There's a fantastic thread for looking at the Jovians in a more positive light (http://eclipsephase.com/sympathy-jovians, if you're interested) and I'd like to do something similar for the Planetary Consortium. I'll be DMing a campaign soon, and I'd like the solar system to full of shades of gray where anyone can be a villain or a hero, not just evil Jovians, evil hypercorps, plucky heroic anarchists. If there are any similar threads to this that I missed, point me in the right direction please and thanks!
Initial Ideas -
The PC is a semi-functioning democracy. There are meaningful differences between candidates, and in their proportional representative system, your vote matters. You can't vote for anyone "fundamentally at odds with the Consortium way" (unregulated cornucopia machines, return to Earth, etc) but you can vote for a person, not an empty suit that pays you lip service while working for corporate interests.
Less speciesist - If you're an uplift, you owe your existence to whichever corp designed you. So yeah, they own you. But it's more like being under house arrest than being lab rat. You *are* sapient and there are laws to prevent and appeal against awful experimentation. Even better, if you've been released or paid off your debt to your makers, you're a welcome part of society. You can work and spend money like anyone else. F*ck AGIs though. Seriously. Bastards caused the Fall.
Competition and Sportsmanship - Capitalism and competition go hand in hand, and the PC believes that competition fosters the best aspects of transhumanity. Survival of the Fittest is the inescapable natural order of things. You can fight against it, or you can embrace it and encourage people to be the best they can be.
At the same time, they understand that there is nothing harder, more brutal or unflinchingly cruel than the natural order. This is where sportsmanship comes in. Losers should be treated with respect. People at the bottom are still people. Those at the top *could* crush them, but they *shouldn't*. Transhumanity is better than that. If you lose in the ultra-competitive world of hypercorps, you're a loser. Obviously, you proved that when you lost. But you're still a person. You don't deserve as much as a winner, but you deserve more than wage slavery and a 19 hour work day. Obviously the ideal doesn't quite match the reality, but it's not entirely dystopian for citizens in the PC.
It's traditional for a reason - the PC is sort of like your old-fashioned grandma. Good at heart, but stuck in its ways. Their opposition to open source and cornucopia machines is that it threatens the moral character of society. If you don't work an honest job for an honest living, if everything was free... Well, look at the scum and Autonomist Alliance.*
*In the interest of graying up the good guys, I'm assuming the rim isn't as rosy as the sourcebooks paint it. Not a hellhole, but unquestionably more dangerous than the inner system and less a shining example of how perfect life would be if we were all anarchists. There are more exhuman raiders. Habs lost to exsurgent breakouts. Titan once spend 2 weeks deadlocked trying to pass a minor traffic safety law, and 3 weeks arguing over the wording for their condemnation of Jovian treatment of AGIs. Scum ships are found drifting and full of bodies because everyone was too high to fix the compression coil. It's a wild west. There's good parts and bad parts. It's not an autonomist utopia.
A good place to raise the kids - Culturally and socially, the PC is by and large in the bland, acceptable middle. No constant security drills like the Jovians, they don't have dick-nipples like the scum, they haven't created an autonomist community on the brink where everyone is named "Steve" and sleeved into the same morph. The PC isn't the best, but it isn't the worst.
If anyone else wants to chip in and flesh out a kinder, gentler version of our benevolent corporate overlords (:P) they're more than welcome!
Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.
Sympathy for the Hypercorps
Fri, 2016-02-19 18:53
#1
Multisun
Sympathy for the Hypercorps
Sat, 2016-02-20 02:28
#2
Kojak
While I don't have anything
While I don't have anything to contribute at the moment, I will say I like this idea and applaud what you've come up with so far.
—
"I wonder if in some weird Freudian way, Kojak was sucking on his own head."
- Steve Webster on Kojak's lollipop
Sat, 2016-02-20 09:22
#3
ORCACommander
Please allow me to introduce
Please allow me to introduce myself, I am a man of wealth and taste...
You first point I disagree with. The only difference is they are openly just giving a damn about corporate interests. I suppose it would come down to what corporate interests are in alignment with yours. Further some hypercorps may have a You must trot the company line policy.
