AFIK (aside from in JJ territories) the majority of individuals lives inside VR spaces as infomorphs, dismissing them -majority falls to the clanking masses, but after dismissing those as well. The majority of people of the street after that are company biomorphs or tourists. Compare to company owned vehicles percentage of the traffic. Average joe probably exist in vr servers inside a synthmorph working tirelessly but might spend free time & holidays in a rented biomorph.

Very good points Herbo. Another major difference is between what an ego has access to and what it owns and controls. To use the above example, maybe the green-eyed, lemon-scented biomorph above is several steps up from what the clanking masses have, but there's still a solid chance that the person wearing it has it as part of a lease. It may even have been issued to them by a polity or corp. Even some of the totally personal technical gewgaws and programs they use might be black boxed from the ip/patent owners and they can't do anything (legally) to mod, update or repair them. Loss or damage to the sleeve could result in severe financial/rep penalties or indentured labor. The standard of living may be higher, but many of the core circumstances are similar. Violations of IP could result in much the same. Standards of living - especially for sleeve quality - will also vary wildly depending on where you are. Luna has a large number of indentured egos in synths, but an atypically high number of bio-sleeved Lunars own their morphs and mods outright because they just happened to live there BF and/or came from early evacuees that were still able to make it off Earth with at least their skins intact. Likewise LLA and other Earth-orbit habs, older corporate and private holdings, and the early colony sites and stations further rimward tend to have cores of egos that own their own meatspace bodies and gear because they've already been at it longer. Then there's change factors to consider where new tech is produced. Centers of innovation that have greater access to raw materials and the highest-quality fabbers would be able to supply more quality more quickly, while innovation centers have the most variety and new things to choose from, both of which drive down the price of former models but in very different availability models. Valles New Shanghai and Locus both have tons of designers and artists putting out amazing new things. In Locus everyone may be able to get their hands on the nanohive plans for a refined set of medichines that really does stop all forms of the common cold, but it's only available to 10% of the population because they run out of cobalt whereas on VNS Skinthetic incorporates it into their Exalt production immediately but only a few hundred people can actually afford the new sleeve and the corp is keeping the plans exclusive for 6 months before opening them to general retail. You may hear about both on the Mesh, but you're living in a tin can out on the rim and can't get a hive capable of running the new nano nor afford a new sleeve, but the next contact with anything outside the can isn't scheduled for a year and a half anyway so it doesn't even matter. Another big factor is the accident of timing and location. Now that things have been ticking along AF for a while and the established egos are in a position to take advantage of getting new morphs and mods the second-hand buying and leasing markets are likely going to heat up in the next year or two as the current crop of clankers can take advantage of decreased cost to actually own existing stock. The economics of sleeving and the basic standard-of-living could be a major point of social change as they concide with the rise in infugee/ai rights movements, more resources coming under developed use in some habs and increasing scarcity in others, and rising agitation against the often oppressive indenture and g.s.p terms... #occupyshackle

Also bear in mind that the 'average' Joe is anything but average (or should I say, the average Joe is a bleached skeleton sans skull somewhere on the surface of Earth. In order to have survived the Fall, your Average Joe was either extremely brave (working in space before it was really a 'thing'), rich, intelligent, or lucky. He was most likely an urbanite in good health and young (possibly a teenager now). He's more likely than we are to be greedy (since he had to take his place on the rescue ship at the expense of another). He's willing to accept major change in his life. His filial obligations were weak enough that he was willing to leave his family behind. He's suffered extreme tragedy (at the hands of technology). Whatever the feature that got him off of Earth likely define who he is as an individual.

Nice, Axel. I quite like those.

Thank you both rather kindly!

There's no logical reason for the hypercorps to allow John Q Informorph to live like a king. If you want to draw from modern day analogies, look at the Recording Industry and the Movie Industry. They both thrive on artificial scarcity. In the case of JQI, what better way to extend his contract than to sell him virtual items (also like modern-day "free" to play MMOs) to slow down the time before he can leave, thereby extending the time that he is valuable. Since they control the servers, they can easily prevent open source alternatives (or better yet, identify them when they "slip" through, and fine him accordingly). Mining towns are a good example. Bad things happen when your employer has a monopoly on your life. I believe the relevant term is Wage Slavery. Personally, I think EP's take on Corporations is rather balanced. In real life, they exist as memetic organisms whose sole purpose is to increase their power and influence. Sometimes they do that by capitalizing on the blatantly anti-social practices of other businesses (with motto's like 'Don't be Evil'). Individuals who focus on nothing but increasing their wealth and influence are thought of as being greedy, selfish and anti-social. Corporations are similar, except they have access to vastly more resources, intelligence, and social influence than a single person could ever hope to wield. They are higher on the food chain and exist for their own benefit. Doesn't it make sense to, at the very least, be wary of them and suspect their motives?

It is pretty hard to prevent people from customizing their virtual environments with home-made objects and public domain software - and probably irrational for a corp to prevent it. Remember that they want reasonably happy workers: frustrated knowledge workers are sloppy and unmotivated workers. Sure, it might make the setting a bit more exciting if the corps are unabashedly evil. But then again, it makes the setting a bit more stupid. A more realistic approach makes things more complex and interesting: poor people in EP have some amazing abilities and goods by our standards, yet they can feel terribly impoverished and oppressed by their own standard. Indentures have a wide range of opinions on their situation and handle it utterly differently - just as different corporations have different concerns about what can and cannot be done in their servers.

zend0g wrote:

This view is kind of funny for being so outdated. We can look at environments like Second Life and see where the future is headed. You may live in a trailer park in real life, but in virtual space everyone is whatever they want to be. Prior to being an infomorph, JQI performed his job like any other and lived his low to middle class lifestyle on a planet that was slowly dying. Then the Fall happened. Having skills that made him valuable, a corp (or someone) insubstantiates him. Now, JQI lives a life that he could have never experienced with a physical body. Speaking of his body, he has the body of the prime of his youth (improved to perfection a little of course). His workplace is an open air villa overlooking the Pacific coast as it appeared in its prime. It's always the best time of the day except for when he wants it to be the best time of the night. He can go swimming in a normal 1g environment and watch sea life that is now extinct. As he drifts in the water, he can still work and perform his tasks. As for wealth, wealth no longer means much to him. What is gold when he can create as much as he wants at his fingertips. Sex? Take a beta fork and throw in a body of your favorite sex idol. Rep? Aside from whoever he works for and his other close infomorph friends, everyone else can screw themselves. He wonders at the madness of people that would throw all of this away to live in a crude real body on a dirty, cramped, weightless station. Madness, madness. Infomorphs are one of supposedly "lower" morphs but in the hands of a savvy player they are easy path to bootstrapping yourself into whatever you want. Based on the progress we have made so far, the amount of computer hardware that it takes to create realistic environment pales in comparison to what it would take to run an AI. So it isn't like you are running that much overhead by letting them live in paradise. But one of EP schticks is that "Corporations are Eeeeeeevil!"

Arenamontanus wrote:

It is pretty hard to prevent people from customizing their virtual environments with home-made objects and public domain software - and probably irrational for a corp to prevent it. Remember that they want reasonably happy workers: frustrated knowledge workers are sloppy and unmotivated workers. Sure, it might make the setting a bit more exciting if the corps are unabashedly evil. But then again, it makes the setting a bit more stupid. A more realistic approach makes things more complex and interesting: poor people in EP have some amazing abilities and goods by our standards, yet they can feel terribly impoverished and oppressed by their own standard. Indentures have a wide range of opinions on their situation and handle it utterly differently - just as different corporations have different concerns about what can and cannot be done in their servers.

The problem is that indentures run on hypercorp systems, not on systems they own. Simulspace takes up processing power, which drains said processing power from where it could be used by the hypercorp. While I understand that in today's corporate world incentive pushes productivity, this is likely not necessary with hypercorps and indentured employees. The fact is that there's [i]a whole lot[/i] of indentures out there, and the indentures know it. If they aren't productive, they'll be shelved, and a new indenture will take their place. There's no need to give them virtual space... they can live just fine without it (well, relatively fine, as opposed to not existing on any computer at all). However, I agree with Arenamontanus that you'll see quite a bit of variation with regards to hypercorps. Smaller hypercorps have more incentive to be nicer to their indentures... after all, they probably can't afford more indentures anyways. Semi-anarchistic hypercorps will probably be the most amicable to their needs and wants, perhaps even giving them a vote on the things they want. But I doubt this will be the norm, and the biggest hypercorps will doubtfully do this at all. Especially if the indenture databases are in that hypercorp's hands... why bother with being friendly when you have tens of millions of spare people looking for a job in your hard drive?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Productivity is not something that can be forced. Frustration and anger inevitably start working against you. Unhappy employees are unproductive, no matter how much incentive they have otherwise. More plainly, unhappy employees are also likely to be more willing to screw the company over some day. Every unhappy employee is a potential barsoomian opposing them later or, even worse, taking a bribe to actively sabotage their soon-to-be-former employer and then running off somewhere else.

Where could they be getting that bribe from? Most hypercorps probably keep their infugee workforce on closed systems with little to no external connection. Any data they require from the outside can be filtered by hypercorp resources, or by another hypercorp which is contracted to do so. This eliminates any need for connection to the greater mesh, and prevents the possibility that they might receive external subterfuge requests. Furthermore, an unhappy employee is still probably a non-threat to a hypercorp... even once they earn their freedom through contract, they'll probably spend the rest of their life as an impoverish member of the clanking masses, and they may never even know the name of the hypercorp they were working for, or any of its employees. Who knows, they might even have psychosurgical memory wipes written out in the contract to prevent any possibility of corporate secrets leaking out when the infomorph is freed. Hypercorps have absolute power over the informorphs held on their servers.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Nothing hurts a hypercorp like angry indentures regularly wrecking their shit. This no doubt gets them shouted at in the Consortium's government, gets Oversight breathing down their neck, gets them less competent indentures (beggars can be choosers, especially if they have PhDs), and, to top it off, it costs a lot of money to pay for Direct Action or Gorgon to go hunt these people down. In short, the more you abuse your indentures, the more you pay for it later. Paying essentially nothing for server cycles (owning the server blueprints, you can literally just print more; the cost is effectively a trivial payment for power supply), it's just good sense and cents value.

Every indenture has a gun to their head 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That gun is called the delete key (even though it is admittedly no longer a key). Their every action is likely logged by the server, and their every piece of work accounted for. When errors crop up, an investigation likely occurs into why that error happened. If it turns out to be intentional, the results could be disastrous for the helpless infomorph. Furthermore, even if a hypercorp can't afford to replace an infomorph, they can simply load up a backup of that infomorph from earlier in their lives, when they were less hostile to the hypercorp. Or, as an interesting twist, simply fork the infomorph and force the two alphas to compete against each other for freedom. How's that for a cruel way to force motivation?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Edit: Plus, it needs to be said, not every indenture is as replaceable as you might think. Even the simplest business will see a dip in productivity while training a new retail employee. More valuable indentures, like engineers, can't just be instantly replaced. These people are likely already working on a project, and hiring a new one means bringing an unknown commodity into something underway, slowing it down considerably while the new hire is brought in and up to speed.

Actually, more valuable egos with skills like masters-level engineering never become indentures. They get sleeved, contracted, and become full employees with benefits. The indenture program is for unskilled labor, whether it be data processing or resources management... things like making sure the automatic doors open when people are coming to them, or monitoring the cleaning drones, or filing "paper"-work. As for training them, it's actually not that hard. It would probably take about as long as this: Skillsoft loading... ... skillsoft loaded

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Except when the indenture works, say, not in a digital sweatshop but in a public job or sleeved in a synthmorph or otherwise in some non-digital job, like overseeing trash-collecting robots. Even those in servers might be contacted by a hacker or some corp employee who wants revenge. They might have a serious amount of control but nothing is absolute.

