The rich have always controlled civilization, one way or another. Who those rich are and what that wealth looks like have changed a lot over time, but the anprims are right about this much: civilization itself seems to exist solely to promote inequality. I’m not meaning to invalidate all the volumes that have been written proposing ways societies should guarantee rights and safety to their denizens, just to say that such ideas are aspirational, and in practice I don’t know if we’ve ever quite made the grade.
My homeland is now dominated by open fascists, who still have the gall to refuse that name, to call themselves by other cutesy little nicknames like “conservative” or “republican.” Whatever. Not here to talk about that. I’m trying to express my perception of power in this country and in the world, and what that power is going to do, so that we can be as emotionally prepared for it as possible.
Wealth feeds itself endlessly, like a virus. It can’t stop devouring any society in which it exists, until that society is utterly destroyed. The billionaire class ate and ate until they became so powerful they functionally ran the world, but didn’t seem to realize this until now. They did understand a lot of their specific powers – pay any politician any amount of money to get laws to hand you even larger sums, assassinate your worst opposition and pay for the dirty tricks to keep any investigation from getting far, have friends in DC sic the CIA on leftist movements in South America, etc etc etc. But I think shitler’s public alliance with apartheid junior really shows they didn’t understand what that power meant until now – because you can see them desperately scrambling to define the borders of their fiefdoms. Something busted this flywheel.
America falling under control of the most corrupt businessman since Ea-Nasir has opened up the battlefield. Through lobbying and cutthroat financial maneuvers the corpos have been building their power, like the modernization of armies in the run-up to World War I, packing the powder keg for purposes they didn’t fully comprehend, and now it’s all-out war for the top spots. Apartheid junior is the first billionaire to directly control government agencies with no authority except his bank account, and now everybody else realizes they need to get a piece of that action. Who will win? What will their victory look like?
I know shitler won’t be around for it. We all know that. But he was crucial in making this possible, so the corpos have to be very careful how they handle his exit from the stage. If I was them, I’d make him die from “natural causes” fuckin’ immediately, before history has fully vindicated his naysayers, so more competent tools can control the damage, spin his hagiography to my brand’s advantage. If he lives long enough for the world to be completely fucked apart in a way that unambiguously points to him as the cause, the damage to business interests will be huge.
If beezus, murdrock, et al are thinking along those same lines, his days may be very short indeed. Then it’s beardo mccouchfuck as bribe recipient in chief, and mfsk will find himself suddenly faced with a lot more competition for that access. This will not look like it used to. There was a kind of detente or gentlemen’s agreement between corpos that what was good for one was good for all. Deregulate deregulate deregulate, and poison the earth to grow your filthy lucre. The peace is over. It’s time for Shadowrun.
Or should I say Cyberpunk? I’m referring to the old TTRPGs where transnational megacorporations were no longer content with mergers and acquisitions, but paid goons to slice throats in the night. Cyberpunk by R Talsorian Games was the first, but its name is too easy to confuse with the genre writ large. I’m gonna stick with Shadowrun.
Shadowrun was a successor to Cyberpunk in the same genre, but with added fantasy elements – elves and magic alongside “chrome” and “street samurai.” Within that world, shadowrunning was doing the illegal bidding of corporations as a mercenary. Such a mercenary would be called a shadowrunner, which is a cool name. I’ve already made reference to this game in another post.
Anyway, shadowrunners IRL. Cool name, bad people. Were those Boeing whistleblowers whacked? Who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia? Expect more of this, and more overt. Amazon security will, at some point, turn live ammunition on Amazon employees, and get away with it. Any news you read that makes a business look bad, you can trust it was only able to be published because it benefited a competitor who owned the media platform on which it appeared.
I’m pretty confident in my lil thesis here, but still haven’t come close to my first aim – prepare myself for what’s next – because there are so many possibilities my head is spinning. First order of business will be taking over different aspects of government or political regions, like cities or states. Texas, a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil. Social Security – Goldman Sachs. How much say will the congress or even the president have in altering these contracts, when resistance will be met with dioxin poisoning, blackmail, even mass murder?
No idea. Used to be medicine and caregiving were the growth jobs, but crapitalist medicine and fascist corporate influence has hospitals closing left right and center, the remaining staff massively overworked. The new growth industry will be shadowrunning. Learn to hack with artificial intelligence. Amass blackmail dossiers. Join private security trained by alums of CIA death squads.
That’s as far as I can go with this for now. Might revisit in the future.
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