The Caldari Dialogues 3: The Rat Race
The third article in this series will examine the lives of the average Caldari, the 80-90% of the population that makes up the wheels and gears of the Caldari State and its corporations. This chapter is going to pull from many of the same sources as the previous one, as well as a few other books that highlight the situation on the ground, as it were. The biggest example is the Sprawl Survival Guide, another excellent Shadowrun soucebook. While most of that focuses more on the specifics of that universe, it also includes a great many good examples of how corporations stay in control over the populace.
The biggest thing to take from this chapter will be that for most people in the State, life is fairly good, at least to them. This is not because the corporations are particularly generous, or even care that much about the people that work for them, but because the corporations have conducted a centuries-long marketing campaign to promote themselves as the friend of the average man or woman and maintain the level of discontent at a minimum. After all, workers that despise their jobs or, at an extreme, believe that they have nothing to lose from a violent strike, do not do good jobs and cost companies millions or billions of ISK in lost productivity (or even deliberate sabotage).
So with that summary, let's move on to the real meat of the article.
The biggest thing to take from this chapter will be that for most people in the State, life is fairly good, at least to them. This is not because the corporations are particularly generous, or even care that much about the people that work for them, but because the corporations have conducted a centuries-long marketing campaign to promote themselves as the friend of the average man or woman and maintain the level of discontent at a minimum. After all, workers that despise their jobs or, at an extreme, believe that they have nothing to lose from a violent strike, do not do good jobs and cost companies millions or billions of ISK in lost productivity (or even deliberate sabotage).
So with that summary, let's move on to the real meat of the article.
For the average Caldari, they are born into a family that is employed by a Caldari corporation; they will grow up in a constant flood of corporate media, living in corporate cities or at least corporate neighborhoods and going to corporate schools. Most of the people they know will also be citizens of their corporation. This creates a feedback loop that inundates these people with pro-corporate ideas and makes it unlikely they will be exposed to anything that disagrees with that point of view. This kind of tunnel vision isn't particularly outlandish; these days, it's so easy to find a media outlet that shares the point of view you espouse, many people only get their news from those sources, ingraining their already present bias even further. What we have in the Caldari State is something similar, but this time it is carefully orchestrated by corporate memetic scientists (a blend of psychology and marketing, key to the creation of effective advertisements), making it even more effective.
This sort of thing isn't particularly new or original, of course. It's a common element of a lot of dystopic fiction, such as 1984, though the social situation there is taken to an extreme that is largely unnecessary in the State. Caldari society has long venerated those who can be the most effective, talented, or in some way most valuable members of society, whatever those talents may be. For the Caldari, this is largely seen as determined by the market, which is why corporations (and through them, their leaders), who are generally the most successful members of society in those terms, can inspire such loyalty. This primes the pump for the propaganda that they will be exposed to as they go along in their lives.
Most of the Caldari corporations also try to make sure that their citizens consider their corporations synonymous with the Caldari State, marrying the two in in their minds. Because the Caldari have such a strong cultural identity, as a result of their shared struggle during the war for independence, this is rather effective. While the Patriot corporations obvious play this up the most, the others, such as Ishukone, certainly do not ignore it as part of their conditioning efforts. For an example, here's a quote from our conversation:
Okay, I want to take a quote from the Sprawl Survival Guide here as a springboard to some discussion on the actual living conditions of most people in the State (or in most cyberpunk dystopias).
Another good example would be in Demolition Man, which while not being exactly a great movie, illustrates this idea perfectly. The people who fit in, go with the system, and do what they are told get along pretty well all the time. But to John Spartan, they seem like Stepford people, and people like Edgar Friendly, who go out of their way to reject the system, are plunged into a life of poverty and just scraping by, hunted like criminals (we'll get more to these folks in the next article). This is pretty common in most cyberpunk media; Case and Molly, in Neuromancer, are part of this class that have rejected corporate life, Shadowrun is a game geared towards playing these sort of characters, and while Max Headroom's Edison Carter is part of a corporate system, he makes his name most of the time by fighting against it, and the focus of the show is usually on society's rejects, like Blank Reg. Cyberpunk usually focuses on these people because people want a character who takes charge of his life, not one who is led around by his nose, and because in general, it's just a lot more interesting.