I'm not saying it's absolute, but it's likely very high. Indentures are probably kept on a relatively short leash, and when you combine hypercorp restriction with Planetary Consortium regulation, you have a very powerful system for keeping infomorphs in check. That isn't to say that it's impossible for escape... and that would make a great mission for characters when they aren't doing things for Firewall (or perhaps the person they are extracting is vital to Firewall). But I doubt that the millions of indentures are going to hold their breath that their white hacker in shining armor is going to come to save them.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Contrary to popular belief, indenturehood does not involve giving hypercorps the right to murder you, which, outside of the JR, deletion is most certainly treated as. Hypercorps aren't evil space nazis and the populace isn't either: Murder for corporate espionage would not be received well publicly. Deletion of your company-held back-up is a different story, as is withdrawing all the money you've earned. That alone is a potent incentive. A workforce with a gun to its head is quite likely to go "Workers of the world, unite!", and the populace to support them, compared to a relatively harsh but fair system that indenturehood makes sense as.

An ego without a body isn't a person. An ego without a computer to run it isn't a person. It's a backup. And so long as you're running on hypercorporate server space, that's all you are... a backup borrowing someone else's computer. And while you're probably right that they don't have a right to kill you, they don't even need to kill you. They just need to delete the copy on their servers and leave you in the cold storage cluster they found you. You have no right to the memories accrued during your time working for them, and you already have a backup there. The one they have is essentially a fork, which they would probably have no qualms eliminating. Plus, there's nothing saying that indentures have any ability to communicate with one another. A server OS architecture consisting of emulated minds kept in isolated resource allocations means that they are running on the same processors, but have no means of interacting with one another. To avoid insanity, they are probably provided hypercorp-designed muses to keep them company (and monitor their every actions).

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

I'd doubt that skilled workers aren't indentured, just that their terms are significantly shorter and better. Also, skillsofts are expensive, limited in scope, and don't also provide an understanding of a project, how it works, or the interpersonal relationships of the team. I'm not saying hypercorps aren't at least a little callous to their indentures, maybe even cruel in hiding red tape to let them extend indentures, but they're not evil, hand-wringing monsters. They don't kill people over non-compliance (though they may sue them into poverty), especially if it's not profitable and hard to get away with. Mind-raping them is just as bad.

Core Book, pg 65 wrote:

In the years since the Fall, large numbers of these infugees have been resleeved. Anyone with valuable skills was first to gain a morph, followed by anyone with friends or relatives already living in orbit who could take responsibility for the person’s resleeving. Those two groups accounted for only half of the refugees. The remaining found themselves in a far more difficult situation. Lacking either personal contacts or vital skills, they had no one else to help them. In the first few years, many of these infugees signed contracts promising their labor or other services in return for resleeving and a guarantee of some form of income sufficient to support them.

Those who had the money were the most likely to escape any chance of being forced into indentured labor. Admittedly, there could [i]theoretically[/i] be strikes amongst workers in synthmorphs, but those same hypercorps would probably have killswitches on their property to ensure they couldn't be used against them. As for psychosurgery, I have no doubt that it's legally allowed so long as it is for the purpose of protecting hypercorp secrets. Remember that the Consortium is a nation for hypercorps, by hypercorps. I'm sure they guaranteed that these sorts of allowances would be made for them.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

The length of the leash on indentures is probably fairly short, but they're not going to try and keep someone bound in a cage. An indenture isn't a slave, it's a person who agreed to a contract, a contract overwhelmingly in the hypercorp's favour. If the person quits, they invalidate the contract and the hypercorp effectively got a lot of free labour off of them. Indentures don't need to be kept on much of a leash, they're probably free to quit at any time. The only thing that hypercorps probably worry about is them leaking company secrets (if any). There's no particular need to keep them under too tight a leash. The only reason you even might is if they're in a digital sweatshop, designing particularly sensitive things, at which point you just monitor their transmissions in the same way any company would. An indenture is [i]not[/i] a slave, and this simply cannot be stated enough. They're contracted workers who often live in shit conditions. They can still likely leave at any time unless their contract stipulates otherwise, and, even then, most likely all they lose is their accumulated capital for purchasing their new body.

Actually not true. Indentured servitude is not simply a contract that can be freely broken. In fact, history shows that the only difference between indentured servitude and slavery was the willing submission to it, and the temporary nature of it. Indentured servants were abused, raped, and suffered many of the same indignities that slaves were. An indentured servant that fled their master was treated similarly to a soldier that abandoned their post. I don't see that being magically changed when indentured servitude makes it's comeback after the Fall. In 10 AF, the only way they're amicably getting out of their contracts is if they negotiated an exit clause (the only legal way to exit a contract even in our time), worked themselves to freedom or did it the illegal way... and I have no reason to believe that most hypercorps have an incentive to place exit clauses in indenture contracts.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Again, that is just cartoonishly and pointlessly evil. An infomorph is not a back-up, nor is anyone likely to see it as such outside of bioconservative groups; it's an instantiated person. Thanks to cloud processing, infomorphs can exist without a host server (except in isolated regions), but this makes them the equivalent of digital beggars. Of course, such digital resources are limited, which means that releasing all infugees onto the mesh is not exactly a smart thing to do, but still... Public data-space exists. Also, even with a muse, keeping people in isolation will drive them mad and is just pointlessly evil. You might stipulate in contracts that they can't bad-mouth the company but stopping them from having friends will just perpetuate the negative image of hypercorps. Giving them contact to the outside world will promote the image that indenturehood is not a bad thing. Even from a purely self-interested perspective, it's bad for business. It hurts your company image and it hurts your worker base, as suddenly only the most desperate and least skilled/intelligent employees are now the ones coming to you, not the cream of the crop.

What cloud processing can they exist in? All server and computer resources are owned by someone, and unless that infomorph knows someone that's willing to run their ego on their inserts, they aren't existing anywhere. There is public data-space, but I highly, [i]highly doubt[/i] that public data space is freely usable for ego emulation, at least in the inner system. Anarchist habs probably allow it though, I'll give you that. Existence requires resources. For infomorphs, it isn't food and room, but processor resources and hard drive space. Unless they own it themselves, they need to find someone who's willing to give them it, and that's what indenturing is all about. Hypercorps pull egos out of cold storage, offer them a contract and put them to work. If they neg on that contract, the ego is deleted, and the original backup is left in storage (why should the hypercorp be obligated to make them a new backup?). As for the skilled, I already mentioned that the skilled likely already have bodies, and can be hired on as full employees. Indentures in 10 AF fill the roll of robotized workforces and data processing plants. The whole point is to replace quality with quantity; taking unskilled labor and applying it to work that doesn't require craftsmanship or innovation. You probably won't find very talented people among the indentured. If someone of talent is found amongst the masses, they will be sleeved into a modest-costing hypercorp morph, given an office, and contracted for more important tasks.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Psychosurgery is literally mind-raping people. You can just add a stipulation of body repossession if someone releases that information, with the addition that they committed corporate espionage and are going to spend the next few years in cold storage or a simspace jail. That alone is a powerful incentive. Mind-raping indentured refugees will get you butchered in the public image, especially given how much of said public are former indentured refugees. There's probably not strikes amongst indentured workers, because that'd be stupid for them. What there likely is, however, is a general hatred AFTER they are no longer indentured, which might make boycotts a much more likely event.

I don't see that happening. Spin doctors and ad-campaigners have already probably made the hypercorps look wonderful in the eyes of the public, despite their treatment of indentures. Hell, think about it, they're giving indentures free existence and space, and all they ask in return is labor. Labor is a small price to pay for existence, no? Psychosurgery might seem icky-scary to you, but you're looking at it with glasses colored by current sensibilities. It probably looks far different for someone living in 10 AF. Psychosurgery is commonly used for mental therapy, fork-making and correcting prisoners. How can you say that no one likes psychosurgery considering how popular beta and gamma forks are (yes that requires psychosurgery, so yes beta and gamma forks are "mind-raped" copies of you). It's a commonality of life. Besides, they should have read the psychosurgery clause in their contract. If they didn't want it, they shouldn't have signed it.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

You can't use a historical context for the modern incarnation of indentured servitude. It used to be acceptable to conquer and occupy other nations, to deny some people their rights based on them being subhuman, etc. People's attitudes have shifted, especially with the advent of mass media.

And war is no longer acceptable? Since when? Since 10 years after the biggest war in human history? And when is it no longer acceptable to deny some people their rights for being considered subhuman? You should get the info out to the uplifts, they apparently didn't get the message from the various labs that the majority of them call home. You might also want to inform the Ultimates, because that info would clearly stop them from treating less-modified humans like trash. Then you could report it to the Junta, so they stop discriminating against the heavily modified and AIs. Hell, take our time into context. The mass media hasn't stopped modern countries from violating personal freedoms, occupying various nations, or declaring people subhuman. Taking into account my country (the U.S.), there's anyone placed in Guantanamo (no personal freedoms or even right to a trial because they've been declared prisoners of war), Iraq, and gays. Technology has changed, genetics have changed, society has changed... but people are still capable of just as much kindness and cruelty as they've always been capable of. War, discrimination, cruelty... those are unfortunately timeless.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Breach of contract is not a sentence punishable via corporal punishment, or even imprisonment, it's a civil matter. In most cases, it's really in the hypercorp's favour to include an exit clause (if, for any reason, the indenture fails to uphold their contract, the contract is terminated and all claim on payment is null and void), since, should there be a breach of contract, indentures are poor and can't be sued for much, but the hypercorp could very well be forced to pay out for work rendered. This puts it very much against their favour to not include an exit clause.

Exactly. No exit clause means the indenture has no right to quit, and any decision to terminate employment simply results in the deletion of the infomorph from the hypercorp servers. Easy cleanup, no issues.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

All mesh inserts allow other meshed devices to use the other's processing cycles to some extent. This is how the mesh works. That public data-space is how transfers are routed and how it's possible to have no-one own or control the mesh. This allows infomorphs to live in public data-space. Things like ghostrider modules are only really necessary to go into locked regions or areas without mesh access, and to ensure that a presence is generally possible.

No. Mesh networks are [i]completely different[/i] from cloud computing. It's not even close to the same thing. One is a transmission protocol, the other is... well... computing. Explaining mesh networking is verbose, so I'll just [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking]link you to the 'pedia[/url], and sum it up: a mesh network is a wireless topology where every deviced hooked to the network can act as a router for every other device. They do not need to share computing resources, just transmission resources.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

As for deleting a running ego, again, that is a living person. Deleting them is murder. Just because they have a back-up on file doesn't make it any less murder. If you kill someone, it's still murder and a serious crime, even if they [i]can[/i] be reinstantiated, due to the trauma involved. Even in the worst places in the Consortium, you at least need to make their current instantiation their latest stored back-up.

Why? Backups are not a legal right. You have to pay someone to make backups of your mind. If you can't afford it, you don't get backed up... period. They have no obligation to give you the funds necessary for that backup. Furthermore, it's not murder. Murder likely only applies if they delete your [i]only[/i] backup. Fortunately, you were backed up during the Fall, so there's that. Any backups beyond that are on your dime, and as an indenture you don't have a dime to your name. As a modern example, imagine if you worked for a company that gave you a car to use for commuting to and from work. One day, you drive to work, walk into your boss's office, and piss on his desk. You're fired. Now comes the quandry: do they have to give you the car to drive home?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Finally, there were countless untold numbers of infugees from the Fall. While many likely had identification and, thus, easily recognized useful skills, many do not. These people are the ones who make up the skilled indenture programs today. Keep in mind, after all, that even if they were skilled and up-to-date workers pre-Fall, they're all ten years out of date in their skills.

