What would Cyber-Feudalism would be like?

When the aristocracy came into possession of land, the principle benefit was the surplus it produced (in the form of taxes), which could be traded/sold to the nearest town for year long credit. The more land you own, and the more valuable the land, the more taxes you can collect. You can even make an argument that land represents a share in the Kingdom. Taxes and stock dividends work surprisingly similar.

TRON, but with warring factions of programs.

Having a megacorp issue crypto currency is something of a do-loop. The entire point of any company is to make money and now they can literally make as much money as they want with the push of a button. The money will be entirely worthless but they'll be making it at an incredible rate.

Alternatively, the company could pay their workers in crypto-currency and it's back to the bad old days of company towns.

You could, in theory, back crypto in goods the company produces. For example, every Musk Dollar represents a place in the queue to buy a Tesla. However, this runs counter to the basic definition of cryptocurrencies.

>When the aristocracy came into possession of land, the principle benefit was the surplus it produced (in the form of taxes), which could be traded/sold to the nearest town for year long credit. The more land you own, and the more valuable the land, the more taxes you can collect. You can even make an argument that land represents a share in the Kingdom. Taxes and stock dividends work surprisingly similar.

There's only really one thing off: taxes was mostly in the form of goods and labour. selling these was often ineffective because the value of money was not very stable. Rather, what made the aristocracy powerful was that they could use these goods and labor to enforce their status. Their food supply was more stable, their power was greater etc. There was no middle class, and the sort of armor a knight wore would cost more than a peasant made in years.

But in that sense, if the megacorp is a privately traded company (meaning access to it's shares and thus ownership is limited) then having shares of said company would be the rough equivalent. There may be no need for further payment in shares, but rather cyberpunk "knights" would have their fortunes obviously intertwined with the fortune of the company. The better the company fares, the more they get paid from dividends.

But does that stock pay a dividend? I know this sounds silly but a dividend could be used to pay for operating costs while a non-dividend share would be mostly useful for the shareholder's rights. Actually, the shareholder's rights could get pretty interesting.

Right now I cant post much but if you want to find cyber corpo feudalism, I recomend you mutant chronicles, three factions are very feudal about it: Imperial(british company), bahaus(german flavour) and Mishima(Japanise) maybe will give you some ideas

The dividend could be in the form of "cash equivalent contributions", that is, supplies instead of a currency (which my not exist). This would be esp. useful if the "cyberknight" concept were a practice that originated in the border volumes, that is, far from banking centers.

Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 9th 2023 at 11:53:54 AM

>But does that stock pay a dividend?

If you want to maintain the analogy, then the shares should entitle them to a portion of the profits, as well as decision rights.

Which prompts to my mind the title: "The Round Table of Directors" :P

(Hmm... Taking the title seriously for a moment, I suppose that they'd be the ambassadors to the king/CEO of the knights with the greatest shares.)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Feb 9th 2023 at 9:23:04 PM

This corporate-feudalism thing is working out far better than I thought it would.

There was some initial skepticism at first, but we seem to have gotten past that.

I mean we established early on that cyber-feudalism cannot exist and then moved on to "ok but how do we create the aesthetics of feudalism in cyberpunk".

I would say that we have rather more than just the "aesthetics" of feudalism here: we have the structure and functioning of it, too.

Is it literal, one-to-one feudalism? No. But I don't feel that it need be; I think that what we're currently describing is easily a close enough analogy to be reasonably called "cyber feudalism".

Or put another way, it's not "feudalism exactly as we knew it, but in a cyberpunk setting", but rather "the structure and function of feudalism as it might manifest in a cyberpunk setting".

I think the question raised by devak is whether we are defining "feudalism" as a form of society (how I use the term in this thread) or as an aesthetic (castles, knights, kings)?

I would say that I'm defining it as a sort of society—but not requiring that the modified term "cyber-feudalism" adhere exactly to the original form.

Put it this way: the term email—"electronic mail"—is a modified version of the term "mail". In many ways, email is fundamentally different to standard mail: there's no physical medium (more or less); no call for postage or the like; no postman delivering it; etc.

But that doesn't mean that "electronic mail" is an impossibility. Rather, it means that the term draws on the similarities—on textual messages of arbitrary length being sent in discrete units, to be received on an individual basis.

Likewise, I'm suggesting that "cyber-feudalism" doesn't have to be an exact match for historical feudalism in order to qualify as more than an aesthetic paint-job of standard cyberpunk.

Rather, it can take the structure of historical feudalism: a central government with limited ability to project force quickly, using loyalty and non-monetary rewards to have lesser governors rule regions under its name but otherwise by their own hand.

As I and others outlined above, we could have a system in which planetary corporate governments take the roles of kings, but in which space-travel is sufficiently slow and/or difficult that they can't just turn up on any extra-planetary doorstep at a moment's notice. They therefore use loyalty and other non-monetary rewards to have lesser governors (the aforementioned "knights") rule regions—asteroids, stations, or lesser planets, perhaps—in their name, but otherwise independently.

Thus we have something that constitutes a modified form of feudalism: the form and substance, if not the exact details.

>Is it literal, one-to-one feudalism? No. But I don't feel that it need be; I think that what we're currently describing is easily a close enough analogy to be reasonably called "cyber feudalism".

In other words we have cyberpunk with a feudal aesthetic.

You're not reading carefully enough. They already explained that what they are describing is a type of economic system, not an aesthetic.

"Non-cash stock dividends as land tax" isn't "Knight with a tablet and a VR helmet".

