Racing the Darkness, like Alpha Centauri, is not cyberpunk per se (even in the face of Alien Crossfire), but traffics in many familiar genre tropes. One memorable being the widespread namedropping of
brands, both fictional and real, often in an anachronistic manner that invokes nostalgia for eras gone by. This serves several purposes. First, it emphasizes the future dystopia of multinational corporations run amok, expanding in wealth and power at the expense of traditional governments in theory responsible to the people, rather than shareholders. Second, it’s a very economic way to worldbuild. As in cyberpunk, SMAC’s proliferation of evocative names is elliptical storytelling. (Funnily enough, I actually can’t recall the website profiles mentioning any private businesses besides all of the Morgan subsidiaries.) Long before I came across this project, I came up with
Honeywell-Messerschmidt.
This approach was popularized in
Neuromancer, and as replies from above link might be termed ‘thisness’, ephemeral visual detail (after the style of Ian Fleming), or in William Gibson’s words himself, “applied a poetic composition.” Whatever the term, namedropping brands grounds the reader in the familiar yet induces dissonance through unfamiliar context. Via tension and contradiction, verisimilitude emerges.
RTD is similar to
Blade Runner - both an
inspiration to, and influenced by many of the same sources as, Gibson in writing Neuromancer, in that the businesses are not simply fictional tech-wizards, but brands of venerable Americana. (Really, it’s all Ridley Scott, as he also coined Weyland-Yutani and brought that idea to the forefront.) Because it’s a work that’s not simply rooted in the ‘80s, but ‘70s cassette futurism all the way back to golden age sci-fi of even earlier decades. I think its conception of business isn’t simply exotic eastern zaibatsu, but the all-American giants that dominated the postwar boom. A bit of nostalgia for the brands of Main Street to
Mad Men. And ironically, so many of the on-screen businesses in the film became subject to the
Blade Runner curse. In RTD’s future alternate history we presume that many managed to survive, somehow. One of my most
emblematic passages I have written for this project evokes this ideal:
Lyonesse Strategies, a proud Nox Conglomerate subsidiary, had cut its teeth in the shadow of the Big Six while on Earth. Experts in modern scientific efficiency methods, they were sent around the globe to dissect and suture all sorts of failing projects. These management consultants strategized on everything from keeping the Concorde flying and Pan Am solvent, to increasing crop yields in modernized Golden Chinese factory farms, to hiding the cooked books of the petty kingdoms in the Indian Ocean- not to mention massaging their PR records even as human rights violations came to light.
The same segment has the elite management company Lyonesse advising WorldCom in the post-Second American Civil War reconstruction. So, moribund businesses from all sorts of decades appear in my conception of the setting. Alternate histories where product battles and corporate clashes went differently. Maybe the memory data tapes of RTD are formatted in Betamax. Embrace the anachronism.
Placing real-world companies in fantastical contexts is not limited to cyberpunk- see a John Deere/Volvo Martian bulldozer in
this excerpt of SMAC-influence Red Mars, perhaps it should also appear in RTD. And I’ve followed suit, with a sleep-reading hypnopædiac Book Club by Oprah, Red Bull blowing past
Powertrains to make muscle cars, and Morgan Industries’ own line of Bloomberg terminals- perhaps licensed from the latter, as they keep the naming.
But this is in service of more than Easter Eggs. RTD recontextualizes the typical corporate dystopia of the genre. Or at the very least, it goes beyond the classic ‘80s cyberpunk tropes of Chrome, Guns, Boobs, and Blood. In this future history, the multicorps aren’t merely avaricious and power-hungry. Sometimes, they’re competent. Sometimes, they’re the
only ones. I’m leery of the concept of hero companies- imo Beyond Earth’s lionizing of ARC is
hilariously naive, a hopepunk product of the Obama years. As we see in the recent return of non-zero interest rates, the road to enhorsehockeytification is universal. But
competency wish-fulfillment doesn’t require moral valence; it could just be that the corps are a little more effective than shambolic political regimes.
And, to take our gaze away from RTD for a moment and look at the real world, corporations are occasionally capable of such breadth of preparedness and ability to execute that rival the most meticulous of governments. One example is the
Disaster Recovery Testing event exercises held by Google. To ensure continuity of operations, the company regularly tests elaborate scenarios from zombie attacks on data centers to Bay Area earthquakes that essentially cause a decapitation strike, cutting off contact between headquarters and the rest of the company. These elaborate drills ensure that the company’s systems have multiple redundancies and the emergency procedures protecting them are familiar to the sysops and continuously patched and improved upon. All this to guarantee uptime within bounds of the service-level agreement. One hopes that one’s nation’s digital services are as ironclad.