While the most recent infugees might be a little out of date, it's far easier to catch an engineer up to speed on modern engineering than it is to teach some random bum how to be an engineer. Plus, there may very well be other means for them to detect the skills that a person has besides mere identification. Employee examinations and the like could be very useful to weed out the personnel who have a potential talent outside the infugee workforce.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Spin doctors can only do so much. Telling someone that it's possible to drill for oil without harming the local ecosystem is one thing, telling them that torturing someone is somehow fine is another entirely. The public is willing to let them get away with the worst kind of wage slavery out there, but they're not willing to let them get away with torture.

Assuming they find out. What proof does an infugee with a fresh body and psychosurgically modified memories have that he was abused as an indenture? Even if they get out with their memories intact, what damage could they possibly do to the face of the hypercorp? One infugee against a multi-million credit business with ties everywhere? Think about this: about three weeks ago, it came out that virtually every cell phone company except Verizon installed rootkits on nearly every smartphone. Apple had this rootkit, Motorola, Samsung... the whole lot. This rootkit had the potential to transmit your every password, location and all other info to the company that created it at any time. How are cell phone sales right now? How's the iPhone doing?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

As for psychosurgery, I can't even begin to tell you what's wrong with that. The entire solar system just got finished watching friends and relatives get mind-raped by alien super-viruses, they likely lost their body at one point, and the only thing they know they have for sure is their ego. When you talk about monkeying even with your mind, your very soul, you will scare people. There is no way to get away with mind-raping people to protect corporate secrets. Sure, you can instill extremely harsh penalties, but mind-rape just ain't one of them. The vast majority of Martians have been through the indenture system. They know what it's like. No amount of spin doctoring can make them forget that. They won't easily forgive abuse of it. You can get away with using them, but you can't get away with abusing them.

Actually, they never saw their friends and relatives get mind raped. They might have seen their heads removed by flying chainsaw-insect-robot-things, but psychosurgery isn't something you can really see, per se. We don't even know if the TITANs did any psychosurgery, only that they took heads. Many people started going insane from the crap they probably saw... but psychosurgery is likely what was used to fix them afterwards. Plus, there are lots of utilitarian uses for psychosurgery that the books refer to. Actors use psychosurgery to fit with a part better. Prisoners have it done to them to encourage good behavior. Addicts use it to kick their addictions. It's common and widespread (verbatim from page 220 of the book). You might see it as mind-rape, but that is not the prevailing attitude regarding psychosurgery in 10 AF. They see it similarly to surgery, and for good reason. Just as surgery can fix an ailing body, psychosurgery fixes the ailing mind. Sure, you can do bad things with psychosurgery, but are you telling me that surgeons can't? If psychosurgery is mind-rape, then modern surgeons are university-trained, health care-funded serial rapists.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Finally, on the topic of beta and gamma forks, there's a difference between psychosurgery and neural pruning, and people still tend to look askew at forks to begin with. A beta fork is basically an AI with a transhuman ego merged with it; hardly a person, even if it thinks it's one. A gamma fork doesn't even have that illusion; it's an AI that just sort of acts like a person.

No, there isn't. Gamma forks are the only fork types that are AI template-based. Beta forks are stripped-down versions of an alpha, largely removing everything before a year's worth of memory. Creating a beta fork is as much mind-rape as removing memories of employment from a recently-freed indenture to protect corporate secrets.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Right, this is getting overly long... You are honestly stating that hypercorps murdering someone (murder is defined as the unlawful halting of the life of a person, and that is what deleting an infomorph is, even if they have a back-up) and mind-raping them would both be... A. Not somehow insanely illegal. B. Acceptable to the populace. C. Not even known to the public. D. Acceptable to the human beings that work for said hypercorp. Hypercorps aren't evil or insane, nor are the populace. This isn't comparable to company cars or having what amounts to spyware in mobile phones. This is straight-up torture, brainwashing, and murder. People aren't going to buy from those companies, especially if they are former employees that survived it and remember said horrors. They're even likely to violently rebel. The hypercorps are greedy, and some people in their ranks are definitely what you'd call evil, but they're not fascist super-Nazis.

And there's the problem. You can't define the halting of an infomorph as murder because you can't apply today's laws to another time period. If we were in the 14th century talking about religious philosophy debates existing in the future, you wouldn't say "well clearly they would be declared heresy by the civilized folk of the 21st century, and those who practiced religious debate would be burned at the stake" would you? If we were in the early 19th century debating slavery in the modern age, you wouldn't say "well, obviously they would have no qualms with it, because no savage culture would try to halt our effective slave trade" would you? Sensibilities change as technology and society changes. In that sense, a world where people can be backed up probably wouldn't take the "killing" of a person the same way you and I would. If I had a back up and you "murdered me", at best you have to pay damages, fees for resleeving, and spend time in jail for aggravated assault. It wouldn't be treated on the same caliber as killing someone's body and destroying their every backup. A true death would be held as a far more grievous crime, and I'm not saying that a hypercorp would start true killing their unwieldy employees. Furthermore, you need to stop using the term "mind-rape" when referencing psychosurgery. It's not mind rape for the majority of the populace of 10 AF. It's mind-rape to YOU. That's fine. Bioconservatives feel the same way, most likely. I don't. And apparently the people of 10 AF don't. First off, rape is a sexual act against an unwilling subject. Psychosurgery is not against unwilling participants; in fact, potential employees would probably be informed before signing the contract that hypercorp secrets would be removed via psychosurgery. So it's not rape. Psychosurgery is not mind-rape. Automotive repair is not car-rape. Surgery is not body-rape. Sandwich making is not food-rape. Playing music is not instrument-rape. You know what is rape? Rape. That isn't to say that they wouldn't have laws regarding unlawful psychosurgery. They already have laws about unlawful surgery today. But those laws would probably be fine with psychosurgery for the purpose of protecting corporate secrets. I see that in the same way that they will probably allow for contractual RFID implantation when the technology stops causing cancer. If you don't like it, avoiding it is as simple as refusing to accept the terms of agreement. Problem solved. There's no rape involved.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Halting an infomorph and deleting them are different things. Deleting one is most definitely murder and you say yourself that this would be treated like an aggravated assault at the very least, probably a much worse one given the time between the back-up and now. A hypercorp committing aggravated assault every time an employee voids their contract is going to be seen as a thuggish and evil corporation. More to the point, every indenture is going to remember this from their terms. You're basically creating an army of whipped slaves, and then releasing them. I'm not sure what person would hope they'd not bear ill will after this but they're the most damned optimistic thinker I've ever heard of.

When did I say that? I said that it would be aggravated assault if someone killed you in [b]your morph[/i]. That won't carry the same weight when you're borrowing someone else's server space to exist (under contract, might I add), it's not the same thing. If anything, the law is in the hypercorps favor. You violated a contract, you reneged on the terms of agreement, and they have no obligation to uphold any aspect of their end of the bargain as a result. You cease to exist on their servers (because it's [i]their[/i] servers), and your original backup remains in cold storage. You keep no memories because you don't have any money to afford a backup, and they aren't obligated to pay the fees. No death, no assault, just a person breaking a contract, and another party following with the consequences. Lastly, what would those indentures do? They're recently released from servitude, with no skills to call their own, and no property other than their newfound (relatively cheap) body. Are they honestly going to try and form an uprising in a multi-hab nation ran by people just like the ones that just released them? Moreover, why bite the hand that fed? You just got your first body since the Fall thanks to this hypercorp. Sure, they treated you like a disposable tool, but they also gave you the chance to live again of all the dozens of millions of egos still in cold storage. Most indentures are probably still going to be somewhat grateful. Those that aren't will probably be dealt with when they try to commit a crime getting their vengeance. There were no indentured servant uprisings in the 17th or 18th centuries either.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

As for psychosurgery, you're literally changing how someone thinks. That's terrifyingly scary. It's probably one of the few real fears people have left in the Eclipse Phase age.

Why? Many of the people who survived the fall probably had the memories of that hell wiped from their minds. Plenty use psychosurgery to do positive things to their heads. The average person is probably as afraid of their psychosurgeon as they are of their implant surgeon... it's the same sort of fear that exist today of people being afraid of a surgeon leaving tools in them. It happens, sure, but odds are it won't, and most people aren't paranoid about it. It seems scary to you, but that's natural. Humans have a tendency to fear tech that they never had a chance to grow up with. Look up the statistics on the number of people in Africa who still rely on faith healing over modern medicine. Look up the statistics on the number of people who are afraid of vaccinations in the United States. Just because it scares you doesn't mean it'll scare the people of 10 AF.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Finally, just because people agree to something doesn't mean that they'll be happy about it, or even that it's wise or sane to introduce it. The desperately poor might agree to a contract that involves them getting murdered if they violate it, but does that mean they're going to be happy about it? Does it mean you'll have a productive work force? Does it mean anyone will [i]ever[/i] buy anything from you again and not the other hypercorp who sells the same products and realizes what a retarded idea it is to torture their employees and then produces a media campaign to promote this fact? Seriously, it's not just likely illegal for a hypercorp to do half these things, it's not good sense, either. Every indenture will be free eventually, and every single one of them will remember the gun pointed at their head. On that day, you will have an army of barsoomians and free citizens who know you're evil, and the people of Eclipse Phase are far from unfamiliar with war. No amount of back-ups will save you from their wrath on such a day.

Chiquita Banana spent the last 20 years hiring Colombian guerrillas to murder their own employees whenever they tried to unionize and strike. Both Disney and Apple maintain a large number of sweatshops to this day, and Apple's sweatshops are notorious for the "suicides" that occur whenever an employee leaks information about Apple secrets. I think the current running tally is 5 "suicides" so far. American banks secretly borrowed 7 trillion dollars from the federal reserve with little to no interest over the past 7 years, and loaned that money back to the government at higher interest to make a profit. This came out just a couple months ago. A subsidiary of News Corp (owns Fox) was caught hacking the phones of prominent celebrities and officials in England, and even hacked the phone of a murder victim to get an inside scoop on the topic, deleting messages when her parents filled up the inbox. Are those companies hurting right now?

Decimator wrote:

Decivre, you keep comparing psychosurgery to normal surgery. How do modern day people view forcible surgery?

Why are we bringing up forcible surgery? Why is voluntary psychosurgery viewed the same as forcible surgery?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Because it's not what you'd call walked into with open arms. These are poor, exploited people being taken advantage of. Could you imagine if a company today was found out to take poor people, bind them to a contract, and replace one of their arms with a welding torch to make them more efficient at it? Sure, they agreed to it. Sure, they signed a contract. People are still going to be horrified by this and I really don't know how to make that any clearer.

