Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form. - New Rose Hotel Most hypercorps are decentralized, non-asset based legal entities. Complete automation, advanced robotics, morph technology, and cornucopia machines allow the hypercorps to abstain from mass employment for labor or production services. - Eclipse Phase Megacorporation - It refers to a fictional corporation that is a massive conglomerate, holding monopolistic or near-monopolistic control over multiple markets (thus exhibiting both a horizontal and a vertical monopoly). Megacorps are so powerful that they can ignore the law, possess their own heavily-armed (often military-sized) private armies, hold 'sovereign' territory, and possibly even act as outright governments. They often exercise a large degree of control over their employees, taking the idea of 'corporate culture' to an extreme. - Wikipedia We can safely assume that there are hundreds of thousands of registered and unregistered corporate entities, most of which are no more than someone owning some information or equipment or making decisions with the goal of making profit. However, we still see the few giant corporations, the "transnational megacorp dinosaurs". A significant percentage of the colonies and habitats detailed in Sunward are nothing more than company towns - every service, every product, every job, is provided by, for and through the company. In these cases, the corporation is the government, provides the military, owns sovereign territory, and creates horizontal monopolies to supply their vertical profit-base. The simple fact is, in a universe which is inherently hostile to transhuman life, the only way that new frontiers will be opened is by motivated organizations bringing tremendous resources to bear, presumably driven by their own self-interest - a situation which necessitates profit-driven 'megacorporations' over the tiny, 'lithe' corporations or individuals. Right now the megacorps have been taken a step back for a few reasons - the collapse of Earth-centric economics, and of major economic bases throughout the solar system, the lack of cheap FTL communication, and a transitioning politico-economic situation. But these would all appear to be temporary concerns, and when they fall away, the megacorporate idea becomes not only tenable, but more efficient than it was back on Earth, where the shipment of goods was relatively cheap. What can we anticipate in the future? The most successful habitats are those that have the fewest possible points of error - where they rely the least on unreliable third parties, and have the most control over their own necessary functions. They are those with the most resources available to make the location efficient and habitable, and to enforce local stability. They are those with sufficient power to defend themselves from external predators and threats (such as foreign governments and Firewall), and those which are streamlined enough to produce goods and use resources efficiently. The cost of transmission of information and goods between space mean that each habitat or habitat cluster will need to evolve to operate relatively independent of the whole. Rather than the classic megacorp monolith, it will be a series of independent children corps creating a corporate ecosystem - ideal for evolution of advanced corporate structures. I feel like I'm missing a step from this to the next point. But we are dealing with systems confined to basic rules, operating with a huge number of individual functions, a high rate of mutation, competitively driven. It seems like, within the next ten to forty years, Eclipse Phase is creating the perfect environment for proper corporate emergence - the creation of a heretofore nearly unpredictable complex network from a set of relatively simple interactions. The next form of transcendence may not be biological at all - except insofar that transhumanity makes up the neurons and cells of the corporate brain.