But for most people in these settings, life is not horrible -- it's certainly not horrible on the level where they are being ground down in some sort of nightmarish factory environment, fed gruel, bread, and a glass of water, and locked in a box for six hours when they aren't working. For most people, even those on the bottom, their life is certainly no worse than it would be for the average working-class American today -- and as I told Yoshito above, for most of the people in the world today, that's a pretty significant step up. What they get in economic prosperity, however, they pay for in loss of freedom. The corporations don't just employ you in the State, they own you. While that might seem to be entirely a bad thing from the employee's perspective, there's some advantages too; people tend to take better care of things they own. Corporations aren't likely to simply use people up and toss them away, especially if the available labor pool is small (as it must have been in the early days of the State, at the very least).
If you're a widget-assembler mechanic, and you work for Lai Dai, let's say, then yes, Lai Dai could fire you at any time and you'd be out on the street, without a place to live, without most of everything you own (even your money is mostly corporate scrip, so you probably can't spend it legally outside the corporation's territory), and probably with a huge emotional burden from being rejected by the corporation you thought would look out for you for the rest of your life. That is a pretty heavy anvil to have hanging over your head.
On the other hand, would you care? For now, at least, that widget-assembler needs to be fixed, and if it's not you doing it, it's going to be someone else. If the company fires you, they'll have to pay to train someone new to do it, and pay them more than the job they were doing before -- and probably someone to fill the job they were doing to, with all the costs that are included in that. So you can probably rest pretty easy knowing that as long as you do your job well (or nothing in the economy fundamentally changes making widgets obsolete), you will be employed. Plus, hey, it's hard to worry about your job when you have some many distractions kindly provided by the company. The company pumps you so full of feel-good advertising, cheap entertainment, easily-available chemical escapes (alcohol and "safe" drugs), and probably company brothels that you don't really mind the fact that your job isn't particularly spiritually rewarding or realize the axe hanging over you, except when they want you to.
Corporations aren't dumb -- they know that it's easier and cheaper to buy you off than to crack the whip over your head and make you work at the point of a gun. That's why the Amarr Empire's policy of slavery strikes the Caldari as rather pointless, at least for economic reasons -- all the money that the Amarr may save in labor costs is wasted in a need for increased security and the potential losses if the slaves revolt, not to mention that slave labor is not usually well motivated, and productivity and quality therefore tends to be low. For all intents and purposes, the average Caldari worker may be a corporate slave -- after all, most of the money they make it just going right back to their employer -- but the difference is that the Caldari corporations and society condition people not to care. All they see is the friendly corporation taking care of them, and that they owe it to the corporation to work their hardest so that the corporation continues to do well.
Okay, I think that's about it for that. Next time, I'll be talking about the outsiders in Caldari society -- the people who don't quite fit into the corporate model, either because they choose to or because they have rejected it. That will probably be getting towards the end of this particular series of articles, but I may look at writing more on some topics if people are interested. I'm also planning for a bit of an interlude on the differences between backstory, metaplot, and "stories" (in quotes because it's such a general term I'm going to have to define what I'm talking about), and why I think that CCP and a lot of other people have gotten them mixed up, and why that's to their detriment. As always, feel free to post comments here if you'd like, or in the Chatsubo thread.
This sort of thing isn't particularly new or original, of course. It's a common element of a lot of dystopic fiction, such as 1984, though the social situation there is taken to an extreme that is largely unnecessary in the State. Caldari society has long venerated those who can be the most effective, talented, or in some way most valuable members of society, whatever those talents may be. For the Caldari, this is largely seen as determined by the market, which is why corporations (and through them, their leaders), who are generally the most successful members of society in those terms, can inspire such loyalty. This primes the pump for the propaganda that they will be exposed to as they go along in their lives.
