Role of the megacorps in the late timeline

[Drashner1]

I like the ideas discussed above. Given existing articles on postscarcity economic concerns, megacorps existing as an evolution or "mission creep" of RL for-profit businesses into something else, rather than a direct continuation of corporate capitalism in space makes sense.

One suggestion I might add is that minor polities, particularly those originally written in the early phase of the project with somewhat ambiguous or outdated mentions of transapients, might be good places to experiment with writing megacorp/Great House/groupmind S1 equivalent societies.

I really really like your suggestions here! It actually triggered some additional notions combined with something posted on another thread and led to the following post, which I'm copying here since it doesn't really fit with the main focus of the thread where I first posted it:

I'm increasingly of a mind that the OAUP should start looking into exploring other types of transapient experience/intelligence/insertcorrecttermhere beyond or apart from our long running exploration of transapients. Both at the level of the animin (and whatever other transapient adjacent entities the founding members may have left lying around from the early days or that we can think up in future) and also at the level of exploring the 'landscape' of alternate forms of transhumanism as is being dabbled in over on the thread about the nature of the megacorps (and Great Houses and who knows what else). Madine's post from today - as well as extherian's on the OA culture thread - actually inspired a whole new train of thought around this. Smile

We've always mainly focused on the 'vertical' axis of the toposophic landscape (S1, S2, etc.) but have historically done comparatively little with the 'horizontal' axis beyond speaking in terms of DNI and augments increasing what different variants of humans can do. More recently Rynn has been leading the charge on exploring the possibilities that come to light when motivations and minds can be modified fairly quickly, easily, and safely via psychoware.

Moving even further afield (and this is the bit inspired by Madine's and extherian's posts) we have civs like the Emple-Dokcetics - but not a whole lot else in the space of 'other ways of being transhuman' that start to step well away from the 'human centric/modo centric' explorations we usually do.

Long story short (I know - too late!): We've spent a lot of time and attention exploring a particular type or range of the transhuman condition. But there are potentially lots of other types/ranges we could also explore within the OA setting and even within the framework of parts of the EG that are there - but not really fleshed out, such as the various 'minor' and 'associated' and 'non-aligned' polities (or even some of the 'major empires' we've not fleshed out) that currently don't have much more than a name or maybe a few paragraphs of description dating from 20 years ago.

Thoughts?

Todd