Meta Platforms. X Corp. tell me those aren’t straight from a strangely prescient cyberpunk classic
Don’t forget the conglomerate names:
Microsoft-Activision-Blizzard
I used to call it ActiBlizz. What am I supposed to do now?
MS ActiBlizz sounds like the next addition to MS Office but they already renamed it to “Microsoft 365”
Shinra-Mishima-Zaibatsu
Wayland-Yutani
“Well, there was a bit of a stir when it was decided that since corporations are people, they could technically run for president. But President Walt Disney-Pepsi-Comcast has done wonders for the economy… given that it’s… now the economy”
Don’t blame me I voted for Tim Apple
I still think it’s hilarious that Facebook renamed to Meta, and anything they did with the “metaverse” was a huge failure. It’s like they didn’t learn their lesson from Second Life.
Second Life isn’t owned by Meta. And just by the amount of money Second Life earned, and somehow still earns to this day, it was a pretty huge success. The only real success in the “virtual world” field. It’s not surprising somebody else would try to emulate that success.
They don’t own it, that means they can’t know about it?
Now we just need companies to have their own militaries and then for someone to nuke one of their towers. We’d have the whole nine yards.
“He burned down half the city just to prove he was right and burned the other half just for fun.”
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I could absolutely see a not-too-distant future where competitors of megacorps have their assets attacked by the government’s military.
Amazon is a standing military or armed navy away from beating the all-time high score.
Wake up Samurai…
Pretty much. Welcome to the fucking future I guess. There’s no flying cars and green cities and happiness or bloody universal healthcare, instead we have corpos trying to turn us into their consumer slaves and governments turning authoritarian. Just do what you’re told and buy more. Don’t ask questions don’t think just browse TikTok, improve your social credit score, and imprint more ads into your psyche until WW3.
We’re walking into hell with our eyes wide open fuck me it hurts.
or bloody universal healthcare
I guess it depends on where you live. It’s not true of the whole world.
Murica. Yeehaw.
Don’t forget Truth Social. Straight out of ministry of truth.
Oh and don’t forget the cheeky suckers that explicitly named their nutritional supplement company Soylent Nutrition, Inc.
Dude “X corp” totally sounds dystopian lmfao
Microsoft was way ahead of everyone.
Theranos sounded like a superhero villain. I guess it kind of was?
If you think about it, all sorts of fucked up things that are happening now have been portrayed as a bad thing in past media: Virtual words, virtual-fuckin’ land (not 100% sure this one is real, still really hoping its not), misuse of AI, smart houses, where everything is controlled by a remote (which relies on electricity / wi-fi), even stuff like alexa, which is listening to every word you say, at your home…
When I think about the fact that Facebook thought it was a good idea to name their online VR platform “the metaverse“ it still breaks my brain a little bit
I find it amusing how nobody noticed when Valve changed their name to Valve Corporation ages ago, and people keep referring to it as Valve Software.
There’s a company called Hashicorp that’s been in the news recently. Literally perfect
I don’t get how the name is dystopian. Is it from a book or movie or something? Search only turns up the company you’re talking about.
Could be that it mixes what sounds like a Japanese name with an English word, which makes it seem like a company from Japan operating in an English speaking place.
In the 1980s people expected that Japan was going to take over more and more American business. Japan was a major player and so sci fi written then — including that which was cyberpunk dystopian — assumed there’d be companies like “Ford” but named after Japanese guys.
Also it’s not “Hashi Corporation” it’s “HashiCorp” which implies a sort of pop-cultureification, like the company has sort of compacted over the years, and gotten less Japanese (known) and more hybrid Japanese-American-Corporate-Marketing (unknown, megacorps have shady cultures, they’re new things).
If HashiCorp were to show up in a movie, it would be in a holographic ad someone flies past.
The meta rebranding made my skin craw. The X rebranding is dumb on Elon Musk’s part. However you make a good point.
I believe Apple got its name from the biblical term of the forbidden fruit. Microsoft has a megacorp sounding name. Will Amazon rename itself to something dystopian?
AFAIK Microsoft came from the Neuromancer novel. A microsoft is a tool in the book.
Could be wrong though, but I feel Ike that book was written before Microsoft was a company.