My other example is restaurant chain Waffle House, renowned for its storm center response, tracking inclement weather and deploying “jump teams” to support locations to keep them open, while relieving local personnel to take care of their own homes. As
Waffle House is known to be so effective of disaster management, FEMA has used a
Waffle House Index to determine areas that are most in need of disaster recovery if the local Waffle Houses are closed. The other “Top Four” companies- Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Walmart, are also
exemplars of disaster preparedness, with mastery over supply chains, logistics, and crisis response. Private business reacting well in the face of physical existential risk is quite something to behold, and I would definitely like to work in the
Waffle House storm center into RTD somewhere, at least as the background of a Planetary meteorologist or a colonial
DIRT (no relation to Google) dispatcher.
When it comes to integrating company brands into RTD I tend to use the approach of
Silicon Valley: the companies of our world exist, but then so does Hooli (logo appears at the end of the above sequences), a particularly bloated, self-indulgent, and bumbling caricature of many of the worst elements of its real-world influences. (And so do fictional startups, especially Pied Piper- but the megacorp’s existence is the most dramatic difference.) It’s somewhat like how Metropolis and Gotham City exist in DC comics, but then so do New York and Chicago. What’s one more walled garden, alongside all the others? Same applies for Morgan, ARC, Struan’s, and my additions.
Though there are some dramatic differences, of course- since this is taking place in an alternate future history, many of the technologies, let alone industries, businesses, etc. are dramatically reshuffled. My own idiosyncratic preference is to have many of the fallen names of pre-Y2K tech- some of which would’ve been contemporaries of the Firaxis that released SMAC in ‘98- somehow survive to the 2070s, even in a cassette retrofuturistic setting. Because dot com era brands often have a distinct sense of personality and style that I find compelling, and so I devise desperate counterfactuals based on Asianometry’s historical accounts. So, ironically, most of the companies that actually show up in
Silicon Valley would not appear in my RTD works, except Apple, grandfathered in an
early post that referred to it as Apple Electronics. (And because the company is indeed old and venerable enough to be a ‘70s and ‘80s icon.) Its one time archnemesis and one-time ally, IBM,
also exists in RTD as well. But not Microsoft- despite what I said about the amusement of seeing Hooli exist in a world of Google and Amazon, the Morgan Industries’ parodies of ‘90s monopoly-era M$ make it kind of redundant to be in RTD, and so maybe it’s better to have
microsofts be cyberware as per Gibson.
While I personally find contemporary hypermodern Big Tech and their unicorn brethren to not fit the tone of RTD, the corporate behemoths of decades past are more viable brands. I already had Westinghouse create the lost bridge droid of the UNS
Unity- and have just only realized that the real-life company really did build
several robots, including the Televox in 1926 (just years after Karel Čapek coined the word), and
Elektro the Moto-Man who wowed visitors at the
1937 World’s Fair. (Come to think of it, the World’s Fair seems like the sort of event to still exist in RTD’s future.) But I had merely picked their presence to provide the beginning part of the machine’s name of Werk, this was sheer unconscious inspiration. And yet, this is the sort of
old-school all-American industrial conglomerate that would fit well in RTD. The big names dropped in Arthur Jensen’s diatribe in
Network (1976) - “You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those
are the nations of the world today.” AT&T is no doubt still engaged in computing in this alternate future alongside the real-world lessers that ate its post-antitrust lunch. General Electric is likely competing with Westinghouse in the same future, taking the War of the Currents to the stars. (Maybe in robotics tech- and also in competition with General Atomics, which has already been established to be behind the Fallout-style robots, and in Project Orion, suggesting a mix between the
fictional version and the real thing.)
Speaking of GE, who Kurt Vonnegut once worked at and became the fictionalized setting of his first novel, the powerfully prophetic science-fiction satire
Player Piano, (a work which intrigued a young
Philip K. Dick!), now that’s another postwar to ‘80s brand that would belong in this setting. One of the biggest industrial giant-scientific innovator-ubiquitous consumer maker there was, General Electric is the likely the inspiration for General Technics in
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner in 1968, a company that builds everything including semi-sentient supercomputers, and sends its armies of young technocratic executives galloping across the globe to bring business expertise to developing world nations a la McKinsey today (oh, hello again Lyonesse). But also the fate of GE in the 1980s might also be a retroactive justification for why RTD has so many anachronistic big brands from past eras. Maybe
Jack Welch never ascends to the CEO’s seat, and GE - and American business culture in general - is spared
the financialization, downsizing, and shareholder value supremacy that inflated corporate returns yet gutted out its vitality of creation in favor of speculation.
