Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered
Or in other words, why give your workers more than they need to survive if you don't have to? That's how you set up the gritty poverty of cyberpunk anywhere you want. It works for TL1 land owners exacting rents that take their peasants to the edge of famine, and it works for TL10 corporations shipping asteroid miners out to the edge of reality and back and paying them nothing more than what it takes to get drunk for a day.
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And any of those works only to the extent that you have no competition who can offer the peasants or the miners more. As an anthropological book I read put it, you can have any two of free land, free labor, and nonzero rents, but you can't have all three.
And to prevent competition, you need state granted monopolies, or business monopolies gained by paying off officials for favors, or anticompetitive state policies such as regulations that only huge firms can afford to comply with, or extralegal violence by private parties such as mafias. Which is why cyberpunk is a futuristic version of noir. Look at classic noir if you want something you can translate into your intended future.