Could a world as presented in SyFy's "Continuum" work?

Great Debates
21

Of course that “neutral third party” will act as if it were a government, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a successor to today’s governments. It could be one successful corporation that evolves into a de facto government, and allows the other corps to exist as long as they pay tribute and don’t cause trouble. This is exactly the same role that today’s governments served.

Let’s look at how corporations came to exist in the first place. Governance is backed by force. One guy gets a bunch of his buddies together, they grab their weapons, and march over to some other guys. They kill everyone who fights, grab all their stuff, and enslave all the survivors. Or, they threaten to kill everyone, and the second group agrees to fork over regular tribute in return for not being massacred.

Then a third group comes along and wants to massacre the second group and take all their stuff and enslave the survivors. Not so fast says the first group, those are our serfs. We’ll fight you before we let you rob them, because that’s our prerogative.

And so the warriors protect the serfs from other warriors. And the head of the warriors is the king. The serfs gladly pay tribute to their masters in return for protection from even worse bastards.

And pretty soon the warriors realize that the more shit the serfs produce, the more there is for the aristocrats to steal. This is called “taxation”. The aristocrats have an interest in growing the economy, in encouraging trade and so on, rather than stealing everything all at once.

So corporations are just another way that the aristocrats encouraged the production of wealth. And people who earned wealth from this method often joined the ranks of the aristocrats, often by literally marrying into aristocratic families.

But the point of this is, corporations are not independent entities. They are money-making cooperative ventures that rely on the rule of law to exist. Without the rule of law there are no such things as property rights, only rule by force.

So with no government, why does the corporation answer to the shareholders? The wealth of the corporation doesn’t belong to the shareholders, it belongs to whoever the warriors say it belongs to.

Note that Somalia isn’t anarchic at all. You can’t just move to Somalia and do whatever you want, because it is governed by clans. Try to shoot people in Somalia and the clan leaders will send guys with rifles to kill you. Somalia is no more ungoverned than feudal Europe was ungoverned. Sure, there’s no central government, that just means that the local government–the clan–is extraordinarily powerful. If the central government was stronger the clan leaders would be afraid to straight-up murder their enemies. But with no central government the clans rule things to suit themselves.

This is the problem that people can’t seem to understand. Weak central government means strong local government of one kind or another. If the local potentates aren’t answerable to anyone, they can do as they like.

22

Actually, the more I think about it, the less confident I am in a “it can’t happen here” position. If fairly genteel Metro Vancouver went abruptly from three homicides a month to three hundred including multiple cop killings, with buildings being blown up and hijackings and violent mass protests and (spoiler for Continuum):the mayor being assassinated by a sniper

… then, yes, I could see civil rights going out the window. What Liber8 is doing is several orders of magnitude worse than the FLQ leading into the October Crisis of 1970, and then-Prime Minister Trudeau slammed down on things with the War Measures Act and had widespread support in doing so.

Would something like this lead to arrests and detainments without charges and, possibly, a return of the death penalty? I could imagine so, but I don’t see a CEO bring the driving force behind it.

23

Pretty much. One day a clever warlord realizes that when you raid a village, take all their crops and kill everyone living there, you can’t take their crops next year. Better to just stay there permanently and only take most of their crops every year.

For the same reason the king and the barons answer to their people. It’s not just force that holds a kingdom together. The king is only the king so long as his men stay loyal to him and his people don’t rise up in rebellion. The people believe a ruler’s right to rule comes from who their parents were. But history has shown that people often found ways to de-legitimize the right of a king to rule if they were a shitty king.

A corporation in our scenario would answer to it’s shareholders because the other major shareholders agree that is the way this organization works. They can’t just take over the company by force. They have to lend an air of legitimacy to the takeover otherwise the people won’t abide by it.

24

That sounds an awful lot like a voice of reason among the crowd!

I still think it could work, and I think it would actually lead to a better standard of living, albeit a very different one. It just makes the show more enjoyable to me, because I can believe the premise upon which it’s based.

25

How closely are you basing this on the show? IIRC, in one of the early episodes, Kellog buys a bunch of fresh fruit for the gang, and behaves as though hardly anyone can afford it in their future. That’s not a very promising indicator for quality of life in that setting.

26

There is one big difference between government and a business or corporate entity. A corporations really has no obligation to people who aren’t either shareholders, customers or employees. A government is typically stuck with all the people within it’s borders.

As I said, I haven’t seen Continuum. But I kind of picture IRL this would look something like the show Eureka. The major local industry would be the main employer, but they would also subcontract out other services. The town would be governed, not so much by “laws”, but by “corporate policy” (which may or may not be extremely restrictive). The main problem is when you no longer are considered valuable to the company. Or with people who simply aren’t valuable as customers or employees in the first place. Those people might suddenly find themselves striped of their corporate housing and services as well as their income. A government would be obligated to provide for those people on some level or at least provide some protections for their personal wealth.

27

For some reason, everyone who envisions a corporate-controlled future forgets about non-profit organizations.

If you look at a modern Condo Association or Homeowner assocation, don’t really have a government in a non-profit form? You have an elected board who enforce a wide range of policies on residents, right down to the color they’re allowed to paint their houses and how often they have to mow their lawns. (Which is funny… the typical HOA has a contractual level of control over our behavior that we’d NEVER tolerate from anything calling itself a government.)

In the absence of government police, fire, medical, military and even welfare services, I could see an HOA providing for all of them… possibly even groups of HOAs pooling their efforts. Remember that HOAs are run by well-meaning busybodies who are elected by other well-meaning busybodies. They are not government entities, but neither are they motivated by profit.