Most of the Caldari corporations also try to make sure that their citizens consider their corporations synonymous with the Caldari State, marrying the two in in their minds. Because the Caldari have such a strong cultural identity, as a result of their shared struggle during the war for independence, this is rather effective. While the Patriot corporations obvious play this up the most, the others, such as Ishukone, certainly do not ignore it as part of their conditioning efforts. For an example, here's a quote from our conversation:
[14:15] <Kai> From"Two Bloodlines, one Race: the Raata spirit in the Deteis and Civire soul", Lai Dai Press, YR87. Reprinted with permission.Of course, my intent here was not to ruin "Cold Wind" for Kai forever, but to illustrate a point -- that corporations have an agenda to push, and that many things that people don't even think about are part of that agenda. Here, it illustrates that Lai Dai is promoting the patriotism that serves both their corporate agenda, of a strong State swathed in tradition, and also that is an excellent marketing message, getting people to believe that "what's good for Lai Dai is good for the State."
[14:15] <Svetlana> Kai: What is that from?
[14:15] <Kai> Cold Wind.
[14:15] <Yoshito> Cold Wind, probably.
[14:15] <Svetlana> Ah....right.
[14:15] <Kai> You know, without that Chron, I'd view the Caldari so differently.
[14:16] <Kai> Much more like you do Sveta.
[14:16] <Svetlana> funny, that chron didn't change my views at all :)
[14:16] <Svetlana> Also, notice who published that :)
[14:16] <Kai> Lai Dai?
[14:16] <Svetlana> Yes.
[14:16] <Kai> What significance do you attach to that?
[14:17] <Svetlana> A corporation that uses patriotism as the core of its marketing? :)
[14:17] <Kai> Ah....
[14:17] <Kai> Never considered that, but that's very intentional, now I think of it.
[14:17] <Kai> The words Lai Dai link to http://www.eve-online.com/background/potw/03-dec-01.asp
[14:17] <Kai> (Factionalism Chron)
[14:17] <Svetlana> That is why you fail!
[14:18] <Yoshito> Of course, you can't market using patriotism unless people believe in it.
[14:18] <Kai> I never claimed otherwise!
[14:18] <Kai> Where you people get these funny ideas, I'll never know...
[14:18] <Svetlana> Yes. But that is something that comes from its history (as evidence by the chron) and the crucible of the war.
[14:18] <Yoshito> I never said you did!
[14:20] <Kai> Ack!
[14:20] <Kai> Damn you Sveta!
[14:20] <Kai> Now the one shred of spiritualist Caldari PF just got turned into a fucking marketing gimmick.
[14:20] <Kai> Thanks for sapping the life outta the Caldari for me!
Okay, I want to take a quote from the Sprawl Survival Guide here as a springboard to some discussion on the actual living conditions of most people in the State (or in most cyberpunk dystopias).
- Oh yeah, I'm sure the corporate life was just so terrible. Cry me a fraggin' river.Here's another quote, from the Caldari racial description:
- Wheeler
- Corporate life has its own pressures. You may not have to wonder where your next meal is coming from, but you're subject to strict work ethics, pressure to achieve, intense mediocrity and mind-numbing corporate propaganda. Told what to eat, what to watch,what to wear, who to see; it's a sheltered life. Everyone you live and work with might as well be a clone, because they're all the same. And whenever you fail a deadline or have a disagreement with a superior, the threat of poverty is hanging over you -- and you've seen how miserable those people are. When the corporation is all you've known your entire life, the thought of being separated from it is terrifying. Most corp kids who run away don't make it on the streets.
