Bugbears: Cyberpunk. Corps and the Law.

I don’t just discuss fantasy rpgs here. No, no, I also sometimes complain.

Today’s complaint, which I hope to eventually grow into constructive criticism as opposed to just me bitching, is about Cyberpunk.

Wikipedia defines Cyberpunk as..

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a futuristic setting that tends to focus on "a combination of low life and high tech"^[1] featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.^[2]

Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 70s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, J.G. Ballard, Philip Jose Farmer, and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction. Released in 1984, William Gibson’s influential debut novel Neuromancer would help solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. Other influential cyberpunk writers included Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker.

Now I bring this up because a person bugbear of mine is the Megacorp. Not because I have a problem with the idea of a large corporation, or even a problem with the idea of an abusive mercantile entity. No, no, my problem with it is the too-cool-for-school approach most Cyberpunk games, and indeed almost the entire cyberpunk genre takes towards it.

We’re all familiar with the common tale of Cyberpunk. Everyone’s dirt poor. Everyone’s oppressed and put upon. The wealthy elites loom above all in their palatial wonderment achieved by robbing the plucky small populace of their hard labor and blah blah blah.

This is where my problem comes from? Why? Because I have a business degree. Despite what the tattooed barrista at the coffee shop who wasted his time on a PoliSci degree has told you, economies are not zero sum games. Aside from genuine thieves, very few people get rich by specifically disenfranchising others.

Now. Let’s start our examination of Cyberpunk stuff by examining frequent bugbears. The megacorp's association with law enforcement.

Shadowrun, like most cyberpunk series, predisposes that the corporations (with their ‘armies of lawyers’) are kingdoms onto their own, who flout a weak and meaningless law and who resolve their disputes through things like back alley assassination, blackmail and the like.

The first question I ask myself with this, is.. Why?

We’re told mega-corporations are essentially defacto voluntarily joined nation states that operate on a mercantile basis. Within their walls, their laws and regulations reign, and all law enforcement outside of those walls is a privately run subsidiary of the dreaded corps. Firstly, any country stupid enough to pass law enforcement off to entirely privately run agencies has abandoned its right to call itself a country unless that privately own agency is the King's guard and the King runs the country. Secondly, no mega-corporation run by a sane human being would want this arrangement.

One of the first things were taught in Contract law is the importance of the well maintained market place, and that requires clear non-arbitrary laws. That is, a market place where contracts are upheld. One of the functions of Government, some have argued the only function, is to operate as a neutral and disinterested arbiter of contract disputes via the law.

Cyberpunk wants its cake and wants to eat it too. It wants the ‘evils of privatization’ with privately run police forces, but doesn’t seem to recognize that the companies who don’t run these PPFs (Private Police Forces) are beholden by default to those who do, and that you can’t really have a real civil justice department when you’ve got dozens of clearly non-neutral actors running around. Why would I trust a tort ruling based on evidence discovered by a PPF owned by a company who is my competitor, what happens if two PPFs both collect evidence. Who represents the final say? Who’ll enforce my warranty on those parts that I SpookCorp bought from FireAntCorp? Do I need to invade them like a freaking Viking overlord to get my $600.00 back on shipping?

And if we try to say the police and justice departments still exist, then the PPFs are just security firms, and don’t really have justifiable authority to operate in ways that flout the law of the country they’re in. See. Governments are really, really freaking pissy when people start muscling in on their ‘job’ of being the final authority and the guy in charge.  

A true cynic could argue that a successful government is just like a crime family made big, with taxes for military and police being a giant protection racket. I don’t hold to that, but the rationale that the bigger bunch doesn’t want people ‘muscling on their turf’ still comes into play.

Now, not all cyberpunk buys into that. Robocop is cyberpunk, and OCP clearly has legal troubles despite apparently owning the police. I’m not sure how the hell that works, but I reason it might be because they only own Detroit’s police department. And well, Detroit.

You see, there are people who think that passing a law magically changes human nature, but in reality, you need police for that nasty ‘enforcement of the law thing.’ Libertarians sometimes say that all laws are ultimately enforced by violence, and get tut-tutted, but in reality, they’re quite on the level with it.

In the real world, let’s say I’m the head of FireAntCorp, we’re a smoke and fire factory who somehow commands the power of a zaibatsu and produces all sorts of products.  I get into a tort issue. See, I was supposed to ship two hundred crates of FireAntCorp brand Fire Ants to SuckerCo. But, because I’m an evil corporation what corporates, I decided to only ship one hundred and seventy five and stick it to him for the extra twenty five. So he files a civil court case against me for replacement of damages.

We here at FireAntCorp tell him to go pound. He goes to a court. Our mutual armies of lawyers do their thing. Let’s assume his are better than mine. We lose. I decide to not pay him, why should I? I command FireAntPPF.

So, SuckerCO sends nice people to collect. I tell them to go pound. SuckerCO goes to the government about how I’m violating a court decision to pay him, and they can’t just take it out of a bank (let’s assume all the banks belong to me, for some strange senseless cyberpunk reason). The government sends nice people. I tell them to go pound.

They send NOT NICE people. People with arms, with the aim to take the court decided moneys and rebuke me rather strictly for my lack of compliance. And if I decide to fight back, I graduate from a bad business partner to an insurrectionist, and my punishment goes up from probably some fines and some minor jail time, to potentially the gallows.  Why? Because if they don’t inflict an appropriate punishment on me for flouting their authority, then their decision making process, their supposed authority and their entire reason for existence gets thrown into the can.

If I can just ignore a court decision they don’t like, then those court decisions are meaningless.  Now, I could bribe them, or hold things up in court, or a thousand other dickbag maneuvers, but those for the most part (bribery aside) are legal. That is to say, something decided on as part of that whole neutral playing field of rules thing.     

If I’m SuckerCO, I want a stable legal system. Even if I’m FireAntCorp, I want one. Because I can’t bribe everyone, but I can hire specialists (well paid ones) to find me loopholes or exceptions to protect me. This means business is predictable, and therefore we don’t need to worry about one another shivving the other or not being able to get paid.  

Most Cyberpunk Corporations you see, have just made themselves into over glorified crime families. Except that the reason why businessmen are rich and die in expensive mansions at the age of 80+ and most crime bosses are middle class at best and die in crappy McMansions at around fifty, is because legit businessmen don’t need to exert force personally to assure they get paid every time they try to sell something, and don’t generally need to worry about getting shot gunned if someone thought the deal was bad.

Unless you’re in Russia.