That's not a very astute analogy because replacing limbs isn't a common technology in the modern day. A more concrete modern example would be if a company forced its employees to get a driver's license. I'm sure they would be brought up on war crimes for that.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Indentured servants in the 17th and 18th century weren't unable to experience contact with other human beings, weren't able to be killed by their masters just for breaking their contract, and weren't treated to mind-alteration so that they didn't spill the beans on things they might have witnessed. They still had rights under the law, and, while they might have endured [i]some[/i] degree of harsh treatment, none of it even approaches what you're describing. In today's society, we don't rip out someone's heart if they can't pay back the hospital for the transplant surgery. This isn't the nightmarish world of Repo. I can't imagine the transhuman future would react much differently. At the very least, you'd be forced to return the indenture to the archive you found them in, but, given how many people come from desperate situations, I imagine the laws are much more favourable than that in most places. Killing someone still causes them trauma, and going "Oh well, they've got a back-up" doesn't mitigate this fact in the least. As for not biting the hand that feeds them, you do realize that there's riots going on all over the world right now, over far lesser things than this, right? That there's military uprisings going on constantly over it? And that a post-Fall population consists almost entirely of people who've been through hell and are likely very much ready and capable of doing what it takes to fight?

A hypercorp runs no risk of killing their employees. Their employees are emulated brain states with back ups on emergency farcast clusters from when the Fall hit. It's not a comparable issue. You can't kill an infomorph in 10 AF, not unless you destroy his/her every backup. Unless that happens, it's not murder. As for returning them to the archive they were in, there's no need for doing so. They already have a backup present. Any further backups cost money, hence backup insurance. There's no legal right to have backups kept up-to-date... it would be an unenforceable rule. Unless the infomorph can afford to have a more recent backup, he has to accept the only backup he has... the one from which he was instantiated. This is why there should be no legal qualms with simply deleting a rowdy infomorph employee from the servers. It's not murder, it's booting a trespasser.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Psychosurgery and implant surgery are not the same. Getting a faulty biomod isn't such a bad thing, you just go back in the tank and get it repaired, but getting psychosurgery can literally change who you are. Just because it has positive medical uses doesn't mean people are going to accept corporations brainwashing their slaves. The only thing these people have is their sense of self, they're very much aware that everything else comes and goes, and trying to take even that from them is going to make them react badly.

Getting implants can't change who you are? If I get a true sex change and get full female reproductive organs, I'm still the same person? When was this ever true, even today? Besides, I've already stated that this isn't a matter of people publicly accepting it or not. It's a contractual obligation. If the indenture doesn't want the psychosurgery, then so be it... but they'll be reneging on their contract [i]the very day it's going to end[/i]. Years of toiling for the hypercorp flushed down the toilet because they weren't willing to go under the "psycho-knife". The best part? After they delete the instance, they can go back to their backup and offer them the contract all over again... and without memories of the contract having occurred, they will probably accept it again, giving that hypercorp more years of service. After which they will refuse the surgery, get their instance shut down, and the cycle will repeat all over again. Ad infinitum. The largest majority of indentures are probably not going to say no for that exact reason, and after the surgery is done, they won't have any reason to file complaints, now will they?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Chiquita is currently facing charges that could see them go out of business and members of its board could face extradition to Colombia for criminal charges. Apple doesn't maintain sweatshops, it contracts out to other companies. Disney contracts out to sweatshops, certainly (though they usually pay well above the local minimum wage), but that's not comparable to murdering people. Even so, there's rather vocal campaigns against Disney as we speak. American banks have done some nefarious things but, again, this is not comparable to murdering people and there are currently massive protests against them. Bank of America's been losing business extremely rapidly and may even go bankrupt soon. Finally, News of the World was shut down by Murdoch after the phone scandal. Investigations are going on with the people involved, including of Murdoch and his son, and their entire organization is now being subjected to tight government scrutiny. Their business is suffering considerably, to the point that bids to acquire other properties have been forced to be withdrawn. So, yes, they are hurting.

Chiquita just posted record profits in the last fiscal quarter, and used the boom as an opportunity to move their headquarters to Charlotte, North Carolina. Disney still holds the position of the most powerful media empire in the United States, and has just recently opened a brand new resort in Hawaii. Apple is currently the most profitable corporation in the world. News Corp has made a net profit of just over 2 billion in the past year, and that's taking into account the aftermath of the scandal and the legal costs it has already attained; it still also holds the position of having the most-viewed 24-hour news channel in the country. Hurting seems to be a relative concept.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Right. There's nothing I can say to convince you here that hypercorps aren't run entirely by murderous sadists who kill and brainwash the poor for the lulz. We have to agree to disagree.

Here we are again, completely altering the narrative of my statements. I never said that hypercorps were uber-evulz, nor that they were murdering sadists who kill and brainwash the poor. In fact, I've explicitly stated that none of the things they do are anywhere near as morally bad as murder, mind-rape, or any of the other exaggerated terms you've used throughout this dialog. I think that a hypercorp is perfectly in the right, so long as they stick to the terms of the agreed contract. Let's run through a scenario: let's pretend you are an instantiated, and you're being offered a contract. It's a typical contract, which my guess will last for 3-5 years, depending on the quality of the morph you get at the end. You go for the cheapest one, so you can get out of the work the fastest. 3 years, you get a simple morph. Sure it's a glitchy case, but it's better than having no body at all, and no computer to run your mind, no? So you sign on the dotted line after reading the contract. There's no fine print... they don't have to put fine print, as they want to make sure you understand everything you're getting into. You'll be working 23.9-hour days, every day for the next 1096 days; afterwards, you will be receiving minor psychosurgery to ensure the safety of hypercorp secrets. Your choice is either that or having your current instance deleted, and your backup placed back in storage. Fearing the alternative, you decide to agree to the terms, and they immediately farcast you to the hypecorporate network to begin your employment. You expected it to be harsh, considering how much work you'd be doing, but you were surprised. You are doing data management, organizing company files and checking any incoming info for errors. You work with 8,500 other employees in the same server cluster. While the work does get a bit tedious, you never tire and your "body" never gets sore. Hell, you don't even need to lift any fingers (not that you have any) since file editing and processing is as simple as commanding them with your thoughts. The hypercorp even offers you a narcoalgorithm to help you focus, if you want it. You refuse, but it's good to know the option is there if you have a problem focusing. You sometimes skip over your breaks and let them accumulate, taking a big 42-minute break at the end of the week. It wouldn't seem like much if you still had a body, but when you can spend that time in accelerated simulspace, it feels like relaxing for two days straight on a virtual beach, with no need to sleep. After your break is up, you are ejected from simulspace and brought back to your workstation, where the monotony begins again. After you show some initiative, you are given access to work on more important files. You are even given a hypercorp-issued muse assistant to help you with your work. The day seems to fly by faster, and you've even started skipping longer periods of time between breaks to take very long simulated vacations. Things are looking up. You've effectively gotten a promotion. While it isn't much, and you still have to work off your entire contract, at least it's going to be a little easier from here out. Today, something crazy happened. An employee named Hadar got fed up, and started deleting files left and right. Did a lot of damage, which you and the other employees are likely going to be working for days fixing. This is going to hurt the bottom line. Hadar was ejected to an external computer system for an HR interview. He spews epithets and rants at the review board, and they can see clearly that there's no way that he'll continue to work with them. What can they do? They can't just put his mind on a computer or back him up, as that will cost the hypercorp more money, and Hadar has done plenty of that already. There's only one option for them to do. They tell him that the terms of his contract were violated, and that they are going to cancel the agreement. With a thought command, his instance is shut down. His original backup still resides on the infugee cluster, so he still exists... but he's been ejected from the hypercorp servers. Such is life. Perhaps another hypercorp will offer him another contract, but you can be sure that this one won't be offering him anything. The years pass by, and sure enough, one day the data screen disappears from your view and a congratulations prompt appears. "You have clocked 26,188 hours of labor, and have officially completed your term of indenture." With that, your ego is dumped into an isolated system, and you are connected to a camera feed within the synthmorph factory. Through it, you can see a wide swath of case models in a variety of colors. They are allowing you to pick your poison. You choose one that looks somewhat stylish to your sensibilities, and while it's depressing that you aren't getting a biological body, it beats a digital existence anyday. With that, another ego appears within the system to talk to you. "Hello Axel, I'm Dr. Ranwadi. I am a psychosurgeon contracted to the hypercorp for the purposes of indenture management. As per the terms of your agreement, we will now proceed to psychosurgically remove all hypercorp-owned confidential information from your mind. Afterwards, you will be placed in the morph you chose, and released to the outside world. Are you ready?" Unfortunately, you aren't. To you, psychosurgery is mind-rape, and you'll have none of it. "Are you sure? I can promise you that we will not touch any other memories that you have. I'm an experienced psychosurgeon with 10 years experience in the field. I do several hundred surgeries a day". You won't budge. "How about I show you these feeds that will inform you on the modern safety standards of psychosurgery, and the safety it entails?" No way. You stand your ground. With bewilderment, the doctor logs off. Shortly afterward, a hypecorporate spokesman logs on to talk to you. "Look, the psychosurgery is necessary to finish off your contract. Without going through with it, you will violate the terms of the agreement. We really don't want to cancel the contract on your last day." It's not an option to you, you stay stubborn. His attention wavers for a minute, then he talks again. "My manager has told me that there is another option." With that, he pulls up a new contract. "This one will extend your indenture for two years, after which you will get a quality synth for your troubles. This should give you plenty of time to get over your fears regarding psychosurgery. We will even give you access to all the media you want to help you get informed with the latest knowledge regarding the safety of psychosurgery." You refuse once more, because you don't want to work here for another minute. You want your freedom, and you want it now. His attention wavers for a moment, and he returns with one more offer. "All right, this is the only other offer I can give you. Rather than giving you the elective psychosurgery, we can instead shut down this instance and give the case you now own to your original backup. This will ensure the security of our secrets while also giving you the means to completely avoid the psychosurgery. What do you say?" With a shake, you refuse him. So let's flip the script. You are now the hypercorp. Here you are with an indenture who just finished his term. He refuses the elective surgery, he refuses to restore to backup, and he refuses to extend his contract. The only thing he will accept is to be placed in his new morph. This poses a problem for you though. His infomorph head has a hard-drive accurate memory containing every single thing he ever saw and heard while working for your company. Within it is every single secret that your company was willing to entrust him with. He has access to blueprints, fiscal reports, secret projects, contract information, employee information and more. He has enough secrets in his mind that he could probably make millions of credits selling to your rivals... and he would easily help crush your hypercorp in the process. What choice does a hypercorp have?

Decimator wrote:

There's no such thing as minor memory editing. The best they can manage is to delete whole chunks of time. This psychosurgery is also coerced and therefore forcible.

Says what? I'm reading the rules on editing memories in the psychosurgery section, and I see nothing that prevents minor memory edits. It does warn that memory editing may affect other memories (affect is not the same as remove), but does not say that memories have to be eliminated in chunks.

Decimator wrote:

The only way for this to work would be to dump their current instance to backup. The people of eclipse phase view deletion as murder.

Not an option. If they dump the current instance to backup, it will retain access to hypercorporate secrets. Either you would have this disgusting legal quagmire that would result in indentures being a non-option for companies, or you are very very wrong and it is perfectly legal for hypercorps to do this. Doing lethal damage to someone while they are sleeved is probably viewed as murder. Shutting down an infomorph is not the same thing. It's the difference between turning off your car and planting a bomb under it. I have seen nothing in the books that shows that any shutting down of an infomorph is murder. Prove it.

Decimator wrote:

Casual murder.

Proof first.

Decimator wrote:

Memory editing isn't this precise.

Sure it is. It can alter some other memories in the process, but will not dramatically change every memory. My guess is that by altering all memories linked to corp secrets, it will at worst also alter all memories associated with the years that infomorph spent as an indenture. We aren't talking wiping massive swaths of a person's memories, only the readable details they might have throughout their most recent years.

Decimator wrote:

Coerced elective suicide.

So egocasting is suicide?

Decimator wrote:

Mnemonic Augmentation is a property of infomorphs, and you don't need to transfer that data along with the guy's ego. No coerced "elective" memory deletion required.