I don't just mean aesthetic in the most literal form of "paint job", i mean that the systems and such described are *also* essentially a paintjob. It's cyberpunk cosplaying feudalism. Stock as a means of power may be analogous (since i pointed this out myself) to giving land, but it's not actually the same. It's not merely that vassals had a say in how things were run, vassals ran their own place and the king had very little say in it. The main way there was a coherent kingdom at all was because the king had strong personal ties to his vassals. They were his vassals primarily because land was given to family, friends, and loyal subordinates. And maintaining these relations was one of the king's primary jobs. It's no coincidence that centuries of power consolidation by kings eventually led to the destruction of the feudalistic system and a return to a more powerful centralized state. Centralized power and great state capacity are antithetical to feudalism. But cyberpunk relies on, no in fact *demands* a powerful central authority whereas feudalism is defined by the absence of that authority.

The two ideas are fundamentally incompatible.

Edited by devak on Feb 15th 2023 at 7:02:22 PM

I'd like to disagree on the grounds that different levels of the state (e.g individual planets vs galaxies, or city vs continent) can and do have different amounts of state strength. International organizations like the UN vs individual countries for example.

Keep in mind that Feudalism was an Ad Hoc attempt to centralize power when it wasn't possible to exert direct control. It was mostly a set of agreements between stronger and weaker powers for mutual defense and cooperation.

Totally? yeah, that it cant be done but with some elements here and there? yeah.

like.

"cyberpunk relies on, no in fact *demands* a powerful central authority whereas feudalism is defined by the absence of that authority."

This is not true, cyberpunk exist in a void of state that corpos fill in and constantly bicker between each other and themselves a lot, you can see that a lot in almost all cyberpunk media: the ten grand in shadowrun does all the time, so mutant chroniclers, edgerunner plot is cause in part because faraday want to climp the social ladder into the closet thing to a nobility, hell cyberpunk 2077 plot hinge in pretty much a feudal dispute of sorts between the arasaka family.

Cyberpunk often used a very loose system so backstabbing and killing can be a justified way to the top.

Now let see what elements a sort of corpo feudalism have:

-extra territoriality would be a good starting point since it help to define more or less something it belogn to the corpo in a way they wont back without a fight.

-Brand name means everything: something you see for royalty is how they took their own name and pride seriously, like the british family shut down a documental call royal family on the basis that if show the royal family as too comon it may lose the mysthique they have over people which is why fantasy sticks with kings. In this case the members need to surrond themselves with it, lost of honor, face, status whatever can be brutal.....which let us to....

-Corpo cultism: if anyone here saw severance, would remenber quite revence people have for their leaders and in a way this is probably the mayor break with corporation: in a corporation, specially in cyberpunk the people doing it are just part of the machine while in feudalism who is who matters A LOT.

Now with tropes, if need to have loyalty to the corpo about all things or a least cant just change side in the same way a freelancer does today, loyalty need to be show in armour, weapons and that kind of stuff that said "you represent me".

To align stock options with vassalage more closely, the gift of a portfolio would have to be tied not only to a particular corporation or network of corporations, but also to a particular territory. So it's specifically stock in "Planet X", a wholly owned subsidiary of "Interstellar Inc." Or rather, it may simply be all the valuable resources on Planet X that are owned by Interstellar (and gifted to their local general manager, Sir Spaceknight), it amounts to the same thing. That makes Planet X a kind of company town, and everyone living on it is working for (and deeply indebted to) "Planet X, Incorporated." Sir S has a lot of personal discretion regarding how he chooses to run affairs on Planet X, so long as the resources flow, and taxes get paid. Of course, some other corporation might try to take over Planet X in whole or part, or just conduct raids occasionally, so Sir S and his security team need to be prepared for some actual combat, and in this culture, corporate overlords are expected to lead from the front, hence the power armor.

Am I missing anything important?

So you would argue that email is not in fact mail, but some other thing with the aesthetics of mail?

To my mind, that's far too strict an approach to such a definition.

\*shrugs* But I don't really want to argue such meta-matters, so let us agree to disagree: you hold that what we're discussing is "cyberpunk with feudal aesthetics", while I hold that it's "a feudal system modified for cyberpunk"—and that's okay.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Feb 17th 2023 at 10:21:05 PM

Oh shit, I just realized that Dune actually has elements of this because the Emperor and most of the nobility all held shares in CHOAM.

Edited by Belisaurius on Feb 17th 2023 at 6:36:42 AM

>So you would argue that email is not in fact mail, but some other thing with the aesthetics of mail?

Not sure how to put this but yes? E-mail is nothing like mail except in name, and things like inbox icons are deliberately using the aesthetics of an envelope. One is a message system centering around distributing physical pieces of paper with a written message. The other is an electronic messaging system. The only thing they really have in common is that they are a messaging system.

They are, in fact, very different things.

>I'd like to disagree on the grounds that different levels of the state (e.g individual planets vs galaxies, or city vs continent) can and do have different amounts of state strength. International organizations like the UN vs individual countries for example.

I... am not sure what your argument is? The UN isn't a state, it has zero state capacity. Different states have different state capacities sure. the Qing dynasty in ancient china had both far greater state capacity and centralization than contemporary Europe and it's feudal system.

>This is not true, cyberpunk exist in a void of state that corpos fill in

They exist in a vacuum of the traditional state, yes, but in turn become the new state. To go with the Cyberpunk Edgerunners example, corpos control law enforcement and act as the de facto government. But as a company they *need* state capacity, and we see plenty of that. The rules are enforced, citizens are part of a census, there's a functioning money system etc. There's a lot of state power on display, even if that is enacted by a megacorp.

>Keep in mind that Feudalism was an Ad Hoc attempt to centralize power when it wasn't possible to exert direct control.

Yup, and i have the impression people aren't quite aware just how little that control was.