Forbes Magazine's 'Prometheus' and the Science Fiction of Corporatism

By E.D. Kain, Contributor Forbes Magazine Online. [url=http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/12/28/ridley-scotts-prometheus-and-the-science-fiction-of-corporatism/]ForbesRidley[/url] A lot of science fiction deals with the theme of a future of massive corporate overlords. A book like Neuromancer basically takes it for granted that the future is pretty stateless, governed instead by an ad hoc system of corporate behemoths and an international regulatory agency, all built on the stilts of artificial intelligence. Alyssa Rosenberg writes: One thing I’ve always liked about the Alien franchise is that it’s part of that subgenre of science fiction that’s concerned with the rise of corporate power. The Mars novels may be my favorite example of this, but work in the space tends to assume that the future might not be so shiny and happy after all, and plots get kicked off not when utopia is shattered, but when something threatens to upend what fragile balance we’ve achieved. So I’m pretty curious to see if the research team in Prometheus, for which we finally, oh joy, have a trailer, turn out to be independent or corporate-funded. Skewing results for the sake of pleasing your backers could make for some really nice tension. But I’m sort of tired of this resurgent theme. Avatar pretty ham-fistedly dealt with the power of intergalactic corporations using military might to subordinate indigenous people in order to extract valuable resources. This isn’t at all a stretch, of course, but it’s also not that new. Hopefully Prometheus brings up the corporatist future with more grace than Cameron’s two-dimensional corporate villains in their quest for Unobtanium. What I’d like to see is some new twist. What about a future where corporations are actually only one of several powerful factions? What about futuristic collectives? What about some new form of government altogether? I guess my problem with the corporate future meme is that corporations aren’t actually all that immune to change and dilapidation. If I told you five years ago that Apple would be the biggest smartphone manufacturer and on track to becoming the biggest computer manufacturer, you would have laughed me out of the room (unless you were very good at predicting the near future.) Corporate giants fall, replaced by newcomers, all the time. If anything, I’d like science fiction to deal with how the corporations of the future – if they are truly state-like and as bad as they’re often presented – actually got to be so bad and so powerful. How, in other words, they become more like for-profit governments. In my hypothetical sci-fi film I’d use the corporate charter city as the backdrop. Maybe place it in some future dystopian state and then show how the charter city creates not only new freedoms and exit from the bad state, but other problems as well – perhaps with wealth inequality, for instance. You could take this any number of directions, and delve into issues of privacy, security, and so forth. I’m no fan of corporatism myself, obviously, but I don’t see the problems undergirding corporatism quite the same as many of my progressive friends. And I think it would be interesting to deal with the question not simply in a negative light. Give me complexity in the political and economic systems present in my science fiction, not just in the technology. Everything is a trade-off. Science fiction should ask us what we’re willing to trade, and at what price.