So… I don’t know that a corporate-controlled world would be so fundamentally different from what we have today.

28

Yeah, but a non-profit wouldn’t be able to enforce its rules. It would have to generate enough profit to pay for its “police”.

29

I don’t think you understand what a non profit is (or profit for that matter). Profit = revenue - expenses. Police and security would just be another expense. Colleges and universities, for example, are non profits and many of them have their own security or police forces.

Except in the areas that are deemed “unprofitable” to the major corporations. Those areas I can see forming a similar structure to the Brazilian favelas. Sprawling, dirty shantytowns that have few services, are largely outside of government control and are run mostly by local gangs or warlords.

That’s one of the main examples of why income disparity is general a bad thing and highlights the potential problems with a “corporate-ocracy”. Sure, life is good so long as you have the right skills and properly kowtow to the people with all the capital. But those who don’t find themselves without basic services.

The reason we have government instead of corporate free-market rule is because corporations aren’t designed to be lawmakers or to provide the services we typically associate with government. They are a mechanism for generating wealth by converting raw materials to goods and services people use. Absent government control, they will typically do this in an amoral manner that maximizes profit and their own interests, even at the expense of society.

30

That is not at all how 99.9% of profit-seeking corporations behave. Geez, dude, leave the house sometime, go visit a business.

31

As msmith points out you don’t seem to know what “non-profit” means. A not-for-profit corporation can in fact make millions of dollars. The difference is that by its own charter of incorporation the margin it makes can’t be siphoned out to shareholders; it has to stay in he company coffers or be reinvested in a purpose germane to the corporation’s purpose.

The classic local example here is the Canadian Standards Association - the Canadian version of UL, if you know UL. It’s a completely private corporation and pulls in about a quarter of a billion dollars a year in gross revenue and usually makes a margin of about $10 to $15 million. However, there are no shareholders to take that profit; it’s rolled back into the company or saved.

I think it obvious CSA could hire a security force if it needed one to police its HQ.

Heck, for that matter, my condo building is a non profit outfit, and we have a security “force.”

32

Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Everyone has to do what the guys with guns tell them to do. But who do the guys with guns listen to? What makes them obey their bosses? Why do they shoot the guy their boss tells them to shoot instead of shooting their boss?

The “war of all against all” will only last a short time, because groups are much more effective at fighting than individuals. And so individuals form families, families form bands, bands form clans, and clans form kingdoms. The groups that can organize the fastest and most effectively crush the opposition, those that cannot organize get massacred.

And so the mythology that motivates the fighters is central to the survival of the group. When the fighters stop believing in the mythology, the group falls apart. Note that money doesn’t make a very good motivator for the troops–you pay them their gold and they fight for you, but then one day they wake up and wonder why they can’t just take your gold by force instead of waiting for you to hand it out.

But this is why a corporatocracy won’t work. What mythology makes the private security forces loyal to the corporation? Their paycheck? Either the security forces end up running the corporation, or the corporation falls apart, or their is some new mythology that the corporate rent-a-cops are loyal to. Like, if society is crumbling everywhere and the corporation is the only organization that seems to still function.

But again, if that’s the case then the corporation becomes the new government. It will stop acting like a corporation chartered by a government and answerable to government laws and government violence, and instead act like a government. If the barbarian hordes are ravaging the countryside and Microsoft is the only surviving organization that still works, it’s not going to get its legitimacy by charging people extortionate prices for Windows and Office. Instead the employees function as a tribe or a clan and cooperate because they know and trust each other.

33

Clearly, I didn’t understand how a non-profit works.

To me, that sounds like the ideal situation for a Continuum-style world. All non-profits, going balls-to-the walls with R&D and worker compensation, means stronger companies, means better economic (and by extension in this world) societal growth?

Maybe?

34

True globally but you run in to the problem of the tragedy of the commons, where the enitre economy and population is the commons. Yes a robust economy is better for you than a lousy one on an open playing field, but it is better still to steal what you can from the economy before the other guy does. Its the same situation we are in now. It would be better for the economy and to the eventual bottom line if even unskilled workers had a living wage, but what is best of the individual employer is for everyone else to have a living wage except their unskilled employees.

I suppose such a system could work if there was an extreme cultural shift such that all of the CEO’s suddenly became totally altruistic and willing to help society at their own expense, but given the lack of benevolent dictators in the world this seems unlikely. Especially since even governement dictators have to pay lip service to providing services to their people, while corporations can legitimately say that they should only be concerned about lining their own pocket.

35

Keep in mind that I’m not necessarily arguing against government. It probably is the best solution.

As you point out, any kind of corporate future probably will exaggerate the disparity of income. We already see it with governments - a public school in a wealthy neighborhood has more money (thanks to property taxes, often) than some poor rural or urban school elsewhere. In the US, we try to equalize that by collecting high federal income tax that can be redistributed to the states. But even here, this isn’t an inherent feature of government. Different governments have different approaches to sharing the wealth… and there are people who really do call for the US government to eliminate most of the spending that helps to equalize public services between the various states.

So my point is that Continuum’s particular dystopian view is really not about corporate vs government control, it’s about the style and priorities of governance. To oversimplify it (as Continuum has) as corporations=bad, while government=good is making a big mistake.

36

Its much more likely to occur in less developed nations as a form of imperialism than in places like the USA.

See East India Company.

37

A riddle from Game of Thrones:

“In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword (mercenary), a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies"