Topic Review: Megacorps

[Worldtree]

This is more my 'personal proposed headcanon' at this point, but it's been generally well received when I've suggested it in the past.
Personally I imagine Houses are megacorps that adopted traits of the state and stopped being much of an economic entity.


Another thought - Either the megacorps or great houses, or both might have become vehicles for modos attempting to augment and organize themselves in ways that would let them better hold their own against transapients and transapient run societies. Details of how this would work are TBD, but in a general sense this might fall under the same umbrella as Unity/Unityware and its development of group minds - modos trying to operate on or near the level of transaps without actually becoming transaps. 

Something like this could create a very...interesting...period during the early-middle part of the timeline during which various superhumanly intelligent entities and groups all interacted with each other in various ways (competition, cooperation, etc.). Eventually the sephirotic archai come along and dominate things - but maybe we push that back a few hundred or thousand years and have a long interregnum period.

Basically look at moving away from our current take which seems (to me anyway) to run something like 'during the Federation the transapients pretty much took over all mainstream governance and it's been that way ever since with the only real change being the S-level of the ruling transapients'. 

Not entirely sure that what I'm describing is wholly accurate (early timeline is not my focus) or what exactly it would look like. But might be worth thinking about/discussing.

Thoughts?

This is more my 'personal proposed headcanon' at this point, but it's been generally well received when I've suggested it in the past. At some point, I'd like to make the necessary article tweaks to fold it into the setting, although given my limited time if someone would like to take this on or collaborate on it sooner I've no objection. 

To wit:

While the Megacorps originally started out as more conventional economic entities (although huge ones) in the early timeline, their role as economic entities transformed (and later faded) over time. This was due to a combination of the rise of the autotopias/post-scarcity economics and the rise of the archai and their memetics and noetics and such. Beginning in the Federation era, they evolved into an alternative (new at the time) to the failing ontology of the First Fed and the resulting search by civilization for new ways to manage the hypercomplex civilization that OA depicts.

During the Federation period, many/most megacorps were taken over by S1 and S2 transapients, initially the manage their great complexity. As the Federation began to fail under the weight of trying to manage an interstellar civilization in a light-speed limited universe (as well as the increasing number of S-levels and the ever growing numbers of new sophont beings and modes of existence), some S1/S2 invented alternative ontologies or mind-sets based on what we might term 'corporate culture'. These were designed to help operate the megacorp over interstellar distance while maintaining a coherent focus as a social/economic entity.

Eventually the megacorps and their 'corporate religions' and 'company ontologies' were directly competing for 'hearts and minds' against the Federation and for a time they seemed to win. Until the S3 or maybe S4 came along and introduced the Second Federation Ontology and the Sec Fed itself. This didn't supplant the megacorps per se, but did drive them back quite a lot. 

The Sec Fed also began running into limits however, and people again started searching around for alternatives (or maybe they didn't care for the Sec Fed and wanted alternatives, multiple options/possibilities here, many of which could all happen at once). This time some transapients (maybe S3 and/ S4 this time, or maybe still S1 and S2?) looked further back in time and took their inspiration for alternatives from ancient Old Earth and ideas around feudalism/clans/etc. and created the Great Houses. These arose and seemed on the way to dominating for a time - or at least providing alternative memetics/ontologies - until the S5 and above came along and introduced the Sephirotic imperial memetics, supplanting the old ontologies (implying the memetics are in some way beyond these) and relegating both the megacorpos and Great Houses to secondary or tertiary importance. They still exist and billions or even trillions may follow them - but they are small potatoes compared to even the least Sephirotic empire.

Or something like that. I fully admit this is still rough and probably needs tweaking to fit various setting elements. It would also involve updating the megacorp and great house articles in various ways. But I rather like it and think of it as a way of presenting how society might still strive for a better mode of existence when the issues of basic material want have been totally solved via the creation of autotopias and such.

In this model, the megacorps would also evolve such that while they still have some form of quasi-corporation/economic elements they would not be concerned with the same things that RL corporations are (although they might characterize what they are concerned with using similar language). Great Houses might do something similar coming from a different direction based in the sort of neo-feudal mindset they work in, perhaps.

Anyway, it's an idea or three.

Thoughts?

Todd