There’s a “Dragon devouring it’s own tail” element. You might be a smart capitalist, but shareholders aren’t, and they hold your leash. You could try to develop a stable, powerful, robust company, but if you’re not return-maxxing and profit-pilled the shareholders will pull their investments and go to someone who promises a higher short-term return.
Individual firms, unless they’re privately owned, often can’t pursue a steady, stable position even if someone in the C-Suite is Marx-brained enough to understand how this whole nightmare works. They’re in the hands of forces beyond their control, the great god Capitalism who thirsts for the blood and bone of humanity.
In the US due to an utterly insane theory of “Shareholder Value” the C-suite is legally required to maximize sharehold profits at all costs and ahead of other considerations, and they can be removed or sued if they do not.
the TTRPG Eclipse Phase kind of goes in to this. The feral anarchists who write the thing posit that after late-Capitalism will come hyper-capitalism, where all the big firms break down in to “agile” and “flexible” hyper-corps, the evolution of mega-corps. Hyper-corps will assemble labor and resources for months or even days at a time to squirt out a minimum viable product leveraging every kind of labor-strangling technique they can. In the Eclipse Phase world that’s countless millions of “infugees”, refugees from earth who uploaded their brains in to cold storage to escape the apocalypse and are now utterly at the mercy of Hypercorps who buy them as de-facto slaves and only break them out of cold storage to put them on a project in a vastly accelerated simulated spaces. The infugees are desperate for any time in the waking world and take contracts that last days or months of real-world time but might be years of simulation time. If they’re very lucky they might be able to buy clock-cycles to keep operating as a digital consciousness after their project ends, but most of them get tossed back in to cold storage, essentially frozen in time, until, if they’re very lucky, their quickly aging skill set is needed again.
The anti-capitalist moeities out beyond the Belt are in a cold-war with the in-system Hypercapitalists, and part of that is spinning up as much compute time as they can to rescue as many infugees as they can manage, then cranking out minimally viable cybernetic robot shells so they can at least put people in simple bodies that can participate in the physical world while they wait in the long, long, long queue for a biological human bodie, or at least a partially biological synth body. Some people are fine being a free or mostly free digital consciousness and living in the data networks, or embodied in simulations, but most people want to have meat bodies that can be part of the “real” world again.
It’s a cool system. It goes hard in to what trans-humanism might mean for us in the near future, investigating both the wonders (nearly-unlimited bodily autonomy for wealthy hyper-capitalists and well equipped anti-capitalist societies) and the horrors (terrifying new kinds of slavery made possible by speculative and emergent technologies).
Shareholders are powerless, no one really cares about shares on the secondary market and shareholder value is a just a thin excuse to keep doing what capital does.
legally required to maximize sharehold profits at all costs and ahead of other considerations, and they can be removed or sued if they do not.
This is not actually the case, I can find a couple articles if you’re interested.
Eclipse Plane reminds me of the Iain Banks book Surface Detail with a simulated hell.
There’s a “Dragon devouring it’s own tail” element. You might be a smart capitalist, but shareholders aren’t, and they hold your leash. You could try to develop a stable, powerful, robust company, but if you’re not return-maxxing and profit-pilled the shareholders will pull their investments and go to someone who promises a higher short-term return.
Individual firms, unless they’re privately owned, often can’t pursue a steady, stable position even if someone in the C-Suite is Marx-brained enough to understand how this whole nightmare works. They’re in the hands of forces beyond their control, the great god Capitalism who thirsts for the blood and bone of humanity.
In the US due to an utterly insane theory of “Shareholder Value” the C-suite is legally required to maximize sharehold profits at all costs and ahead of other considerations, and they can be removed or sued if they do not.
the TTRPG Eclipse Phase kind of goes in to this. The feral anarchists who write the thing posit that after late-Capitalism will come hyper-capitalism, where all the big firms break down in to “agile” and “flexible” hyper-corps, the evolution of mega-corps. Hyper-corps will assemble labor and resources for months or even days at a time to squirt out a minimum viable product leveraging every kind of labor-strangling technique they can. In the Eclipse Phase world that’s countless millions of “infugees”, refugees from earth who uploaded their brains in to cold storage to escape the apocalypse and are now utterly at the mercy of Hypercorps who buy them as de-facto slaves and only break them out of cold storage to put them on a project in a vastly accelerated simulated spaces. The infugees are desperate for any time in the waking world and take contracts that last days or months of real-world time but might be years of simulation time. If they’re very lucky they might be able to buy clock-cycles to keep operating as a digital consciousness after their project ends, but most of them get tossed back in to cold storage, essentially frozen in time, until, if they’re very lucky, their quickly aging skill set is needed again.
The anti-capitalist moeities out beyond the Belt are in a cold-war with the in-system Hypercapitalists, and part of that is spinning up as much compute time as they can to rescue as many infugees as they can manage, then cranking out minimally viable cybernetic robot shells so they can at least put people in simple bodies that can participate in the physical world while they wait in the long, long, long queue for a biological human bodie, or at least a partially biological synth body. Some people are fine being a free or mostly free digital consciousness and living in the data networks, or embodied in simulations, but most people want to have meat bodies that can be part of the “real” world again.
It’s a cool system. It goes hard in to what trans-humanism might mean for us in the near future, investigating both the wonders (nearly-unlimited bodily autonomy for wealthy hyper-capitalists and well equipped anti-capitalist societies) and the horrors (terrifying new kinds of slavery made possible by speculative and emergent technologies).
Shareholders are powerless, no one really cares about shares on the secondary market and shareholder value is a just a thin excuse to keep doing what capital does.
This is not actually the case, I can find a couple articles if you’re interested.
Eclipse Plane reminds me of the Iain Banks book Surface Detail with a simulated hell.
I would like that, thank you.
Let me know if the link doesn’t work - book https://is.gd/mLTVsQ and a blog post - https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
Directors tend to have very broad latitude as long as they’re not stealing from the company
Thank you!