- Ellie
The Caldari State offers its citizens the best and the worst in living conditions. As long as you keep in line, do your job, uphold the laws and so forth, life can be fairly pleasant and productive. But for those who are not cut out for this strict, disciplined regime life quickly becomes intolerable. They lose their respect, family, status, everything, and the only options left to them are suicide or exile.And here's another snippet of our conversation:
[12:57] <Yoshito> And aren't cyberpunk dystopias usually in the near future and part of the stories dealing with how society is crumbling because everything has moved toward the accumulation of wealth?Now, these quotes get to what I see as the problem with how the Caldari have been portrayed in the past and how they have been portrayed recently. Cyberpunk dystopias aren't dystopic because the corporations run everything like something out of The Jungle, they are dystopic because for most people, the idea of everyone being a mindless drone is horrific. If you want a more humorous take on a similar theme, look at the beginning of Shaun of the Dead, where they go out of their way to make Shaun's life look bland and zombie-like.
[12:58] <Svetlana> No.
[12:58] <Svetlana> Society isn't crumbling, it's just different. And for the vast majority of people, it's nice. Gibson has said so himself. (Edit: I know I have read this somewhere, but I haven't been able to find the interview I'm talking about in a search, so unfortunately I don't have any cite for it. -Sveta)
[12:58] <Svetlana> It's just that most of the stories are about people on the fringes who have rejected that.
[12:59] <Svetlana> Or who have been rejected by society....which is pretty much exactly what things were _supposedly_ like in the State. :)
[12:59] <Yoshito> Hmm... Interesting
[12:59] <Svetlana> It's not necessarily a free society, or a very open one, or even a particularly pleasant one to modern society.
[12:59] <Svetlana> But it is "good enough" for most people.
[13:00] <Svetlana> The problem is, when you fall through the cracks, you fall pretty painfully.
[13:00] <Yoshito> A dystopia is characterized by human misery, so I would say anything where the majority of people are more or less happy or at least not miserable isn't a dystopia.
[13:00] <Svetlana> It's a dystopia because for a lot of people, to life of a drone isn't particularly an appealing one (even if you are in real life).
[13:01] <Svetlana> But you don't starve.
[13:01] <Svetlana> People live longer.
[13:01] <Svetlana> On the other hand, look at Blade Runner.
[13:01] <Svetlana> People on earth are those that couldn't afford to live in the offworld colonies.
[13:02] <Yoshito> Right.
[13:02] <Svetlana> They aren't starving to death, but their environment's screwed up, they live in giant cities surrounded by the rubble of World War Three....
[13:02] <Svetlana> There's no sign that society is about to explode and everyone's going to die though.
[13:02] <Svetlana> And for all the people that left earth, it's not bad at all.
[13:03] <Svetlana> But stories about everyone working their job 9 to 5 and having nothing particularly interesting to them happen are not very dramatic. :)
[13:03] <Yoshito> True.
[13:05] <Svetlana> It's an oppressive society, but for the individual it's not a horrible one.
[13:05] <Svetlana> Keep in mind things are pretty crappy here and now for 75% of the world population.
[13:05] <Svetlana> They'd probably be pretty happy with 3 squares a day and a roof over their heads.
[13:06] <Yoshito> Indeed
[13:07] <Svetlana> So the way I pictured it, Caldari society is largely bland, uniform, rigid, oppressive....but not evil. And not exactly "bad" for most of the population.
[13:07] <Svetlana> Especially with a population shortage.
Another good example would be in Demolition Man, which while not being exactly a great movie, illustrates this idea perfectly. The people who fit in, go with the system, and do what they are told get along pretty well all the time. But to John Spartan, they seem like Stepford people, and people like Edgar Friendly, who go out of their way to reject the system, are plunged into a life of poverty and just scraping by, hunted like criminals (we'll get more to these folks in the next article). This is pretty common in most cyberpunk media; Case and Molly, in Neuromancer, are part of this class that have rejected corporate life, Shadowrun is a game geared towards playing these sort of characters, and while Max Headroom's Edison Carter is part of a corporate system, he makes his name most of the time by fighting against it, and the focus of the show is usually on society's rejects, like Blank Reg. Cyberpunk usually focuses on these people because people want a character who takes charge of his life, not one who is led around by his nose, and because in general, it's just a lot more interesting.
