In 2017, Charlie Stross talked about corporations as slow AI, and he identified some ways in which they have supplanted humans as first-class citizens.
I remember reading, as a teenager in the early 1980s, a story about a world where humans were not citizens of nations but employees of companies and the whole thing was some battle among the big three companies in the world. That meant that when I read Snow Crash the idea of burbclaves and the quasi autonomous states didn’t strike me as novel so much as just natural, in a hyper capitalist dystopia.
A recent Reset episode, “When Big Tech Calls 911,” talks about how the Tesla gigafactory in Reno uses lots of public infrastructure for workplace accidents (like, ambulance and fire dispatch, every day — to be fair, there are 7k employees at the one site, so it’s a 100% employed small town) yet it doesn’t pay for any of it (because of tax breaks to lure the company there). As well, it talks about Facebook and how they’re building out a bunch of housing in Menlo Park, which will, like, double the city’s population — so Facebook tried to get ahead of this by funding a big expansion of the city police near their campus. Which makes people feel a little weird, like, the company somehow owns the cops. The point being, though, that public services are usually funded by the public via taxes, and Facebook doesn’t pay enough taxes to Menlo Park to cover the infrastructure costs they incur. Because yeah, they’ll need police, but they’ll also need schools and roads and emergency services, won’t they? But police, they’re gonna fund that.
And there was some other podcast I was listening to (probably Make Me Smart) where it was mentioned that, hey, some of these big companies have yearly budgets bigger that those of a medium-sized country (which has been true for a long, long time and is news to nobody, I’m sure).
And yet. All of this still gets reported on as though it’s some kind of surprise to people.
Here’s the bottom line, my readers: corporations have no empathy. They do not care about human lives as such. They are economic sociopaths and they optimize for economic return, not for human welfare. They don’t like you.