Actually it is. Mnemonic augmentation only causes your memories to have perfect digital clarity. It does not make them easily deleted from mind like files. That still requires psychosurgery.

Decimator wrote:

Don't treat your indentured employees worse than draft animals?

Really? We pen up full contracts for draft animals to sign before we put them to labor? Now you're just being ridiculous.

It's enough to legally bind indentures to not have them spill company secrets. None of them want to lose their opportunity at a body. You don't need to tinker around with their thought processes. If they break their contract, you can sue them back into poverty (with possible indenturehood or even prison time attached) and no-one wants that. Notoriously risky and not-so-foolproof psychosurgery pales in comparison, and people will accept it far more readily. Working people for 23.9 hours a day is also bad. It leaves people unproductive and tired. Just because they don't experience physical exhaustion doesn't mean that monotony somehow no longer causes mental exhaustion. It's not like it costs the hypercorps much to switch people out every so often or even to give them plenty of rec time in accelerated simulspaces (imagine the morale/productivity boost if you give your entire indenture staff access to the latest VR MMO of their choice, for 12 hours, time accelerated, a day). Breaking up this time to allow people work shifts where they can have time off in accelerated sims is probably a great way to give them a feeling that they still have a life. I would also say that, since [i]someone[/i] is keeping a back-up on record of these people, it clearly isn't costing the company money or they've already got some obligation here to back these people up. Most likely, it's a public, government-owned back-up system for infugees, and that back-up is either deleted once the person is reinstantiated or kept as a sort of public good, in which case a person either can be returned to these public data-blocks (costing the company nothing) or can't be erased (since that would be perma-murder). Even if deleting someone with a back-up wasn't somehow treated as reversible murder (which I'd be fairly certain it is pretty much everywhere), something that still counts as a cruel and traumatic thing to do, it's just unlikely that they'd do and bad business sense anyway. I could argue until I'm blue in the face on the other topics, but, frankly, it's just not good business sense or good logic. Coercive business practices done to the very people who are to form your consumer base will get you a bad result, and treating employees like disposable cogs instead of like human beings (even if they [i]are[/i] disposable cogs) will hurt productivity. It's just bad business sense.

Decivre wrote:

You tell me if they are treated well. Other books often reference indentures with terms like "near slave" and other such things. The Martian hypercorps aren't above sending indentures into areas with known TITAN activity. Ultimate indentures are often kept in hobbled pods. And as you can see above, many hypercorps do what they can to extend service periods and hit indentures with bills that force them to stay in servitude. So no, the standard treatment of indentures is not fun and nice.

Being an indenture is not fun or nice. You're incredibly poor, you're no doubt heavily monitored by the corp that owns you, your time isn't your own, and your hard work could be evaporated after years of effort from stepping out of line just once. I've no doubt that the hypercorps definitely try manipulative tactics to get the most bang for their buck, but they're not dumb/outright evil and you really do get more of a result with a happy, motivated work-force than you do with a downtrodden, fearful one. Indentures definitely get screwed over sometimes, but that doesn't mean they're tortured or threatened with obliteration, though. They might be coerced into risking life/sanity on alien worlds or monitoring the TQZ, but that's far from the same thing. It's still slavery if you're forced to wait hand and foot on people as a digital shopping assistant or as a waiter at some high-class corp restaurant, or to spend day after day assembling habitats in mindless repetition. You complain too much, you risk pissing off your boss. That doesn't mean you have no rights, though, nor that you are literally a slave. Indenturehood is slave-like, but it's not utter slavery. As for the Ultimates, they're not hypercorps, which are whom we've been discussing. Ultimates do what they like, and if they fuck you over, that's your problem.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Being an indenture is not fun or nice. You're incredibly poor, you're no doubt heavily monitored by the corp that owns you, your time isn't your own, and your hard work could be evaporated after years of effort from stepping out of line just once. I've no doubt that the hypercorps definitely try manipulative tactics to get the most bang for their buck, but they're not dumb/outright evil and you really do get more of a result with a happy, motivated work-force than you do with a downtrodden, fearful one.

Indentures aren't really put on work that requires real motivation. They're given dumb-labor, the sort that could be done without the need for pep and morale. Whether it be mining the surface of venus, sifting through vast quantities of data or watching a door lock, you aren't expected to do much more than repetitive tasks. Besides, they probably don't need motivation anyways; one of their clauses likely states that sub-par labor results in a term extension

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Indentures definitely get screwed over sometimes, but that doesn't mean they're tortured or threatened with obliteration, though. They might be coerced into risking life/sanity on alien worlds or monitoring the TQZ, but that's far from the same thing. It's still slavery if you're forced to wait hand and foot on people as a digital shopping assistant or as a waiter at some high-class corp restaurant, or to spend day after day assembling habitats in mindless repetition. You complain too much, you risk pissing off your boss.

Why not? An indenture is fully and utterly obligated to fulfill their contract, and the owner of that contract has near-complete power over them. If the contract gives them the right to beat and torture their indenture, then so be it. If they didn't want it, they wouldn't have signed the contract. I do find it ironic that you were horrified at the thought of minor memory editing for the sake of preserving corporate secrets, but have no moral qualms with sending indentures in to risk their lives against the TITAN horrors. You think that psychosurgery risks altering who you are....

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

That doesn't mean you have no rights, though, nor that you are literally a slave. Indenturehood is slave-like, but it's not utter slavery.

Of course not. Utter slavery is forced servitude with no end in sight. Indenture work is voluntary servitude with an expiration date. Other than that, the treatment is in many ways the same.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

As for the Ultimates, they're not hypercorps, which are whom we've been discussing. Ultimates do what they like, and if they fuck you over, that's your problem.

But it's still relevant. Hypercorps aren't the only people that purchase indentures... pretty much anyone who can convince an indenture to work for them can get one. And whatever clauses they agree to decide what you're allowed to do with them. Hypercorps aren't necessarily held to any higher standard than any other group. In so many ways, indentured servitude in 10 AF is eerily similar to indentured servitude of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

The threat of legal action for a leak is far outweighed by any potential benefits. What is the indenture going to leak? A new potential product component? Something your opponents already either are or aren't working on anyway and that you already hold a patent to? No, coercing people into having the equivalent of major surgery today would cause far more bad press than a potential leak every would.

It would all depend on what information those indentures were entrusted with. The indenture who cleans the toilets would probably know nothing. The indenture who acts as the assistant to the CFO probably knows everything. And losing those secrets is far more disastrous than a PR problem. A software company could have vast quantities of source code copied and sent to rival companies, who could then do such things as find flaws or blatantly copy their code. All of the companies under-the-table activities could be brought to light. That indenture might have been witness to something illegal, or to quirky behavior that could be used as blackmail. The possibilities are pretty far-reaching. So yeah, a hypercorp would probably see surgery as a far better option. Also, once more, psychosurgery is pretty common in 10 AF. It's right in the book.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

You're not actually talking about drugging and potentially addicting your work-force. The evils keep adding up. None of that actually generates any loyalty or motivation, all it does is increase alertness. Monotony still causes mental stress, at which point you might have to start doping your employees with anti-depressants. The term "corporate hell" comes to mind. Giving people reasonable breaks and off-time seems just as easy and less evil, and has the thankful addition of not inducing mental drug addiction or trauma.

No need. If the indentures get burned out, you can always replace them with more indentures. The number of infugees still in cold storage makes any attempt to fight for indenture freedoms a non-issue. If you start putting up a fight, you'll be easily replaced.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Believe it or not, there is indeed a need for those "worthless" people. Otherwise, the indenture program wouldn't be worth their time. The mistrust of AI helps, certainly. The hypercorps need indentures a lot, more than they'll likely ever let on, they just don't need any individual indenture that much, which is where the problem arises. Again, though, these data clusters are clearly being maintained anyway. The net cost to a hypercorp to replace the present back-up with the current version: Zero.

Of course there's a need. AIs require programmers (who have a salary to pay) and time to code. Indentures can be gotten right away. Furthermore, an indenture is capable of more intelligence and reasoning than a standard AI is. That could come in handy. But just because they have a need doesn't mean there's any incentive to treat them well. There's plenty more infugees where they came from, and if they're going to complain the hypercorp will just get someone who won't to replace them. As for storage, you are incorrect. The data clusters aren't a public access thing. They are owned by whatever hypercorp created them. And if another hypercorp wishes to back up one of their instantiated on that cluster? You're damn right they'll have to pay a fee. Not to mention that there's now a copy of an ego on that cluster that potentially contains company data... if the company running that cluster has a mercenary outlook.... The net cost is going to be higher than 0. Even for the hypercorp owning it, they still have to pay to upkeep the damn thing. Sure, they could back you up, but the only reason they'd need to put you back in the cluster is if you were a crappy indenture... and why would they back you up in that case?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Killing someone gently doesn't make it any less murder. You're depriving them of their life experiences at the very least, which you are literally erasing. That is a loss to them. You are objectively causing them harm. There is no way around that.

If you shut your computer off, did you kill it? If you turn off a car, did you commit an act of murder? No, you didn't. Infomorphs can be turn on and off at will. It's not some horrific act to do this. In fact, I'd imagine that it's a pretty common occurrence. Infomorphs probably shut themselves off when they have to wait for long periods of time. Comparing it to murder is ridiculous. As for depriving them of experiences, I think it should be noted that those were experiences they had as an indenture. They don't necessarily own those experiences. Those experiences are likely property of the company or person that pulled you out of storage.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

It is bad business practice. It's bad business financially, it's bad business ethically, it's bad business in terms of efficiency. You get more or just as much bang for your buck by not being an evil dick in terms of working conditions. Indenture programs have a purpose and a place in a capitalist society, especially one with such concentrations of wealth as the Consortium has. They don't need to be, nor should they be, nor should anyone want them to be, anywhere near as evil as you are suggesting they could (and should) be. Any sane, civil society, which is what the Consortium ultimately tries to be (since it's good for business), will realize this and react badly. The minor levels of excess are enough to cause the Barsoomian movement by themselves (screwing people into longer contracts, dangerous work, etc.), but extending it into such insanity would cause open revolt. People oppose evil by itself, but people [i]really[/i] oppose it when it's happening to themselves and people they know. Strangely, as Machiavelli put it, they oppose it even more strongly when it affects their possessions, which screwing indentures out of their bodies most definitely applies to.

It should be noted that indentured servitude is outlawed in every country on Earth today. The UN has sanctions against it, and I can't think of a single country that legally allows them. The very fact that places in the Eclipse Phase universe have brought the concept back should speak volumes about how different their culture is in comparison to ours. It might seem evil to you or I, but apparently indentured servitude has become acceptable in post-fall society, or at least some of it (there are places that prohibit indentures). Moreover, we can talk about what a sane, civil society does, but you'd be surprised about the things that a sane-civil society might tolerate. We could probably list for hours the number of horrific things happening in the world today that aren't being addressed, and we could probably look at them while saying "no sane, civil society would allow this". But such is the world. Sometimes sane, civil societies turn a blind eye to insane, uncivil things. Honestly, it always has.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

All jobs require motivation. There's an obvious difference in a worker who does their job with gusto and takes pride in their work and one who meets the minimum expectations. A miner who gets a job done on time is one who is working to meet requirements. A miner who gets the job done early and exceeds expectations is one who honestly appreciates their work opportunity. One who designs a product to specs is working to meet requirements, but one who suggests new features and improvements is one who is motivated. There [i]is[/i] a difference. There is no job that cannot be improved by workers who honestly enjoy what they're doing.

