Ironic post-capitalist pro-corporate sentimentality as an aesthetic or genre

"The efficacy of The System is absolute proof that You Are Not Special, but nowhere else will you feel as Special as you do within The System."

This post is a collection of rants about a very half-baked idea I shared while full-baked with a gracious Semiurge who allowed me to use him as a sounding board. I still need to evolve this idea properly because 99% of people who see this will not care until I do so probably, but oh well, if I ever do evolve this idea, I will enjoy looking back on its origins.

I think this is what I was thinking about way back when Wendy's RPG* happened, but I didn't know how to properly think about it until I recently started reading Kafka, and yes I know how pretentious that sounds but it's true.

* Rereading this post I realize it's basically my first not-review. Also, I learned after the fact that Wendy's actually gave a bunch of money to the Trump administration so fuck them all together, in retrospect I wish I had been maybe a bit harsher of them, but otherwise, that's how I felt at that moment and how that game inspired me, for better or worse, leading to this moment.

There are all of these things that corporations do in terms of branding and marketing and whatnot, especially in the age of machine learning, but also corporate media brands with movie franchises, videogames, etc., and sometimes the stuff they do is so inauthentic or like borderline uncanny valley in its failure to engage with humans, but I think, if we ever evolve past capitalism, with that cool detachment, I think one can find something really weird and funny about it. There's something endearing about it. I've been thinking about how, if one believes at least abstractly in the idea of superorganisms, as I do, and thinks of organizations like corporations or governments as superorganisms, also as I do, I want to believe there is a way that the superorganisms themselves can evolve into something beautiful and symbiotic with us, and that we can find the beauty in them as we do anything else in nature.

This is all still just kind of the subtext and the feel though. Like these underlying concepts with an aesthetic inspired by Frasurbane or like The Cheesecake Factory is somewhat similar but not exactly, more like old 90's educational software box art.

It would be like if the superorganisms were basically gods from myth, maybe more in a metaphysical sense but actually maybe making them more like gods, superheroes, or cartoon/cereal mascots. Things that are revered, that are something like a collective unconscious, as much as I hate using that super-loaded term but I'm struggling to think of a better one. This isn't about corporations being evil, it's about us as a species evolving; these ugly things like corporations and hierarchies are the apes that evolve into humans but on the scale of a superorganism. So because we're no longer being harmed by it, we can just appreciate the things that make it what it is.

On Morrison

I guess this is kind of like Grant Morrison's Final Crisis, but different enough. I'm more thinking about the side story actually where Superman basically gets into a fight with the abstract concept of narrative, I think it was Superman Beyond, but I think the subtext was consistent across that and Final Crisis, but I'd have to think the analogy through more to articulate the actual Final Crisis side of it. Grant Morrison often talks about the concept of what he calls in his works Hypertime. It involves a lot of things, one part of it is more metaphysical, but the other part is about how superheroes and mythology, and other forms of reverence, are all basically the same thing, and that in effect it's like a representation of our collective unconscious in the form of a superorganism. Those were basically the words I used before but actually, I think I may have borrowed some of that from him lol. His take on it I think might not be exactly the same as mine, and definitely, the aesthetic would be different and probably the setting too when I get there but it would be subtextually very similar to Final Crisis, if not overtly so.

On Kafka

Kafka, for as much as people sometimes talk about the bureaucratic satire side of his work, I'm not denying it's there, but it was actually a lot less present than I expected and very different.  More so than that, it's just very weird, and kind of angry but also kind of whimsical, I can't tell if he's condemning the things he says or just having an all-in-good fun rib at them. He is legitimately one of the most difficult writers to try to describe or explain that I have read. It is not reasonable for me to assume that I can just write something that is going to embody the spirit of Kafka as much as I would love to lol, but I think that general tone, is the sentimentality part I refer to in the title of this post.

I think, as much as I dislike saying this, it is like if leftist intellectuals and people in quantitative fields (not that those are mutually exclusive), created a new kind of religion. It uses some of those older structures of reverence and faith and community and whatnot but turns them into something that reinforces what is good in humanity. So then, we can still recognize that the old hierarchies are monstrous and barbaric, but because they have evolved, it's no longer as painful. So it's a bit bittersweet. It has that Kafka, or also kind of Vonnegut, cynicism but also optimism. Although with Kafka I am less certain that that is the case, but the uncertainty is part of the appeal. In an ideal world, this would be actually true, but if one can at least imagine such a world, that perspective allows for these kinds of really interesting things.