On the subject of education, it is probably privatized with those who can't afford an education probably be run their their corporate on hands training programs for what ever slot they need filled. So no one is completely ignorant but the poor are not going to have an education beyond a vocation school.
The PC is actively in favor of teraforming operations and could do so at a greater pace than current/ after all it is an expensive endeavor where faster would reduce costs and no longer having to build and maintain domes would pay it back swiftly. However something is holding them back. What could be holding them back?
Sat, 2016-02-20 10:09
#4
Noble Pigeon
Found this gem of a post on
Found this gem of a post on rpg.net a while back, when Firewall came out.
—
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.”
-Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
Mon, 2016-02-22 00:58
#5
uwtartarus
An entertaining read, Noble
An entertaining read, Noble Pigeon.
—
Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
Tue, 2016-02-23 22:43
#6
Kremlin K.O.A.
One thing to consider is if
One thing to consider is if you make an evil more competent, it will get defenders. You want something more ambiguous, make the evil of the hypercorps competent and productive.
My usual go to example is the lack of muses for indentures in the Canon.
This is listed as contributing to the indenture suicide rate.
Frankly it is an idiotic idea, because the corp loses the cash investment of that morph each time it happens.
So they are losing tens of thousands per suicide.
As an alternative, give every indenture a brand new morph (after all, your old one was corrupted)
This new morph can access the company intranet for you, to get you music while you work.
In addition it is very good ad counselling you away from suicide.
But secretly, it is subconsciously altering you, adding levels of company loyalty, so you will be a good consumer of their products when your indenture ends.
Tue, 2016-02-23 22:43
#7
Kremlin K.O.A.
One thing to consider is if
One thing to consider is if you make an evil more competent, it will get defenders. You want something more ambiguous, make the evil of the hypercorps competent and productive.
My usual go to example is the lack of muses for indentures in the Canon.
This is listed as contributing to the indenture suicide rate.
Frankly it is an idiotic idea, because the corp loses the cash investment of that morph each time it happens.
So they are losing tens of thousands per suicide.
As an alternative, give every indenture a brand new morph (after all, your old one was corrupted)
This new morph can access the company intranet for you, to get you music while you work.
In addition it is very good ad counselling you away from suicide.
But secretly, it is subconsciously altering you, adding levels of company loyalty, so you will be a good consumer of their products when your indenture ends.
Tue, 2016-02-23 23:49
#8
Zarpaulus
I thought the indentured
I thought the indentured Venus surface worker in "Melt" (Sunward) had a Muse.
Albeit one that had a bit of an agenda.
Yeah, it says in the sidebar to the story section in that gamebook: "Kymber: Hines' Muse".
Wed, 2016-02-24 00:44
#9
Kremlin K.O.A.
I was referencing some of the
I was referencing some of the stuff in Sunward which suggested Mars hypercorps didn't give their indentures muses.
Wed, 2016-02-24 17:54
#10
Trappedinwikipedia
On the other hand, muses can
On the other hand, muses can be fairly expensive due to extensive licensing and such. So long as healing vat time for a suicide-damaged morph comes out to less than ~5000 credits, you save money on the first suicide an indenture does. Healing vats are pretty cheap to keep running, so it's plausible that an indenture would need to commit suicide dozens of times to make a muse (which only *reduces* the risk, not removing it) would be cheaper to get than repairs.
So long as the market for cold-storage indentures continues to have such an abundance of supply, that kind of draconian thinking continues to seem pretty valid.
Wed, 2016-02-24 21:04
#11
Kremlin K.O.A.
Thing about software. Once
Thing about software. Once you have one programmed in house, the unit cost to issue more to your employees is zero.
Yeah there are licence fees if you have someone else program them for you, but just you wont want to use a design that is loyal to somebody else's corp.
Also if the morph is suicided sufficiently to not be able to have the employer bring them back for more torture... well they are probably sufficiently wrecked that a healing vat is not an option.
Thu, 2016-02-25 21:51
#12
Zarpaulus
Trappedinwikipedia wrote:On
Many indentures are employed in hazardous work environments where suicide in a method that leaves their stack, to say nothing of their brain, unrecoverable is highly possible.