Indenture work is more about quantity than quality. They honestly don't care how well the job gets done, just that it gets done. They don't hire indentures for carving stone statues, they hire them for mining stone out of stone mines. Pride in work doesn't matter, just results. If your results drop, there's no need to motivate you. They'll just offer a contract to the next infugee in line and boot you out. No questions asked.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

That's called coercion. Beating and torturing people because the alternative is non-existence is most definitely coercion. As for the risk of TITAN zones, that's at least a risk, not a certainty, and you aren't the one forcing it on people. Companies no doubt put protocols in place to try and [i]prevent[/i] TITAN strain infection. What you're proposing is mandated mind-alteration. An indenture who works building colonies risks falling into space, but at least that's a [i]risk[/i] of the job and not a requirement. You can take steps to mitigate or avoid risks; you can't when it's your employer forcing it on you.

If we're going to say that entering TITAN quarantine zones is a calculated risk rather than certainty, we could say the same thing about psychosurgery. If all goes as planned, the only thing lost from the mind of the ego will be hypercorporate secrets he has no need to know. Everything else will be left alone. It's just as much a calculated risk as going where TITAN horrors are present. And honestly, if I have to choose which of the two is going to be fiddling with my brain, you can be damn sure I'm going to pick the psychosurgeon over a TITAN war machine.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Yeah, the Ultimates buy indentures, but the Ultimates aren't a government, they're a loose affiliation of ascetic mercenaries, who have no need to dedicate themselves to a better society beyond their own goals. They're the ultimate Randian egoists, who exist for their own moral aims, with no consideration to others beyond the ends of their morals. The hypercorps are a part of the Consortium. They have to live up to standards. They have to keep a public consumer base happy and remember that the indentures they have now are the consumers of tomorrow. Techno-socialist democracy has already shown its effectiveness elsewhere in the system, and it's only a matter of time until people weigh the balance between continuing to suck the corporate teat and throwing off the yoke. There IS a benefit to either one, and it's in the corporate interest to make it seem a good idea to stick with them, and there's only so far spin can go before you fuck up.

Actually, in the context of the setting the Ultimates [i]are[/i] a government. They have multiple sovereign habitats and their own culture. They do not recognize themselves as a branch of any other alliance or consortium. They, just like most other groups, are a nation unto themselves. But that's to be expected, the nature of the system as it is makes most independent groups the equivalent of a nation unto themselves. As for the Planetary Consortium, it's a hypercorporate-ran country. If a hypercorporation has to live up to its standards, it's only being expected to live up to the standards that were set by hypercorps before them. The elected officials are a puppet government set in place by a Hypercorp Council that holds all true power. Furthermore, there's no expectation to treat indentures well because all places that have indentures expect them to be treated rather badly. It's the same way that slaves in early America weren't expected to be treated well. It's not a good or bad thing per se, but a fact of life. If you don't like it, go to one of the many places in the system where indentured service is illegal. The outer system is your best bet.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

I have no doubt that the personal assistants to the hyper-elite probably have a number of odd mods (such as memory blockers that can be turned on/off by their masters) but these people would not be indentures. Indentures eventually leave. You want someone already extremely loyal, someone who has proven their devotion (or who at least has a very good reason to be devoted), not an indenture. These sorts of people likely very much willingly volunteer for such modifications and do not need to be coerced; they're not the desperately poor, they're likely already quite independently wealthy. As for source code, the indenture would need to take that with them when they leave somehow. Unless they have a flawless memory and spent time memorizing the entirety of the source code (an extremely rare quirk) and then re-writing it, there's no cause for concern there. Even then, any company with skilled hackers (read: every hypercorp) is going to be able to reverse-engineer your code or product anyway. You just have to rely on patents. And, again, surgery is pretty common today. People aren't eager to let a surgeon do extensive and irreversible surgery to make them more fit for a job.

There are advantages to using an indenture rather than employee. An employee is expected a degree of leeway and liberties with regards to the obligations they have to the company. Employees do not have a contracted obligation, and they can come and go as they please. Indentures are not employees. They aren't given these leeways and liberties. They are contractually obligated to serve their contract-holders, and they cannot leave until they are freed people. Furthermore, the cost to "employ" an indenture is "free until released". As for source code, an infomorph can easily memorize it due to mnemonic augmentations. They grant you photograph-perfect memory of everything you've ever glanced, and recording-perfect quality of everything you've ever heard. A quick sift through a programs source will give you the ability to read it later more thoroughly. That's how accurate mnemonic augmentations are. So yes, they are capable of this. Moreover, a company that has to hire programmers to decompile software from a rival will be set back months before they have any chance of releasing a competitive alternative to their product, because they'll still have to alter that code to be different enough from the released product that it doesn't violate a copyright. A company that can grab an indenture that has that source code recorded in his mind has the potential to give them access to that code before their opponent's software is even released. They could even undercut them and release an identical copy (with logo replaced) beforehand so they could utilize copyright law and shut down the original product. Surgery isn't that common today, at least not as common as it is in 10 AF. There's a reason that the first half of the game's tagline is "Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it." Today, the only surgery we ever really see is corrective in nature; whether it is to replace an organ that's lost, or fix an organ that's broken. This is not the case in the post-Fall system. People use surgery to get new organs they never had, improve organs beyond what they were born with, and far more. You can change or gender or race with a 2-hour dip in a heal vat. In the context of the term "common", modern surgery doesn't even compare. If you want to compare psychosurgery to anything, compare it to psychiatric medicine. Like psychiatric medicine, psychosurgery alters and influences the very way you think and feel. Like psychiatric medicine, psychosurgery risks severe alterations... some users of various drugs have reported suicidal thoughts, severe mental breakdowns, and people taking sleep-regulators have fallen into comas. These things have wild effects, and can be pretty dangerous. As you have used before, it could probably be called "mind-rape". There's no way that this crap would sell well, right? Well, as it turns out, psychiatric drugs pulled in 40.3 [i]billion dollars a year in 2008[/i], and demand has been increasing constantly the entire time. Despite being "mind-rape", people are getting new prescriptions for the stuff everyday. Hell, the average parent spends more on psychiatric drugs for their kids than they do on regular medicinal drugs like Dimetapp (I used to love that stuff). Furthermore, a company is allowed to fire you if you are not taking an active hand in trying to treat any psychosis you've been diagnosed with... so they can technically encourage you to get "mind-raped".

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Indentures burning out would happen astonishingly quickly on 24 hour days and the actual supply of indentures is limited. Motivation is so easy to generate and it's just pointless not to bother. Reality actually favours treating people like human beings sometimes.

Limited to a degree. You're talking ½ of the ½ billion population that got placed in cold storage, those that didn't have the skills or family to get them out. That's 250 billion people. You can also add in any people who already have a body, who simply elect to become indentured servants because their lives are crappy as is. Is it finite? Sure. But so is oil, and we don't seem to be more cautious with that either.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

There's plenty of incentive and I've listed all the reasons why before. A dull work-force is slower and less effective than a motivated one. Threats simply cannot achieve the same level of motivation that passion and zest can, and they leave the former-indentures unhappy with you after.

A dull work force can be easily replaced, and the thought of being replaced and spending more time in cold storage probably scares the motivation right into indentures. There's no need for threats to begin with. You'll be in the middle of working when an AR screen pops up and says "Your work output has dipped below the recommended employee quota. You are now being ejected to the databank." And sure, it'll lead to indenture unrest, but why would that matter? Mars already has a massive restless population of people who are recently-released indentures, and the hypercorps don't give a shit about them. Apparently, the threat of an indenture uprising isn't nearly as scary to the hypercorps as you would believe it is.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

They have to pay upkeep regardless. Either they delete the back-up when the person's instantiated (making deleting them later perma-murder) or they just overwrite the original when the person renegs (barring a public server support for them). Either way, that back-up belongs to the individual who owns it, as they either paid for it to be there in the first place or never agreed to it being there. The company has no choice in the matter unless murder is somehow allowed to corporations now. Either way, they either have to keep the person sustained unless there's some public option, which there probably is as a result. It's likely a rather unpleasant one, comparable to Victorian work-houses, to encourage indentures to stick with their current method of employment, but it probably exists. Otherwise, companies have to pay to maintain back-ups indefinitely or murder people. Why not shift the burden and make it at the tax-payer's expense? Again, more reasons for hypercorps not being evil dicks!

You still haven't explained why refusing to pay for someone's backup should qualify as a crime. A person has obligation to pay for their own backup. The hypercorp has no incentive to do so, especially if you were a terrible indenture. That's rewarding failure. If you get fired by a company today, do they have an obligation to make sure you have a place to stay? Hell, no! And if you want examples of that sort of callous material happening in this day, look no further than Obion Tennessee. There, [url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/04/firefighters-watch-as-hom_n_750... stood back and watched as a man's house burned down with his four pets inside, because he didn't pay a $75 fee[/url]. But that doesn't count as evil dickishness because someone actually did it, right?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

They own themselves. Ergo, they own those experiences. No company would get away with including [i]your memories and experiences[/i] in the contract unless you are, again, taking this to ludicrous levels. You sell your services for a time. That is it. And, no, it's not murder if I shut off a car or a computer but neither of those is a human being. Turning a human being off could be considered putting them into stasis. It becomes comparable to murder when you [i]delete[/i] them, thereby destroying that individual. Storing the new individual as a back-up is not comparable to murder, but deleting them most certainly is.

They might own those experiences in our time, but not necessarily in their time. Historically, indentures weren't allowed to own much anyways. Traditional indentures had no right to marry without their master's permission, and a pregnant indenture could be forced to give the child up to adoption (or their master's care; as a side note, pregnancy also extended your contract by law). I have no doubt that in Eclipse Phase, indenture laws have expanded to include things that didn't exist in 17th century, and regulations on whether they are owned by the indenture or master. And as for shutting off a car or computer, it could be. Let's go through a scenario. You're surfing the web on your computer, and suddenly an AGI takes it over. They run amok on your system, and in frustration you get ready to pull the plug. The AGI suddenly says "NOT SO FAST! You don't want to be a murderer, do ya?" So, what are your rights? Can you legally shut down that system?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Indentured servitude, under civil conditions, is far from the most horrifying thing in the world. In most countries it's practiced in, people are allowed to beat indentures or otherwise abuse them. Sentencing people to perform labour to repay a debt is hardly the worst thing in the world, though, as long as it's not considered overly crippling to them. That is most likely what indentured servitude is in Eclipse Phase and why it is readily accepted: It's a much more gentle system. This isn't to say that it's necessarily fair, but it isn't likely to involve brutalizing the serfs.

Um... no. When a writer uses terms normally associated with historical concepts, it's often because they are trying to invoke the same emotions and attitudes regarding that concept. When a writer talks about a world with slavery, they aren't talking nice and gentle slavery that's in no way comparable to slavery in our world... they're talking slavery. In that same vein, the choice to use the term "indenture" was probably no accident, especially since other similar terms exist for employees put under better conditions. Hell, "sweatshop worker" carries nicer connotations than "indentured servitude". They picked that term for a reason. And again, and I can't stress this enough, when a historical concept that was made illegal worldwide for being inhuman is brought back in a setting, it generally is intended to speak volumes on how the world has changed. It doesn't mean that the concept has gotten nicer... if a novel talked about how some country ended women's rights, that doesn't mean "they are not treated as equals, but they are very nice to women". It means that women don't have rights, and all that might entail. Besides, the idea is a bit ridiculous. Claiming that "gentle indentured servitude" is the norm sounds about as bizarre as "peaceful genocide". I'm sure they would have found a different term in order to invoke a more gentle form of it.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Again, you get better results when you have employees who take pride in their work. They don't just meet quotas, they exceed them. A good anecdotal example comes to me from reading Feynman's autobiography, and him describing inventing a whole new way of cutting string beans with phenomenal speed compared to the kind that was used before. He wanted to improve his working conditions and did so, not out of a desire for reward but because he took pride in it and saw a better way could be done. Dulled, unhappy minds don't do this sort of thing. Even stone mines improve when workers are more considerate and careful. Happy workers make suggestions, they improve, they innovate, because they genuinely feel good about what they're doing. Not only do happy workers make better indentures, they also make good future employees and are friendly towards your company once they become a consumer. Going "Oh, this person is sad, let's bring in another" just means you burn out your supply faster. Paying a handful more credits to make the working conditions at least bearable gets you a lot more in return.