But for most people in these settings, life is not horrible -- it's certainly not horrible on the level where they are being ground down in some sort of nightmarish factory environment, fed gruel, bread, and a glass of water, and locked in a box for six hours when they aren't working. For most people, even those on the bottom, their life is certainly no worse than it would be for the average working-class American today -- and as I told Yoshito above, for most of the people in the world today, that's a pretty significant step up. What they get in economic prosperity, however, they pay for in loss of freedom. The corporations don't just employ you in the State, they own you. While that might seem to be entirely a bad thing from the employee's perspective, there's some advantages too; people tend to take better care of things they own. Corporations aren't likely to simply use people up and toss them away, especially if the available labor pool is small (as it must have been in the early days of the State, at the very least).
If you're a widget-assembler mechanic, and you work for Lai Dai, let's say, then yes, Lai Dai could fire you at any time and you'd be out on the street, without a place to live, without most of everything you own (even your money is mostly corporate scrip, so you probably can't spend it legally outside the corporation's territory), and probably with a huge emotional burden from being rejected by the corporation you thought would look out for you for the rest of your life. That is a pretty heavy anvil to have hanging over your head.
On the other hand, would you care? For now, at least, that widget-assembler needs to be fixed, and if it's not you doing it, it's going to be someone else. If the company fires you, they'll have to pay to train someone new to do it, and pay them more than the job they were doing before -- and probably someone to fill the job they were doing to, with all the costs that are included in that. So you can probably rest pretty easy knowing that as long as you do your job well (or nothing in the economy fundamentally changes making widgets obsolete), you will be employed. Plus, hey, it's hard to worry about your job when you have some many distractions kindly provided by the company. The company pumps you so full of feel-good advertising, cheap entertainment, easily-available chemical escapes (alcohol and "safe" drugs), and probably company brothels that you don't really mind the fact that your job isn't particularly spiritually rewarding or realize the axe hanging over you, except when they want you to.
Corporations aren't dumb -- they know that it's easier and cheaper to buy you off than to crack the whip over your head and make you work at the point of a gun. That's why the Amarr Empire's policy of slavery strikes the Caldari as rather pointless, at least for economic reasons -- all the money that the Amarr may save in labor costs is wasted in a need for increased security and the potential losses if the slaves revolt, not to mention that slave labor is not usually well motivated, and productivity and quality therefore tends to be low. For all intents and purposes, the average Caldari worker may be a corporate slave -- after all, most of the money they make it just going right back to their employer -- but the difference is that the Caldari corporations and society condition people not to care. All they see is the friendly corporation taking care of them, and that they owe it to the corporation to work their hardest so that the corporation continues to do well.
Okay, I think that's about it for that. Next time, I'll be talking about the outsiders in Caldari society -- the people who don't quite fit into the corporate model, either because they choose to or because they have rejected it. That will probably be getting towards the end of this particular series of articles, but I may look at writing more on some topics if people are interested. I'm also planning for a bit of an interlude on the differences between backstory, metaplot, and "stories" (in quotes because it's such a general term I'm going to have to define what I'm talking about), and why I think that CCP and a lot of other people have gotten them mixed up, and why that's to their detriment. As always, feel free to post comments here if you'd like, or in the Chatsubo thread.
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Thought I'd add a little something to this (and not edit the article so people knew this was added afterwards); if you want a cinematic example of how corporations can keep their folks in line, have a look at Outland, which isn't exactly a cinematic masterpiece (it's a sci-fi remake of High Noon), but it does show how companies keep workers in high-stress, dangerous positions happy and generally satisfied while working them hard.