Very broadly and roughly, in Cyberpunk 2077, Militech is… more or less the entire US military industrial complex, but all consolidated / merged into one huge megacorp.
Like … imagine if Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, General Motors, Ford, Colt, Smith & Wesson, Palantir, Anduril, Blackwater/Xi/Academi/Constellis, SpaceX, KBR…
… were all just subdivisions of one huge holding corporation.
And then they just had a SuperPAC, and a political party to go along with it.
…
A whole lot of the… actual world building of most good cyberpunk fiction is … well, either the logical conclusion of neoliberal economic trends if you’re cynical/realistic, or a horrific and grotesque nightmare exaggeration… if you’re optimistic/a naive liberal.
Most people just see the fanciful body augmentations and super technologies and go ‘wow, cool!’ at that, though.
…
But anyway, a megacorp is basically just an Anglicized way of saying ‘Keiretsu’; Japan’s giant conglomerates of … basically a family of manufacturers, service providers, and banks that all work with each other as a sort of intracorporate family, or feudal fiefdom.
Much (most?) early cyberpunk pretty directly made clear their model for a ‘megacorp’ was corporate Japan in the 80s.
Very broadly and roughly, in Cyberpunk 2077, Militech is… more or less the entire US military industrial complex, but all consolidated / merged into one huge megacorp.
Like … imagine if Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, General Motors, Ford, Colt, Smith & Wesson, Palantir, Anduril, Blackwater/Xi/Academi/Constellis, SpaceX, KBR…
… were all just subdivisions of one huge holding corporation.
And then they just had a SuperPAC, and a political party to go along with it.
…
A whole lot of the… actual world building of most good cyberpunk fiction is … well, either the logical conclusion of neoliberal economic trends if you’re cynical/realistic, or a horrific and grotesque nightmare exaggeration… if you’re optimistic/a naive liberal.
Most people just see the fanciful body augmentations and super technologies and go ‘wow, cool!’ at that, though.
…
But anyway, a megacorp is basically just an Anglicized way of saying ‘Keiretsu’; Japan’s giant conglomerates of … basically a family of manufacturers, service providers, and banks that all work with each other as a sort of intracorporate family, or feudal fiefdom.
Much (most?) early cyberpunk pretty directly made clear their model for a ‘megacorp’ was corporate Japan in the 80s.