The infugee population that is most likely used for labor is so vast that it contains almost as many people as the entire United States. The odds of them running through that pool in only 10 years is very low, to say the least. I have no doubt that eventually the pool will run out, or indenture rights will come about... I'm just saying that they don't exist yet in 10 AF.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Then you're a far more trusting individual than I. If hypercorps are such bastards that they'll kill someone over failing to perform a duty, I wouldn't want them potentially warping my personality in wild and unknowable ways. Monitoring patrol-drones near the TQZ is scary as hell but I likely get extra compensation for it and, hence, a better morph or an average one more quickly, which works for me. Plus, this is taking a risk I can mitigate and, at the very least, I can be reloaded from a back-up if I do get infected. If the hypercorps tinker with your personality, that's a done deal.

Wait, so you are fine with sending people to their deaths, but not with someone hitting the off-button on a brain emulator? You really don't see how ridiculous that is?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

You're free to say that but they don't particularly have any sort of real government setup beyond Might Makes Right. They only really need to worry about maintaining a small amount of cohesion and being able to corral or bully enough resources to carry on their existence. They're not the kind of people we're talking about here; they don't need to take indentures, they can just plain keep slaves.

From my understanding, the Ultimates have a heirarchy, military structure, and central government in place. "Might makes right" isn't an ascetic concept, and we've already acknowledged that they are an ascetic culture. Ultimates are about physical and mental perfection, and those that don't strive for either are worthless. So yeah, they are a nation. In many ways, they are the "anti-Junta".

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

See, that's the thing: The Consortium is definitely created to be corp-friendly but it exists as a method by which the corps can also do business. To do business, you need a consumer base. To have a consumer base, you need happy consumers. Abusing the populace doesn't get you consumers, it gets you rebels. The hypercorps aren't short-sighted, they're very much aware of this and the elites at the top expect to be around forever. They've got every reason not to piss off the plebs below. That means at least some levels of independent government (remember that the Morningstar actually outright seceded from the Consortium), and the need to consider the treatment of those below.

It depends on who your customer is. The largest majority of hypercorps probably never do any business with the end-consumer, and instead act as logistics and supply for other hypercorps. Those Venusian indenture mines ran by Polaris Industries may be publicly known, and people might hate them, but that will probably have no effect on their Starware contract. Cognite has a very crappy reputation due to the Futura debacle, but guess what? They're still one of the head hypercorps of the Consortium, and they still lead the way in psychosurgery tech and mental implant development. Doesn't matter that you're getting your mnemonic augmentation from a local surgeon, it still might have the Cognite brand on the casing. Public appearance only affects the hypercorps that serve the public directly. This is why public opinion doesn't affect Blackwater's bottom line in the modern day.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

First of all, let me point out that the mnemonic augmentation and memories are different things. A mnemonic augmentation keeps records of memories but it's not the memories itself. It's fundamentally a different storage system. All digital entities have this by default, but it's not necessary for them. Any company can simply choose not to have infomorphs record their experiences and then you only have the employee's memory to recall it. Once that infomorph downloads into a body, all they have is their memory, which is unlikely to recall the untold numbers of code lines accurately. Even if they do, they can't use it, since that would be copyright violation. If they're caught leaking it, ego hunters will soon be on their ass. That is more than enough security, I'd say, and going further will get people angry. In addition, any source code their opponent gets from the former indenture delivers is likely out of date before they even finish transferring it; infomorphs in time-accelerated simulspace who have already been working on the product for ages and with a cohesive team, have had two months for every day it takes the former indenture to transfer the information.

I just don't see that as good enough security. An ego hunter can only punish an infomorph after the damage is done, damage that could potentially ensure the death of a hypercorp. The best course of action would be for a hypercorp to take preventative measures, something that stops them from being able to sell secrets in the first place. But you are right, mnemonic recordings can be deleted, although the infomorph could still have a chance to memorize them beforehand (if they have an eidetic memory; it will require them to read the whole code rather than simply glance at it like mnemonic enhancements would allow). I still see minor memory editing as a necessity or, as a last precaution, restoring to their original backup to make sure they remember nothing from their employment.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

As for a personal assistant, the problem there is that indentures all eventually do leave. Personal assistants to the wealthy and powerful are not just standard employees; these are extremely dedicated people and they know it. Screwing over one boss means none will ever trust you again, ever, which is a big deal when you're immortal, and it means you have an immensely powerful enemy for the rest of your days, while working for them provides immense benefits. Being a professional "Smithers" for the CEO of some hypercorp or otherwise elite person is an extremely high-profile career and is probably about as high as you can get in the service sector. This is not a job you want to fuck up, and it's not one you want someone potentially fleeing from after a few years or so. An already trusted employee is a far better choice than running on the indenture cycle. This person must be a trusted friend and confidante as much as an employee.

Yeah, but you're working off the fact that they [i]need[/i] to work for another boss ever again. Selling information would probably make a great retirement plan, for someone who has no intention of working for any hypercorp again. Get your payday, book a ship to the outer system, and live a life of luxury someplace where those credits still have buying power. And while I agree that a trusted employee might be the best option for someone to use as an assistant, it isn't necessarily a possibility. That assistant employee will expect a paycheck, and a fledgling hypercorp might not want to spend the resources for that to happen. One advantage that an indenture assistant grants is that it allows for a cheap assistant that requires no overhead until they leave, and their final costs are relatively small (you're talking a cheap morph, Moderate to High in cost at best). It's a good option for hypercorps that are looking to minimize salary costs and reduce outgoing profits.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Psychosurgery is neither a perfected nor exact science. It is notoriously messy and incomplete as a method. Psychiatric medicine certainly is a decent comparison in that form, with the caveat that it can't be used to force your loyalty to a given individual. No company forces you to take mind-altering drugs, either. Certainly, many encourage it, but you have alternatives and, at the end of the day, we're talking about treating a psychosis there, [i]not[/i] altering your thought patterns exclusively for company benefit (as well as opening the door to other potential company-related alterations). Not really comparable.

But we aren't talking about loyalty enforcement. Hell, we aren't even talking severe psychosurgical modification here. We're talking memory editing solely for the sake of protecting company secrets. Honestly, I could see that technology being used [b]today[/b] if someone found out how to do it. Think about it; the ability to eliminate any leak of corporate secrets when an employee leaves the business would be beyond effective with regards to corporate security. Even beyond corporations, governments would probably use it on employees with high degrees of security clearance going out the door (black-ops, anti-terror agents, and even presidents that are on their final term). I agree that psychosurgery isn't a perfect or exact science, but neither is psychiatry... and psychiatry is one of the biggest fields in medicine. And as it has gained more clout and power, there have been some pretty sweeping changes in the world of business today. Employees can legally be fired from the assessment of a psychiatrist if that employee refuses to follow medical advice. Down the line, I can see it getting more clout. And as we were talking about earlier, I [i]can[/i] see businesses eventually getting the right to force (or at least fire at the refusal of) employees to get implants... especially once RFID tags become less of a cancer risk.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

One half of one half of 500 million is 125 million. 125 million people providing all the bottom-level jobs for 375 million people. These people provide menial labour for, say, five years, to fill around 10-40 million positions across the system. Even under the hardest estimate for the number of available jobs, we're talking about a population that will be dried inside 65 years, less than a human lifetime. This may be sped up or slowed down to some degree by various measures, but that's a good average. A less charitable measure says they'll be gone in less than two decades. Given that the Fall occurred 10 years before, it's safe to assume that at least five of those years have passed. That's not very long at all for hypercorps.

I said half of a half billion. That's 250 million (though after a second reading, the number is actually 200 million). The indenture population includes virtually everyone that didn't have the skills to get an immediate body for hypercorp employment, and didn't have family or friends to free them. Only half of the bodiless infugee population had that luxury. Everyone else is easy pickings, and there are even people outside these groups that may be willing to sign themselves away for the possibility of a better life afterwards. And you are right, the indenture population will probably run dry very soon. But again, that doesn't necessarily stop hypercorps from running through them like a water tap. The oil industry is a perfect example of this in motion today. The risk of running empty isn't always high enough to force change... maybe it'll happen when the pool actually nears E. As for the speed they run through those masses, I don't think it's nearly that fast. If one indenture was hired every minute, the indenture reserve wouldn't run out for 380 years. That's plenty of time, and most hypercorps probably don't see it as a risk within the century.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Fear doesn't motivate anywhere near as much as excitement. Fear gets you your quotas, as I've said, but excitement exceeds them. Indentures who [i]want[/i] to work harder for you, whom you give incentive to do so, are going to not only do a good job, they're not going to hate you afterwards. As for unrest, the hypercorps are concerned about them. The Barsoomian movement is a threat. Techno-socialism has taken root already in the Morningstar. The hypercorps are probably working overtime to try and spin against techno-socialism and they don't need any more fuel for the fire. Just because there's not a military-grade overt crackdown (which would violate the rights of citizens and cause outright rebellion anyway) doesn't mean they're not taking measures against them. Socialism is a threat to the Consortium. Anyone in the top ranks that does not realize this is going to get convinced or replaced quickly.

But again, the indenture population isn't about exceeding quotas. It's about filling labor needs on the cheap. Any attempts to make their lives better reduces work time, cuts into the bottom line, and puts far more effort in encouraging work output than was necessary. If all these sorts of accommodations were a necessity, the hypercorps would have dumped these minds a long time ago and just risked using AI workforces. Really, what are the advantages of an AI workforce? No downtime, no pay, and constant menial labor output. Well, the advantages of an indenture are the same, PLUS the lack of programming time. Take away any of those advantages, and suddenly the indenture program looks worthless. And while you'd think that the risk of some socialist uprising might exist, you'd be surprised. Many Americans have been expecting a socialist uprising for years, and it has never happened. Political spin has kept people ignoring the ever-expanding gap between the wealthy and the poor, the shrinking middle class, and a multitude of ethics violations that have been happening for decades. In Eclipse Phase, this hasn't necessarily changed, and memeticists probably make big profits making sure that the public eye sees indentures as a good... or at least a necessary evil. That said, I haven't found any socialist references within the info regarding the Morningstar Constellation. So far, it seems that the Morningstar Constellation's economic structure is near-identical to the Planetary Consortium, and the only real cause of its creation was the desire to have aerostat self-governance. They don't seem to have any real socialist concepts interlinked in their existence. Titan is probably the world you were thinking of. As for the Barsoomians, they may be a threat down the line, but the hypercorps probably don't see it that way right now. Think the American colonies in the 1760s; their rants about independence from the hypercorps and an end to slavery are seen as quaint coming from a group of poverty-stricken Martians living on the fringes. To be honest, the Barsoomians are proof-positive that the indenture programs aren't the fluffy-nice programs you want them to be. The very fact that they rally so hard against indentured servitude should tell you that the indenture system is immoral and corrupt, just as you say it couldn't be. And to put it all in perspective, remember that one of the many jobs that ego hunters take up is indenture-hunting... and indentures don't go on the run because their employers are pleasant and enjoyable.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Letting someone's house burn is not the same thing as deliberately murdering them. Honestly... As for the company paying for the back-up, it comes from the circumstances. Deleting someone with no back-up is murder and, therefore, the hypercorp cannot do it. If they keep the back-up anyway so they can delete the person, the net costs for overwriting their old back-up with their latest form is zero. As noted, I'd imagine that corps are well aware of this and have tried, where possible, to shift this burden to the tax base; make the ego database public property so that anyone who goes to it can retrieve and ego and claim responsibility for it. That way, the public has to maintain it and the hypercorps aren't responsible for any recalcitrant egos. Consortium legislation forces all companies to do so, ensuring a communal pool to choose from.

