Topic Review: Megacorps

[Rynn]

Hope you like.

I like! Thanks for taking this on, I have a few minor comments but otherwise I think this is great.

The 'megacorps' gained their name, not from the size of their assets

Suggest making this "not just from the size." In canon they're usually described as big and I think having them big in all aspects will cause less confusion for new readers.

One of the most successful of these experiments was the development of the ‘micro-share.’ Sophonts could purchase partial shares of company stock at a proportionally reduced price and returning a proportionally reduced dividend.

I do like this idea and I think it's an interesting one. I'd suggest mixing the AI CEOs and micro-share ownership model together earlier in the text. The micro-share feature is what gets it to spread, the CEO AIs are what make them distinct IMO. I think both of those attributes are worth introducing earlier in the article before going into the details.

In and of themselves these micro-shares counted for very little when compared against all the shares a company might offer. But over time even individuals of modest means could accumulate enough shares (and therefore dividends) to augment their regular income or even supplant it entirely without any need for further work on their part. More importantly, while the individual portfolio of any one micro-investor might be insignificant, the sheer number of such investors meant that the cumulative total of their portfolios - and therefore their voting power - could be quite large indeed. Groups of microinvestors - coordinated (some might say manipulated) via social media and specialized online voting and feedback systems began exercising more and more control over the direction, policies, and even day to day operations of the corporations they invested in. The spread of DNI and mental augmentation technologies only accelerated and expanded this process.

Minor suggestion but you could perhaps include a line of this model also being used in the public sector, but with citizen stakeholders. E.g. an AI supervisor of a habitat education sector with parents and students as the "shareholders." Just to hint at some other social changes that we could go into at a later date.

While the number of megacorp employees was dropping, the number of shareholders (including shareholders living partly or entirely on dividend income) grew. DNI based voting, surveys and (on the other side) attempts to influence shareholders to vote for a particular direction for each company became ever more sophisticated and took up ever more time and attention for a subset of the shareholders. This led to two trends within the megacorp 'ecosystem'

I'd suggest mentioning something along the lines of governments/media of the time encouraging basic income to be invested in the increasing "automated market." Perhaps with a line like "critics at the time debated whether this was an effectual means of social mobility, a question that later historians would struggle over." Something like that to give us a bit more wiggle room and hint at the wider timeline implications.

Shareholders voted in AI CEOs or even entire Boards of Directors to manage the day to day operations of the megacorp more efficiently and with less need of the shareholders attention.

I think the automation is really something that would set this apart. This is a time period that is transitioning towards post-scarcity. From their perspective a commonly owned automated market may be the model that takes them forward (too bad for the big T). That's a really unique idea that I've only seen in one published work (whose name I am forgetting but I'm sure it will come to me at a random time).

EDIT: Corporation Wars by Ken McCleod. A trilogy that features a post-scarcity world that operates with a free market of AI/Robotic companies all jointly owned by the public.

While the majority of the megacorps were destroyed by the Technocalypse, and the majority of the survivors were in turn destroyed by the Great Expulsion, there were exceptions. Mostly among those companies based in the Outer System - or having major satellite offices there - and occasionally in the form of Inner System entities that a combination of foresight, planning, and sheer luck allowed to reach Luna, Mars, or the Belt sufficiently intact to operate in a form at least approximating their former organizational structure.

I'd suggest mentioning something like "Company habs." Some megacorps may have had private habitats for certain tiers of membership, and these may have survived if they were sophisticated enough (or conversely simple and robust enough).

That's all I think the combined AI-CEO and widespread ownership are two very cool ways of going about this. Going further I have ideas for an economy run entirely like this, but I might fold that into an update I'm working on with Astronomer for a planet that has strong NoCoZo affiliation (the article in question treats the zone very much in our old canon style, and something like this could really help bring it to the modern interpretations).