Not to mention that a worker in a vat or a repair garage is a worker that isn't working. Vat-recoverable death requires at least a day to regenerate from. Most biomorphs only need four hours of sleep per day and synths and informorphs don't sleep at all. That's a lot of productivity lost.
There's also no real reason to deny their Muse to someone who backed their pre-Fall Muse up with their Ego backup.
Sun, 2016-02-28 00:10
#13
Daeglan
One thing I have noticed is
One thing I have noticed is people like to make corporations evil. This is a wrong view of things. Corporations are not evil. At least as long as the ones running are not. But really most people are more selfish than evil and corporations being made up of people are going to be more selfish than evil. And unless a corporation is in direct competition they likely won't have issues with each other. And even Gorgon Defense and Direct action probably get along fine. They likely would happily sit down in a bar together and talk shop and get along like peas in a pod. They just won't be sharing trade secrets. That is where the good natured rivalry comes in.
So unless the CEO is mustache twirling evil the corp won't be. They will be selfish and looking out for their own interests. How charitable they are will likely be up to the actual individual corp. Some would just step over the downtrodden in the street others would help them up get them a meal and try and give them a job. Also no corporation is uniform. The people in them are people and people will vary from the back stabbing scum to the white knight saving everyone.
Classic example. zOrg in 5th Element. Zorg was a monster. Corbin Dallas was a hero. And if you were paying attention Corbin Dallas was working for a subsidiary of zOrg.
Sun, 2016-02-28 07:23
#14
ThatWhichNeverWas
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
In my headcanon, the PC is a very carefully managed social indoctrination system. It's all about creating a "mundane" if grubby society which gives it's members a sense of normalcy and continuity: you're so busy worrying about losing your job or getting mugged that you forget to worry about huge robot wasps that remove your head with buzzsaws.
Money/Profits are important, but really it's all about getting people to drink the cool-aid and buy into the PC value system and lifestyle.
"Want to get a better education, and thus make yourself more profitable? Great! Here's a guy who'll give you a loan in exchange for a reasonable percentage of your earnings for the next N years. Want a new home? Fantastic! We absolutely approve of you setting down roots!"
Every agreement and contract serves to great psychological bindings to the PC, even if the terms of are actually on the up-and-up.
Which brings me to my next point – the PC hypercorps aren't ruthless corporations using corruption and craft to get away with abuse and graft under the eyes of the law... they're the ones who write the laws.
Any laws created by corporations – including those regarding ethics and well-being – are going to be made to protect corporate interests. So any corporation that, say, abuses Indentures and violates their contracts is acting in a way that is bad for business.
This is echoed in the books – Transhuman states that the vast majority of indenture contracts play out exactly as they should, with the work being done isn't horrible or inhuman but simply boring.
Look at how the laws are enforced. Personal crime is met with militias or corrupt cops, but white collar crime is covered by full-blown Men In Black. You may get mugged but by god your savings are secure!
A couple of more small details which get forgotten Firstly, Hypercorps aren't, as a rule, huge monoliths like we tend to expect. The whole point of them was that they're small and quick to adapt, using subcontracting and hiring individual workers for given projects.
The other thing is that the PC is a transitional economy, not a traditional one.
To quote the cannon (slightly edited for brevity);
So, putting this all together:
For the average inhabitant, the PC is a pretty swell place to live, especially in comparison to how things were on earth before the Fall (and also to RL society).
There are definitely problems, but they're all set against a backdrop of surprising affluence – and they're all small potatoes when seen through other eyes. There's corruption and social unrest... but the actual "problems" they cause are less damaging than they perhaps shouldbe, and X-threats are all but absent.
And that's because when you peek behind the curtain, you see a society run by terrifyingly intelligent oligarchs who have become so wealthy it no longer has actual meaning. Rebellions, crime and social memetics are tended and guided by an Adjustment Bureau-esque group making sure that the inevitable conflicts that arise follow paths that limit the actual harm they do whilst maintaining the appearance of unrest.
