.

If you use 1.21 Gigawatt's you can literally blast them back to the stone age

Yeah, but do you really want to know what happens to human history if it starts with Megas?

Well sure. So you hack an Aztechnology ASAT laser using an Ares network, via a corp site that you broke into at 3am.

And the code is set for "000000000000" just in case communications break down because they want the weapons to be ready "just in case"...

Pretty sure it takes more than a quick 3am hacking job to set the orbital lasers to blow up the single most important piece of combined corp property on-, or off-, planet. Very likely a custom OS, using a bandwidth not usually used for matrix connections, and it has to have received a pre-arranged signal only sent with a very specific set of sequences.

Not if they want their wireless bonus.

You don't even need to muck with it. Spirit movement powers and the right bit of mojo is enough to accelerate a Ford Americar to a significant fraction of lightspeed. Well past escape velocity.

I'd see this as going the other direction from armed combat.

Government has the power. Corps have the money. Together, they're best friends! The Koch Brothers buy off congressmen and governors. The Shiawise decision is really an excuse; the PR cover for something that was going to happen anyway. It was just a question of putting the issue before their judges. Yes, the corps like having governments pay for the military. However, they also like a direct and efficient command structure. But there's no rule that when the corps own the military that they have to pay for it. I imagine the corps own everything, but the governments still pay for it with taxes (with elected officials getting their private yachts and retirement provided for by the corps).

In other words, it's basically modern day US without the veneer.

Of course when governments does pull stuff off like this, foreign investment capital tends to flee the country. This causes the nations economy to pretty much tank, since it can't pay its bills.
Countries with cash flow problems like this are more concerned about internal strife. The corporate big wigs and VIPs (those that are important skill wise such as their nuclear fusion engineers) have all left the country and all financial assets moved out as well.

Whose going to maintain the reactors? What assets can the country go after. The corporate court will just tell them to buzz off and any assets are likely in a financial institutions the Mega owns anyway.

more than likely the corp in question will bribe enough people, start a low level guerrilla war, or just assassinate the the problem leaders. Then get back to business of making money.

Is it easier for a corp to get elected officials out of office, or for elected officials to organize a nice pogrom for the corp leadership? And yeah, if a corp wants to abandon a few tens of billions worth of infrastructure I suspect it isn't hard to find someone who will pay for it.

See also why Ares has positioned themselves as 'America : The Corporation!'.