On the subject of alternate history, I’ll close this out with one of the original magnum opuses of the genre, now quite forgotten:
For Want of a Nail, published in 1973 by business historian Robert Sobel. A sprawling faux-textbook of an alternate historical novel, it
might have predicted the online incarnation of the genre with its dry election tables and dusty mountains of footnotes to imaginary sources. With the premise of the American Revolution failing due to Burgoyne winning at Saratoga, FWoaN goes on to chart a different course for the continent, split between the British loyalist Confederation of North America and the bilingual United States of Mexico with an Anglo co-ruling class descended by the defeated revolutionaries who reorganize the former Spanish colony under Andrew Jackson. And it also has a megacorporation
Kramer Associates, formerly a Mexican transportation company that vies to build a transoceanic canal in Central America, and through the chaos of the early twentieth century becomes so big as to essentially take the island of Taiwan as one big company town, and then invent the nuclear bomb to force a worldwide peace. I’ll let this
summarized timeline and this
recent review provide more details.
Such an unexpected (remember, this novel precedes cyberpunk), yet un-fantastical turn of events (Sobel is no Turtledove nor Stirling, but an academic who goes on to include a critique in his book from a fictional professor against his novelized counterpart). The review above points out that it’s not even the only megacorporation in the novel-
Much of their early dominance is in partnership with Petroleum of Mexico, before merging with that organisation in 1892. These organisations are not limited to the USM, with the Galloway family’s North American Motors being wealthy enough and powerful enough to launch their own sponsored migration scheme in the CNA and beyond from 1922. Nor are they limited to private enterprise, with the CNA’s National Financial Administration existing as an arm of the government to provide financing throughout the Confederation. These organisations are not without historic precedent, and Sobel’s profession as a business historian many have been the reason an alternate path whereby these corporations grow evermore powerful rather than being curtailed by governments is so emphasised within For Want of a Nail.
But this
older, turn-of-the-century review from AH.com’s own Ian Montgomerie goes into this characterization deeper, drawing a contrast between
large corporate monoliths of the 1970s and before, with the software titans that arose in the '80s and '90s, underlining mine:
That, however, brings me to the only really glaring problem of the whole timeline - Kramer Associates. Kramer basically starts out as a monolithic, government-supported corporation in Mexico, with control of a lot of important natural resources and their exploitation. Due to friendly relations with Mexico's government, it emerges to become the largest corporation in the world - and then it successfully diversifies, becomes a true multinational, and moves out of Mexico. At this point things begin to get very implausible - it just grows and grows and grows. By the end of the timeline, Kramer Associates is more powerful, and richer, than any nation except the CNA, it has effective control over many Pacific countries, it played a vital role in the global war, and it was the discoverer of the atomic bomb. Given the personalities and aims attributed to its leaders, it can basically be described as the Enlightened Supercorporation. It is far more successful than it has much reason to be, and that's after Sobel has a lot of things go very well for it throughout the timeline. The more I think about it the more annoying it becomes, actually - Kramer Associates is almost a toned-down, economic Domination of the Draka, in the sense that its leaders are too smart, it has too much technological success, and luck seems to go its way the great majority of the time.
This is, in actual fact, probably attributable to when the book was written (and by who). Sobel was a business historian, writing in the late 60s/early 70s. This was a period when the accepted view was that large, monolithic/monopolistic corporations worked very well, that command-based economic practices and pure Keynsian controlled economics was the road to success, and that the big old companies with governments in their pockets were around to stay. Of course, we have since learned that this view has profound flaws, both in and of itself and in terms of its relevance to the modern world. Bell was broken up, the Zaibatsu and their relationship with the government led to Japan's current economic problems, the Asian Tigers got hit with collapse due to problems their growth-oriented economies were not prepared for, resource-based cartels such as OPEC and DeBeers lost their power. And last but not least, we saw how the information revolution began changing our economy and in the process, who was on top of that economy. In record time, the grand old dinosaurs of the electronics and information businesses were crushed by the likes of Microsoft. Today we know a lot that Sobel didn't about the kind of problems Kramer Associates would experience, so what to him probably looked like an interesting and possible what-if, appears to us as incongruous and implausible as old science fiction novels that casually assumed the Soviet Union would be a competitive threat well into the 21st century.
I would not include Kramer in Racing the Darkness, but this is the sort of prototypical concept of an entire class of corporation, and perhaps an earlier type of American capitalism that existed before the corporate raider neoliberal takeover of the cyberpunk ‘80s, that this timeline seems to be full of. Would be interesting to compare them with other conceptions of megacorporations. And their continued existence in RTD's retrofuture would fit in alongside the survival of the Soviet Union and the western European colonial empires. Anyway, brands.
One more to come.