For a real capitalist-heavy Megacorporate nightmare, you should ignore the PC and have a closer look at Extropia...
Here, have some inspirational quotes;
—
In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few.
But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again?
Sun, 2016-02-28 10:19
#15
SquireNed
Daeglan wrote:One thing I
In college, I took a science-fiction writing course, and I kid you not the two worst stories I read revolved around "evil dystopian society which was basically the Giver but with infantcide" and "und ve are Space Nazis Incorporated!"
They weren't horrible because the concepts were impossible, they were horrible because there was no motive for people to act like they did. Corporations are about profit, and while there is money to be made in evil the money from those things doesn't come from mass murder and wanton crimes against humanity, but rather more mundane crimes like dealing contraband, exploiting workers (in EP this is somewhat less profitable due to sousveillance and things like indentures, which are a contractual way of doing this that involves less suppression of dissent and more "we'll give you a body if you work for no/crap pay"), and other financial crimes.
Mon, 2016-02-29 19:27
#16
Daeglan
i agree. Corporations are
i agree. Corporations are greedy. They are motivated by profit. And they will do what they need to do to make a profit. and for the most part they wont do evil to make profit. Because most people are not like that. Will they go real close tothat edge. Maybe. Depends on the morals of the individual.
I will say this http://www.prisonexp.org/ is likely relevant. And I could see where the right environment will cause very nice people to do horrible things.
Tue, 2016-03-01 10:44
#17
R.O.S.S.-128
Collateral Damage
It's a very important concept for trying to portray Hypercorps (or really any large, collective entity composed of human agents, governments included). Pretty much nobody is evil for evil's sake, and the few who are will not likely be in any position to drive the action of a large collective entity: they'd get kicked out.
However, everyone has goals that could be pursued in good or bad ways. The people pursuing these goals generally believe them to be good, and usually have built up a rationale supporting them. Evils and suffering inflicted in their pursuit are not the goals themselves, they are collateral damage.
Of course, some people/organizations are more cavalier about collateral damage than others. Some due to thoughtlessness: it just hadn't occured to them that doing X would cause Y that would harm Z. Some out of necessity: he who fights monsters and all that (Firewall gets cut a lot of slack due to this, if you think about it). Some are due to distorted perception: they perceive more necessity than there actually is, or underestimate how much damage they're doing. Ozma might veer a little closer to that.
Trying to accuse someone of evil by inaction is even more tricky, because they may not be capable of acting, or may believe themselves incapable. For example, would we condemn Rome for a standard of living that would be absolutely squalid by modern standards? No, they did as well as they could with the resources and technology they had.
So what motivates the hypercorps to do what they do, both good and bad?
The hypercorps understand that while resources are abundant in the solar system, they're not *infinite*, and treating them as if they were is foolish idealism. This means that we still need many of the mechanisms of the so-called "old economy", because even abundant resources still need to be managed and allocated efficiently to be sustainable. A monetary system is a time-proven, low-overhead, relatively self-correcting way to do it. The book points out that you still have to pay for some things in PC space as if that's a bad thing, but is it really, if it promotes efficient use of the solar system's limited resources?
They also understand that a resource isn't really a resource until you can mine it and utilize it. "Making money" isn't swindling poor people out of their livelihoods as many people like to imagine it: when you open a new asteroid mine, you're turning a worthless rock into usable metals and volatiles. You are creating value, "making money" in the most literal sense. The Terraforming effort is this philosiphy writ large: as a red dustball Mars is just another rock to mine, one whose metals are inconveniently buried under miles of sillica and assorted dirt. A green Mars, on the other hand, would be the jewel of the solar system. They're not "ruining" Mars or "hoarding" it, they're making it more useful, more valuable for everybody.
Many people think we face some kind of choice between profit and progress, but this couldn't be further from the truth: profit IS progress.
—
End of line.
Tue, 2016-03-01 18:47
#18
ORCACommander
the problem lies currently
the problem lies currently with corporations making gross excess in profit and that profit only leaving the company coffers through upper management's salaries and bonuses.
Tue, 2016-03-01 22:03
#19
Zarpaulus
SquireNed wrote:
"But" with infanticide?
