10 Sci-Fi Books Where Corporations Are The Villains

The future is nine to five.

The Mary Sue

Welcome to the city of Starbase, home to SpaceX and a huge Elon Musk bust - National | Globalnews.ca

https://blog.taursnd.haus/display/1a041b09-8868-194d-0382-d00436682383

Welcome to the city of Starbase, home to SpaceX and a huge Elon Musk bust - National | Globalnews.ca

There's a reason this song exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9j91-18Kb4 https://youtu.be/B9j91-18Kb4 https://globalnews.ca/news/11164494/elon-musk-...

#SpaceX staff in South Texas voted to turn Boca Chica into “Starbase” - a new city for the purpose of one corporation. It may build community now, but what happens if #Musk moves on? Feels like a modern-day company town with uncertain roots: boom today, ghost tomorrow. #Starbase #CompanyTown

Voters Approve Incorporation o...
Bluesky

Bluesky Social

I've made no secret of the fact that I think the nazi "broligarch" cultists who brought Trump to power, and support the creation of monarchal, technofeudalist city states under a variety of names (Network States, and Freedom Cities most prominently) are working on a larger, dystopian plan for literal authoritarian global domination; a plan that encompasses and revolves around the destruction of democratic structures, the implementation of digital fascist surveillance and repression via AI technology, the adoption of quasi-religious beliefs about our future as exemplified by the TESCREAL movement, and even the fascist plan to remake America into a type of dictatorship under Trump proposed by "neo-reactionary scholar" Curtis Yarvin, also known as The Butterfly Revolution. Taken together, the proponents of these ideas, who are often quite wealthy and influential people in our society and in particular the tech industry, have dubbed their ideology "Dark Enlightenment" which should give you at least some idea of both how obnoxious these rich fascists are, but also how far-reaching their plans ultimately go.

Furthermore, I am certain that this isn't just some weird conspiracy theory for three key reasons. First, the billionaire fascists have more or less told us their plans in the open. Secondly, since buying themselves a president, a small group of hyper-reactionary billionaires led by the world's richest nazi, Elon Musk, have more or less guided the Trump regime to act in countless ways that directly facilitate their obscene visions for the future of humanity.

Finally of course, there are quantifiable structural reasons why what these nazi cultist billionaires are proposing represents one of the only possible futures in which most of the planet maintains capitalism and free market fundamentalist ideology. After all, the planet is on fire, billions of people's lives are at stake if we don't act collectively to address climate crisis, and capitalism is the culprit causing both our impending destruction and our refusal to act; either capitalism and free market fundamentalism go to their graves, or billions of everyday people do, and these billionaire nazis know that. Folks aren't going to keep supporting a capitalist order that's killing them as the bodies pile up, so if you're going to keep doing capitalism for the benefit of an increasingly smaller ruling class, even as it leads to genocides all around us, you're going to need a political system that provides the necessary degree of surveillance, repression, and applied force to maintain control even as society disintegrates in real time - and that political system is going to look a lot like fascism, no matter what they choose to call it.

Despite their rhetoric about "the future" and their love of technology, the truth is the ideas and plans folks like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen (to name a few) are proposing to accomplish their goals, are old, decrepit, and often utterly disproven. As a species, we have already learned the horrible outcomes of adopting repugnant ideas like eugenics, feudalism, and fascism as enforced policy; and yet here today these ideas are being repackaged and renamed as the only hope for our future, by a billionaire nazi ruling class determined to rewind our society into the darkest days of our collective past. Down that road leads subjugation, violence, and death; which is probably why it appeals to rich nazis who value "artificial minds" (and labor) over human beings, and are preparing for a world where billions of people are "surplus" to their requirements as techno-feudalist overlords.

To demonstrate this last point, let's look at a piece by J.J. Anselmi writing in The New Republic that identifies a new (old) way to look at the Network States/Freedom cities plan being pushed by Balaji Srinivasan and his ultra wealthy backers; as the author notes, at its core a "Network State" or "Freedom City" is really just a big company town:

https://archive.is/9B2ZI

Trump’s “Freedom Cities” Are a Devious Scam

"Tech bros love to repackage old ideas as innovation. We’ve all seen it. But their latest foray into disruption no one else wants, the so-called “network state” and its constellation of start-up cities, deserves our attention. This notion has been embraced by President Donald Trump, who has rechristened them “freedom cities.” In reality, the scheme is a techno-fascist vision of the future that’s been quietly but persistently pushed and funded by billionaires such as Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Brian Armstrong, and Sam Altman for years. Despite the shiny marketing materials for places like Próspera and California Forever, which make outlandish promises of futuristic utopias, the start-up city as a concept is a modern, ketamine-infused repackaging of something that flopped into obsolescence long ago: the company town."

#Fascism #Trump #Dystopia #Billionaires #Musk #NetworkState #FreedomCities #CompanyTown #AI #BigTech

What was once Bingham Canyon

#utah #CompanyTown #mining
Oh, yeah, let's make SpaceX's Starbase into an incorporated city and move all Elon's companies there, forming maybe the largest "company town" in history. Because those things always worked so well for us historically.
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-city-starbase-texas-elon-musk-d251a58f32797fd04e4215a4570e782f
#spacex #elonmusk #companytown #texas
(It's interesting that when I tried to enter "Texas" as a hashtag, autocomplete tried to add "schoolmassacre" onto the end. Can't imagine why.)
Elon Musk wants to turn SpaceX's Starbase site into a Texas city

SpaceX is launching a new mission: making Starbase a new Texas city. Billionaire Elon Musk’s company on Thursday sent a letter to local officials requesting a election to turn what it calls Starbase into an incorporated city. Starbase is the South Texas site where SpaceX builds and launches its massive Starship rockets. The area is on the southern tip of Texas at Boca Chica Beach, near the Mexican border. The county's top executive did not immediately comment on the proposal.

AP News
The scene of one of the darkest moments in American labor history has been left essentially untouched since the tragedy.#monuments #ghosttowns #mines #disasters #companytown #podcast #section-Articles
Podcast: The Ludlow Massacre Site
Podcast: The Ludlow Massacre Site

The scene of one of the darkest moments in American labor history has been left essentially untouched since the tragedy.

Atlas Obscura
I have problems with this "example" using Carnegie, but, yeah. How about starting with your business by paying your workforce a living wage? It might mean you'll be able to build fewer buildings with your name on them after you've started your philanthropic works.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/apr/12/centibillionaires-can-learn-from-carnegie?utm_source=press.coop
#Capitalism #CompanyTown #RobberBarons
Centibillionaires can learn from Carnegie

Letters: Peter van den Dungen extols the beneficence of the Scottish-American tycoon which today’s super-rich could imitate. Plus letters from Mark de Brunner and Tom Scanlon

The Guardian