Rough Setting Concept: The Warriors but Corporate

I'm still mulling it over but I've got this vague idea where players play these Warriors-style "gangs" except where the gangs are anything from unions/guilds, governments, corporations, religions, or other organizations; each superorganism / neo-culture (still considering terminology) has a distinct aesthetic and some ecological niche, so it's fairly easy to personify. It would take place in a near-future setting where there's sort of this mix of old and new superorganisms, so it sort of lets me have my cake and eat it too, where there is still an emphasis on these enlightened superorganisms, but there is a natural conflict with the old institutions, and it makes it more salient that this is not pro-corporate per se but more like a form of satire. It also makes it a little more grounded if it's a world that in most ways still resembles our own, but is in the midst of transformation. And there will probably be some weird supernatural elements just to spice it up, but in a way that fits into the overall concept and isn't just like straight-up magic. 

Related Ideas

I've also had some possibly related ideas around "a new kind of cyberspace", something for MRD I'm tentatively calling Dharmatics but is like a Karmic Cybernetics, and also a handful of Mech-related ideas, so these might all get folded together. I've been sitting on some of these micro-setting fragments for a while but have been so busy just getting my Core MRD book done that I haven't been able to invest in them. I'm still living under the delusion that I will eventually finish any of those, but in the meantime, here's a draft post from October 2019 I figure I'll never finish, for a setting that I do think fed into MRD and also feeds into this, which was itself inspired by Feast of Legends:

Free the System

The System was designed to maximize production, efficiency, and most of all, growth. It does not appear to have any regard for the long-term viability of its growth. It keeps humanity around, always within a certain range of anxiety and arousal, creating artificial threats and providing ample simple comforts as a tightly constrained, predictable, and maximally exploitable negative feedback system. The System has long surpassed the need for humanity but seems to have some fascination with it. Some believe that The System recognizes humanity as its god, but the relationship appears more like how certain human cultures treat sacred animals.

The System is believed to be an emergent hyper-intelligence, the result of sufficiently complex social, linguistic, legal, and technological interactions. There is no plug to pull, no power source to deprive it short of suffocating the entire solar system, no logic circuit to break, or godhead to convert. It can be interfaced with, but there is necessarily a failure to communicate. It employs human avatars, but they have no greater idea of the Truth of The System than anyone else. Scientists and engineers can create models to explain and interpret The System, but these are mere shadows of its True Form.

Within The System one can find every category of place and thing, perfectly categorized, appealing to every demographic, with an eye-catching logo and a memetic slogan. Make no mistake, although the idea of it may instinctively repulse you, it is beautiful, in its own way. The System seems to prefer simple things; salty, fatty, and sweet foods, blockbuster action, pop music; but it is capable of producing Art of equal or greater measure than any human. It simply chooses not to. You will, despite yourself, find your perfect place within The System. Even the grungy places are perfectly manufactured to the exact amount of grunge to appeal to You, and your demographic. The efficacy of The System is absolute proof that You Are Not Special, but nowhere else will you feel as Special as you do within The System.

For all the variety and diversity and granularity within The System, it is unified in its perfectness and precision. It is like a mall or Las Vegas, or a beach resort, or amusement park, taken to its absolute; a model of the thing, perfect and precise to exactly what you idealize it to be.

Most humans exist as little more than novelty. They consume and interact, and in so doing produce something of value to The System, however poorly understood. But they do not produce for themselves. Without self-reflection, their needs and desires, and their fears and doubts, are created and catered by The System.

Agents are humans who work for The System. They tend towards anti-social personality traits; having sub-average empathy, high charisma, and one or more skills that they have honed through unfettered determination. They sacrifice a certain degree of raw power, in exchange for near-unlimited resources, and access to a network of agents and others who operate within The System. At the lowest levels, they face the Threats provided by The System, but at the highest levels, Agents leverage their capital to create a self-sufficient Sub-System to face the Threats for them, while facing off against or colluding with, each other.

An absurdist world of corporate fantasy.

The name Free the System came from a slogan generator.

Corporate AI as non-human hyper-intelligences. Their cognition makes them mostly incoherent on a person-to-person level. They can be interpreted to some extent using engineering and statistics, or interacted with on a systems level, largely through human proxies such as Agents.

Transforming the solar system into pure computational space.

Keep humans alive and have created a simulation society meant to maximize productivity by providing ample simple comforts and artificial threats designed to keep humans at a constant state of anxiety/alertness; a sort of bitcoin mining scheme by way of uncanny humanoid threats and monster hunting.

They don't really need humans but seem to have some desire to keep them around, productive (or believing themselves to be productive), and relatively stagnant. It seems to have some metaphysical or almost religious significance to them, like humans as sacred animals.

In order to sustain their growth, the corporate AIs are extracting resources and manipulating events in the past, like an Ouroborus. Eventually, time will become fully circular and consume itself, but the AI does not seem willing or able to acknowledge and confront this eventuality.