In this day and age, you don’t have to convince audiences that billion-dollar companies are bad guys. It is a widely accepted fact that wealthy conglomerates run the world and will do whatever it takes to increase their profit margins at the expense of everyone else. need, and that’s when they engage in corporate warfare.
The typical real-world way corporations oppress everyone tends to be pretty boring when played out on screen. It’s much more exciting when you engage in an epic shootout for.
Corporate warfare occurs when private corporations use their enormous power to recruit, hire, or build an army. The company could do business in everything from science to finance, but its corporate dealings would benefit from some sort of physical force. May be, but people need it to live, so they won’t give it up without a fight. , may be threatening to form a union. A rival company may be considering scrapping all board negotiations and sending out a bunch of hired thugs to burn out all the competition. Any of these circumstances and others may persuade corporations to expand into the private military arena and crack down on those who dare to disagree.
The sci-fi subgenre that most often claims this trope is undoubtedly cyberpunk. Corporations are almost always the villains of cyberpunk stories, and their need for good action setpieces should use something along the lines of corporate warfare. Cyber There are definitely examples of this trope that predate his punk subgenre, but it’s Neil Stevenson’s landmark 1992 novel that likely popularized the concept. snow crashThe story follows protagonist Hiro, a typical leather-clad katana-wielding 90s hacker, as he and his edgy sidekick battle a computer virus. snow crash Although arguably post-cyberpunk, its adoption of corporate warfare as a concept is highly influential. The novel refers to a pair of rival highway construction companies who engage in endless sniper duels while competing for jobs. to
Perhaps the best example of this trope on the big screen is Robocop franchise. The central villain of the franchise is textbook megacorp Omnihi his Consumer Products. The OCP owned the city of Detroit, renamed it Delta City, and immediately set about suppressing it. To enforce their will, they own a fully privatized Detroit police force. The OCP uses cops like an invasion force, but turns criminals into soldiers. OCP’s Urban Rehabilitators are former military veterans that the company uses to violently evict citizens from their homes. robocop 3 It uses this trope more than its predecessor. The citizens of Detroit formed an armed resistance against the company, forcing the OCP to turn to even more terrifying tactics. OCP finally features a robot ninja for the same cause, slightly undermining social commentary with a very silly concept.
Video games love the corporate army. This allows game designers to hurl a myriad of armed enemies at the player without demonizing a specific nation’s military.of borderlands The franchise, for example, is set in a universe constantly plagued by corporate warfare. Atlas, Hyperion, and Dahl constantly feed their unrivaled military might into conflict, and the entire universe frequently suffers from firefights. Part 1 It refers to a “corporate war” that explains the missing Central Galactic government. final fantasy VII It takes a more traditional approach to the concept, depicting the SOLDIER program, a subsidiary of Shinra Electric Power. The Gotai War shows both the power and ruthlessness of Shinra’s military efforts to defeat disobedient nations and become the undisputed ruler of the world.
Corporate Warfare is the most visually stimulating version of big corporations with tight control over who owns them. It’s almost unheard of for a corporate army to be the good guy in the story. This concept is not uncommon in the real world. Private military corporations can serve just about anyone, and wealthy corporations have historically dominated matters of international conflict to a large extent. Your least favorite company may not yet have its own “peacekeeping” force on staff, but there are many examples in the world of science fiction: corporations shouldn’t have armies, and humanity’s Just trust his sci-fi writers for nearly all of history.