Again, you are making a poor comparison. Turning off an emulation is not murder, especially when it's an emulation you don't own and you have violated the very agreement that got you the emulation in the first place. If that counts as murder, then evicting someone from their home is murder, shutting off someone's electricity is murder, and towing away their car is murder. Granting someone an emulation is a service, and if they don't make the payments for that service, you can cut it off. It might seem like murder in our society, but this isn't our society. This is many years in the future, where laws have adjusted to compensate for minds that can download from body to body, and backups can save someone long after death. It would be like trying to apply heresy laws today. It's simply not a comparable context. And again, there's no obligation that a hypercorp should have to maintain up-to-date backups. If you can't afford to pay for the backups, [b]no one else has to hold that burden[/b]. That would be like forcing a bank to pay for someone's rent if they get evicted from their home... it's a ludicrous notion (and it doesn't even count if you say "but if the bank owns the house you rent, the cost is nothing"; it's still not an obligation they have). The indenture likely already has a backup (one they didn't probably pay for either... so they already got their free backup). If they can't afford a new one, tough break... they still have an older one. Even if you did have some tax-paid server cluster, I doubt that free backups for anyone who reneges on their contract is a possibility. Could you imagine the public outcry that would occur if prisoners and contract violators got a free backup? Hell, people today get pissed off when prisoners have access to a TV! Backups are a much costlier affair. Unless that backup was already done (vis a vis, your cortical stack), I don't see why anyone would have an obligation to do it for you.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

The AGI scenario is self-defense. If someone breaks into my house, I have the right to use force to defend myself and to get them to leave. Truthfully, if I can shut them down, I might as well instead of killing them, and then turn them over to the authorities. If they refuse to leave and even resist attempts to do so, I have a right to shut them down (storing them to turn them over to the authorities). If they try to harm me and take over my systems, I have a right to kill them in self-defense. It's no different than a home intruder. An infomorph indenture who has nowhere to go is not the same. They did not enter by force, nor are they staying there by force. Self-defense does not apply because they are not doing anything harmful to you, and any costs they incur are considerably minimal compared to you assaulting them unprovoked. As for owning experiences, that'd be outright silly. Experiences are integrated into the individual; claiming ownership over them is ownership over the individual, which indenturehood is most certainly not. You buy labour, not the individual.

Self-defense only applies at times when your life is in imminent danger. If I crap on your kitchen counter, you don't have the right to cut my head off. In that same context, an AGI in your computer probably doesn't have the means to be an imminent threat to your life. If you apply your interpretation of everything alongside modern law, any attempt to shut down your computer would be first-degree homicide, especially if he takes steps to prevent you from backing him up. After all, it's his mind, and his right to decide whether he can be backed up or not. Plus, shutting them down and giving them over to the authorities is a non-option too. As you have already acknowledged, turning off a mind is murder. Therefore, you must find a way to eject them from your system without turning the system off. Seems ridiculous, doesn't it? And when it comes to experiences, it's a tough call. Indenture contracts often listed what an indenture was allowed to own and bring, and they weren't allowed to own anything else. I have no doubt that indenture laws would expand to include the non-physical (so software counts as property, simulspace designs count as property, and so on), and that could very well include memories from your time as an indenture. Who knows?

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Indentured servitude isn't innately a horrific thing, nor does it need to be. Happier, better treated workers are more productive and capable. You do better business treating them as human beings, while abuse could see an indenture meant to last years burn out in months. It just makes good sense to be a nicer person. Indentures work in harsh conditions, yes, which would not be allowed today. Their lives aren't easy and, if they screw up, they're either on a public server or back into cold storage. Life as an indenture's pretty shitty. That doesn't mean hypercorps are unnecessarily evil, though. They've got far more reason to be at least gentle to their indentures than cruel. Everything we know about labour relations today says as much.

Everything we know about labor relations today says that indentured servitude is a terrible idea. Would we even be having this dialog if we were talking about another labor injustice? Would you be willing to defend hypercorps if the core book talked about a return to child labor? Slavery? And I'm not saying that hypercorps are evil, per se. The problem with terms like "good" and "evil" is that they tend to be very subjective in context. People on this board talk about the Junta like it's evil, when it's not necessarily so. The same is true with groups like the Ultimates. The closest thing that the setting has to "evil" are the TITANs, and any groups that ally themselves with the TITANs (the Exhumans, for example). Other than that, the whole system is a giant pool of grays. In that sense, indenture work isn't evil either. Slavery would probably have been evil. But indenture work has to be voluntarily entered and only lasts for a period of time. It's grim, and probably worse to a degree than our labor standard, but think about this context; today, we have an ever-rising poverty problem that is gradually becoming a pandemic affecting the world. On the other hand, the indenture program is a pretty elegant way of handling a poverty problem... anyone who signs up gets a job without the need for an interview, it's assured work, and it's easy on the bottom line of businesses. Is it ethically wrong? No doubt; but ethics tend to take a backseat when humanity is recovering from an apocalypse (though admittedly, indentures returned to the world years before the Fall).

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

You got your calculations wrong. The population they're servicing is greater than the population in the United States and that's including children. The number of service/blue collar jobs in the United States are far higher than the numbers I posted above, I'm being generous in my calculations for increased automation. They'll run out some time between AF 20 and AF 70.

I highly doubt that. A potential indenture pool 200 million strong will last a decent amount of time. We haven't even factored in the occasional hypercorp or person that screws an indenture and forks them to get more work. And they aren't servicing that many people... most of the outer system does not even allow indentures to exist at all, and little hypercorp influence exists that far. The Inner System and the outlier areas in the outer system where capitalism thrives are probably the only places where indentured are part of the supply chain. When you take that into context, and the fact that former-indentures are likely far too poor to be a customer, it really reduces the customer-base's size.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

It's not sending them to their deaths. They patrol the periphery of the TQZ and report anything odd. They're likely teleoperating bots. Every transhuman involved is working to safeguard the safety of others, and this is a very good thing. The indenture who volunteers for such work is taking a risk but they're getting time off their contract for more risk. When a company executes an employee, that's transhumans being brutal to transhumans for no good reason. That's a very bad thing.

Probably seen as far less horrible than sending them to face the TITANs. I mean we can talk 'til we're blue in the face about whether society frowns upon or accepts the shutdown of an informorph, but one thing we both know that society frowns upon are the TITAN horrors, and I have no doubt that if the public knew that actual people were sent to scour the area rather than AI-driven drones, they would probably go far more apeshit than to find out that some hypercorp turned off a douche-bag indenture.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Ascetism just means that you abstain from worldly pleasure to focus on some sort of spiritual goal. The Ultimates seek to make themselves perfect, and all the written actions about them seem to indicate that your strength (be it mental or physical) determines your right to own and exist. I have no doubt that there's plenty of nice Ultimates who live in peace with everyone and share their discoveries but there's definitely a trend of ultimate egoism within them and their ideals; only the Self matters, others are tools to achieve ends for that Self.

Social darwinism isn't quite the same as "might makes right". It's the philosophical belief that the very same factors that determine genetic evolution apply equally well to social evolution. Weaker members of a biosphere (or sociosphere) die off, while those that adapt and succeed continue to thrive. Ultimates are certainly egoists, but that's not the same as what you're implying. It's more like a form of divergent discrimination; whereas people today discriminate based on social strata, race, gender, religion or sexual preferences, the Ultimates discriminate against the lazy, inept, unmotivated and the fearful. A better slogan would be "adapt or die".

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

All the hypercorps serve the public somehow; they have hands in everything. Boycotts do hurt companies. Savvy consumers will change their habits to punish corporations they dislike. Transhumans, by definition all being more savvy than the average human, are likely to be more politically aware and involved than most people today. Only Direct Action is likely to be largely immune, and even they might suffer when habitats decide to reduce their contracts with them to upgrade their own personal security forces. Everyone has to sell to someone. The hypercorps have a bottom line and that bottom line is the consumer. The process is much more direct than it once was; Polaris might not lose its Starware contract, but watch its sales of fabber feedstock plummet, while their opponent's rise exponentially by using a manipulative ad campaign against them.

Not really. The largest majority of hypercorps are very specialized businesses with a very narrow clientele. The example I was giving was more for a hypercorp that specializes in industrial goods production and refinement, one that would have virtually no contact with the public eye. Cognite still gets by well despite a lot of bad press over the years because their clientele is psycho- and implant surgeons. Hell, in many ways the Futura Project was a win for them; it may have made them social pariahs, but it also made them the forerunners of psi research everywhere. In fact, very few hypercorps probably have to appeal to the public. Experia, Go-nin and Solaris are the only hypercorps that I can think of from the core book that probably need good PR. The rest probably make the majority of their profits selling to distributors and other hypercorps.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Y'know, the length of these posts is getting ridiculous, heheh.

They really are, aren't they? :D

Cifer wrote:

Nothing much to add to Axel's line of thought. Essentially, it's an exercise in game theory: Assume a state in which every corporation treats its indentures equally crappy. If one corporation treated them a little less crappy than the average - for example by [i]not[/i] mutilating their consciousness -, it gets positive PR. Since a very large part of the populace (their market) consists of or will consist of former indentures, empathy towards current indentures will likely be high, and good treatment will be rewarded, creating a competitive advantage and a lower potential to become the target of anarchists and other monkeywrenchers who will likely focus on the perceived bad boys. There is of course a trade-off between getting positive PR and incentivising your workforce versus reaping the rewards of their exploitation, which is why treatment won't be [i]too[/i] good, but if the corporate masters of EP act out of a sense of enlightened self-interest rather than pure maliciousness, I'd expect about the results Axel has outlined. In the end, it's all about the Greater Greed, which is in this case probably best served by thinking about who will be buying from you, enthusiastically working for you and ideally boycotting or even sabotaging your competitors in twenty years from now.

The problem with that line of thinking is that we're assuming three things. [list=1][*] That the rest of Consortium society has a problem with the mistreatment of indentures (which they don't necessarily have). [*] That these indentures will accrue enough wealth to be viable consumers in the future (which they likely won't). [*] That reducing work hours and granting vacation time will somehow create more work output than simply funneling out workers that are working inefficiently (which it probably won't).[/list] You have to remember that just because this is the future doesn't mean that these people are somehow more mature or kind than people today. Biochauvinism runs rampant through Consortium society; the very idea that people who have synth bodies are disgusting and worthless. Guess what the indentures usually get for bodies? The reality is that most of the consumers for any given hypercorp are going to be far too wealthy to be counted among the clanking masses or digitized indentures, and the people who sympathize with them amongst the wealthy probably are the minority. Eclipse Phase takes place in the future... the world is different, not necessarily better.