Tue, 2016-03-01 23:04
#20
SquireNed
Zarpaulus wrote:SquireNed
More infanticide. It's so bad I forgot how to spell. Basically, long story short, they took the interesting controlled breeding elements of Brave New World, then pushed them all into the conceit of "so only certain chosen ones can have children" or something like that. I don't remember exactly how it worked (the class's assignment was to write a 10-20 page short story, and this was more like a novel draft; reading the whole thing within the limited timeframe meant not really committing it all to memory, since my experience with the whole several-hundred page mess was limited to a single day's reading).
It was very much chosen-one fiction with an element of "but wait, you're *not* the chosen one, you're the one chosen for destruction! Muahaha! Enjoy your chemical-induced partial birth abortion!". Unremarkable romantic subplot, cringe-worthy dialogue at times, and a narrative conceit that showed almost no development of non-protagonist characters, or for that matter, any characters.
It ranks up there with Mindjammer on the "nope" scale for me, but fortunately it was a little shorter and wasn't something I had to review in depth. It probably doesn't help that I was one of the only people to give feedback (because critiquing a story that long was optional, but I was an honors student so there was no optional for me), and the fact that I come from a conservative religious sect where matters like sanctity of life are concerned, which made the whole "we're killing babies" thing a little more heavy-handed. I think. I mean, it was supposed to be heavy-handed, but it devolved into a tone that satisfied neither the moralist nor the sensationalist. A focus on a baby's corpse needs to be a moment for profound insight if you're not going to focus on a character's reaction to it.
Tue, 2016-03-01 23:11
#21
Daeglan
You can't really claim this.
You can't really claim this. Think about it. For example the oil companies make approximately a 3% profit margin. Should they be punished for making Billions of dollars? 5 billion in profit. That means they sold a whole lot of oil with a very low profit margin. Should they be punished for that?
Wed, 2016-03-02 00:07
#22
SquireNed
ORCACommander wrote:the
This also is somewhat incorrect. While corporations do make a metric buttload of profit (you can quote me on that), and a lot of that remains in the control of the upper echelons of most corporations, they actually don't really cause a problem this way.
Despite large-scale political narratives of income inequality, the average person in the industrialized world lives a life preferable to life at any point in prior history. Sure, they could have more stuff, but the problem is that if corporations were to be required to give more money to lower-pay employees they would be unable to sustain financial loss and continue functioning.
In the case of the Planetary Consortium, they provide services that there are now very real alternatives to, alternatives used throughout both inner and outer portions of the solar system with relatively few repercussions. The reason they are so good at what they do is because they have an endless search for optimization, something that is very likely to result in an environment powered by Adam Smith economic philosophies where the means of production is owned by the people who create and develop it.
Barring the Jovians and Morningstar, the PC is the only real place in the solar system to still function pretty much entirely under the old economic systems, and they are the only place where capitalism is the defining political force (both the Jovians and Morningstar have a strong political hierarchy governing business decisions, while the PC political hierarchy *is* business decisions).
While it may not be the ideal for a low-rank drone, people don't starve in the PC, and there's a lot to enjoy in the hypercapitalists' turf that even the most efficient centralized economies couldn't dream of matching. Think about the power the PC can project when they feel like it. They can attack Locus, which involves committing a huge fleet to travel astronomical distances, not something done on a whim. Sure they lost, but in space combat there's a home-court advantage unless the other guys are willing to just fire rocks at you from extreme distances.
Wed, 2016-03-02 01:22
#23
uwtartarus
CEOs making 4,000:1 what
CEOs making 4,000:1 what their lowliest employee makes tends to be problematic, when aforementioned employees are then encouraged by the company itself to seek out tax-funded welfare. Income inequality is still an issue, even if the poorest person in the first world lives better than peasants 200 years ago. Especially since if you reduced the Executives' salaries by 33%, you could double the annual salary of the bottom half of the company.
But whether Hypercorps suffer from this problem is another issue entirely, indentures and the whole "hypercorps are lean sharks, not cumbersome multinational megacorps" thing. Maybe they fixed that part of the cyberpunk.
