Using Megacorporations

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by RyanW

So would Pepsi, in the late 1980s, have very briefly edged toward being a megacorporation with its fleet of about two dozen warships?

Ah, you were serious...!

Yeah, I guess, though Pepsi is already cyberpunk:
We declare Cola the most cyberpunk of beverages. Coke probably has the most cred as a cyberpunk drink but is also a mega-corporation vying for this title with Pepsi. (Source!)

[Johnny1A.2]

My world contains a corporate body that became so wealthy in the future, had so much economic clout and social force, that it more-or-less became the skeleton or template for a world-wide (in scope, not universal rule) political empire, the tycoons at the top became hereditary princes, their family power based in their control of that corporation. The corporation and many national governments more or less merged.

After this was done, the result was a weird cross between a state owned enterprise, a super-massive monopoly/oligopoly involved in myriad businesses, and a global-scale family business with a very restricted stock base. In 2100, the company owns/embodies over 50% of global economy, and indirectly controls more.

It's not particularly efficient, but it doesn't always have to be, since it's owned by the government/owns the government (depends on how you look at it...).

[Johnny1A.2]

Something to keep in mind about megacorporations in general, as a concept (or any corporation for that matter): they don't exist independently of the culture they rise/exist in. A megacorporation that rose in and was rooted in China would tend to behave differently than one rooted in France. If the culture as a whole displays certain tropes, the business bodies within it will do so as well.

It's true that some aspects of business create pressures that make corporations move in certain similar ways, but this can easily be swamped by culture.

[Black Leviathan]

Greg Bear once said that he wrote Mega Corporations in the same style Victorian romantics wrote about sovereign nations. They didn't understand the intricacies of how pre-industrial governments handled diplomacy but neither did their readers. They just knew there were a lot of spies, ministers probably couldn't be trusted everyone was getting ready for a war. So he wrote his Cyberpunk with much the same feel. From the perspective of the character Megacorps were monolithic and didn't care about the character. When they did interact characters would interact with someone in a fancy suit with a fancy title who didn't really have any power and didn't really want to make the situation better, but if you could manipulate the information spies had you could exert some control over these unyielding sovereign entities.