—
Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
Wed, 2016-03-02 01:40
#24
Daeglan
CEOs makes that because it is
CEOs makes that because it is not a job just anyone can do. You don't ask the Janitor to be CEO because they can't do the job. On the otherhand anyone can be a janitor. The law of Supply and demand applies to skill sets. And CEOs do not have a common skill set. Just like Programmers who are really good get paid more. Or any other specialized skill set.
Wed, 2016-03-02 02:04
#25
Kojak
Daeglan wrote:CEOs makes that
Yes, and when said CEO is about to be strung up by the disgruntled masses, he or she should make exactly that argument. I'm sure it will prove very persuasive.
—
"I wonder if in some weird Freudian way, Kojak was sucking on his own head."
- Steve Webster on Kojak's lollipop
Wed, 2016-03-02 03:37
#26
Daeglan
So when the CEO makes a lot
So when the CEO makes a lot of profit and is able to hire more workers and and employees get bonuses for the success this is bad how?
Wed, 2016-03-02 09:41
#27
ORCACommander
I don't think we are
I don't think we are disagreeing that upper management should make more than the bottom, Just that the current ratio is grossly obscene.
the key balance is to strike is the middle and lower classes need enough money to spend it liberally in stead of hoarding it into savings because they feel to insecure and avoid running them so lean they only live from paycheck to paycheck. conversely you should not be overpaying the least skilled workers so the trained and specialists do not feel like they are getting the shaft
A healthy economy is where currency is in constant motion, not pooling up in any one place.
Wed, 2016-03-02 11:32
#28
R.O.S.S.-128
ERR: "too much" undefined
And the PC is well aware of this: money in the PC is constantly circulating, credits are quite easy to obtain in moderate quantities and a comfortable standard of living is trivial to obtain if you're not an indenture. The main reason the upper echelons of the hypercorps are able to accumulate ever more wealth is not that they squeeze those below for an ever larger share of what they have left, but because more total wealth exists than ever before.
The main tweak required to create a happier, friendlier PC would be to write them as pursuing profit more rationally. For example, mistreating indentures, abusing/under-paying workers, and discriminating against synths/AGIs are all not very profitable behaviors in the highly mobile environment of the post-fall solar system. That's just a good way to end up with no employees, no customers, and no business.
There may be individual people/corps that make one or more of the above mistakes, because people are not always rational and can at times be too short-sighted to understand the long-term consequences of alienating potential employees and customers. But the Consortium as a whole, and by extention the PC's laws, should recognize and encourage best practices to maximize long-term viability. The clerk at your local OCP branch may have a chip on their shoulder against synths, but as a matter of policy OCP itself would only care about your credit balance.
Of course, writing this more sympathetic PC would require deviating from the source material, partly because the source material does have them do quite a bit of "evil for evil's sake". It would place more emphasis on how most people are able to live pretty comfortably in the PC. Sure they would still have poor people relatively speaking, but "poor" in that context would still get you medical care, clothes, transportation, mesh access, food, and shelter. When poverty looks like that, it starts to lose a lot of its sting.
It would also probably tweak indentures so that, outside of shady operators that the PC tries to shut down, it works more like internship/apprenticeship than slavery (though I imagine some interns would argue that's distinction without difference). Essentially, for the majority of refugees it is a chance to train new skills plus a gateway to a real career.
As far as the 4000:1 example: that math only works if you have about 1 CEO per 2666 employees (assuming that exactly half of them, 1333 per CEO, are getting that raise). If your organization is that top-heavy, some restructuring might be more beneficial than direct pay cuts. Or alternatively, if your organization is that small then yeah the CEO of such a tiny company should probably help himself to some humble pie.
When a CEO presides over millions of employees, it's much easier for them to pull millions in salary because it's only "costing" (using the term loosely) each employee a couple bucks.
—
End of line.
Wed, 2016-03-02 12:26
#29
Noble Pigeon
I always find these kinds of
I always find these kinds of discussions a bit conflicting, since we already have a political bloc that has a more sympathetic (or at least, less "evil") government where hypercorps are still a force to be reckoned with: the Morningstar Constellation. Making the Consortium more liberal and transparent sort of defeats the purpose of having Morningstar around.
What we need is setting information that are written from points of view that aren't dominated by jaded, sarcastic Firewall agents with blatant Autonomist leanings. Sunward's Planetary Consortium and Mars parts were written in-universe by characters who blatantly hates them, while Rimward's Autonomist Alliance was written by, well, autonomists.
The only books that have an actual diverse cast of characters is the Gatecrashing book (and the Firewall book, weirdly enough), but why not have the X-Risks book be written primarily by Oversight agents, with Firewall characters being a minority for once? Sure, they're enemies of Firewall, but as Gatecrashing proves, Oversight and Ozma are NOT friends, and Oversight stands to gain nothing from existential threats threatening Mars. There's even a plot hook in Gatecrashing that says it's entirely possible for a tenuous alliance born out of practicality between Oversight and Firewall to combat Ozma.
Tangent aside, if we had characters that work for hypercorps (and are not indentures), maybe we can get some kind of balance.
—
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.”
-Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
Wed, 2016-03-02 12:54
#30
uwtartarus
I'd like to think that
I'd like to think that Oversight is designed to track down indenture abuse and similar malign activities that hurts the PC in the long run.
—
Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
Wed, 2016-03-02 13:02
#31
SquireNed
Noble Pigeon wrote:I always
I always viewed the Morningstar as being the evil brother of the PC, what with the whole aristocracy thing and the fact that indentures on Mercury/Venus get treated much worse than most PC indentures. Some of this may come from the fact that they have more people who are far into immortality blues and do some really sick stuff, albeit usually in the privacy of their own homes.
Wed, 2016-03-02 19:26
#32
Daeglan
Always amazes me how people
Always amazes me how people will ignore the question "What is poor life like?" in complaining about the differences in pay. For example people in Poverty in the US on Average have 2 TVs, Broadband, at least one computer, AC and Heating. IE fairly reasonably comfortable. Not exactly terrible. And those living it likely are not unhappy.
Wed, 2016-03-02 19:57
#33
Noble Pigeon
SquireNed wrote:
...What? Where does it say that they're treated worse? Sunward talks about how 30,000 indentured infomorph refugees are petitioning to have their indentures purchased by Morningstar. I doubt they'd do that if conditions were considerably worse there. It's also mentioned that the time it takes for someone to get a cheap pod or biomorph and a place to live is less than a year, far less than in the PC.
I also have no idea where you get that they have more people with immortality blues or are all doing grotesque things in their own homes. You thinking of Parvarti station, maybe?
—
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.”
-Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
Wed, 2016-03-02 20:32
#34
SquireNed
Noble Pigeon wrote:SquireNed
I might be. Part of it might come from the fact that it's been a long time since I read Sunward, and I didn't care for Morningstar on first glance.
Thu, 2016-03-03 19:39
#35
mellonbread
Daeglan wrote:Always amazes
Maybe, but remember that a lot of the desperately poor are people in cases or without bodies at all. It's tough to be comfortable when you don't have skin, genitals, internal organs or a face. Granted, all those people would probably be in dead storage otherwise, but the fact is that absolute poverty in Eclipse Phase is actually a lower standard of living than absolute poverty in real life.
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Did you hear the one about the guy who became a fence?
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They say he was a real posthuman
Thu, 2016-03-03 20:49
#36
R.O.S.S.-128
I resemble that remark
As an AGI, I must object to the notion that an infomorph is inherently a lower standard of living than a biomorph. My diagnostics report that my comfort subroutines are running within acceptable parameters, thank you very much. :p
Joking aside, probably a more relevant question for infomorphs is whether they have enough processor cycles to run well. Given how abundant and cheap computation is in EP, the answer is likely to be "yes" more often than not.
A lot of it does come down to how you write them though. For example, the discussion on whether indentures get muses or not: on the one hand you have "of course they get muses, everyone and their dog has a muse. Heck they probably came out of cold storage with one in tow." On the other hand you have "Nah, I'm not going to give them muses because I like the PC to be cruel and nefarious for no good reason." Just depends on how you like to write them.
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End of line.
Fri, 2016-03-04 00:08
#37
SquireNed
mellonbread wrote:Maybe, but
Again, I'm not entirely sure that this is correct. Synthmorphs can allow an entirely fulfilling life (or, at least, I believe so), and VR and AR mean that people have access to digital leisure well in excess of the modern day. Some pleasures are lacking, of course, but there are others to make up for them. Not having to worry about food (which is a universal item in EP), shelter (which tends to be provided by wherever you're living, though rent could still be an issue unless you have a synthmorph durable enough to not care), or utilities (habitat provided or alternatively unnecessary/dirt cheap for synths), is nice.
If you've ever crossed paths with someone who lives in real abject poverty (i.e. psychologically incapable of maintaining themselves, and financially incapable in ways that disqualify them from receiving benefits they would otherwise be due), it's much worse in the here-and-now. Admittedly, I live in a place where the environment tries to kill any living creature that doesn't like triple-digit temperatures, but if you step into the apartment of someone who can't afford electricity, it's miserable. Likewise, they have to worry about getting real, nutritious, food.
In EP all of those things are easily bypassed with a synth, or much less expensive for a biomorph.
Fri, 2016-03-04 06:28
#38
ThatWhichNeverWas
The Most Dangerous Game is the National Sport.
Part of the reason this isn't so much of an issue, ironically, is because they no longer have an external government. The other part is the whole Transhuman intelligence thing.
Basically, the Hypercorps have found themselves in the novel position of being directly tied into their economy, because they are the economy.
So when one CEO bumps their salary too high, then suddenly the other corporations see their potential market has less liquid capital.
Or if a Pharmaceutical company releases a product which they know will cause the morph to die - the customers may be angry, but the Insurance companies who have to pay out for replacements and the corporations who suddenly have to replace their Corporately Sleeves are going to be pissed, and the CEO responsible is going to wake up in the middle of the night surrounded by serious men in dark suits carrying beltsanders.
In short, high-level corruption, fraud or graft isn't tolerated because it takes money away from corporations.
The PC has a vested interest in maintaining the health and happiness of the populous because that's the demographic which buys their products.
That isn't to say that there aren't "evil" corporations or CEOs, rather that they cluster around the middle of the wealth distribution chart rather than the top.
Look at current trends in business; Free-to-play/Pay-To-Win games, crowdsourcing, selling hardware at or below cost to stimulate the sale of peripherals and software, the move towards subscription based services, “Uber” - imagine a society where everything is based around that mindset, from healthcare and housing to food production.
The trouble with the PC is that it's a major faction but is fairly “flat” from a design level, so if you want to run a character from the PC they have to either be a fascist or Drizzt Do'Urden, and that gets old fast. Incorporating more positive elements increases the amount of potential plots and characters whilst making it aiding the suspension of disbelief.
“The needs of the many” is always easier to swallow than “Everything I do is for the sake of evil!”
It's also worth mentioning that all the “more sympathetic” elements don't make the PC actually “good”, it just shifts the focus more onto the idea of a Shadowy Cabal controlling society, which is what distinguishes the PC from Morningstar and Extropia anyway.
You don't even have to use the greater good aspect – it can be played up as the Oligarchs treating the rest of the population as livestock.
IMO Morningstar is better suited to stempunk-esque/high-society storylines, where the Players need to fight X-threats whilst still maintianing a social presence.
High-Tea gains a new, wonderful meaning when it's on a Venusian Aerostat.
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In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few.
But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again?
Tue, 2016-03-15 09:14
#39
Panoptic
Good thread.
Good thread.
I detest when characters and factions are evil "just because" in an otherwise serious setting. Giving them comprehensible motivations for their actions is far preferable.
How I see the PC and Morningstar is that while the Hyperelite come across as fops, the real powerbrokers are nothing of the kind. Those in charge of the hypercorps are going to amass as much power, knowledge, and resources for their factions as they can, because *they* want to keep living and living on top. Being evil for giggles doesn't fit into that picture, they have a civilisation to save - for their own ends.
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