Corporate Dehumanization II

Murderbot, Chain-Gang All-Stars and real life

Dystopian?

While I won't get into definitions again, I think it's important to remember that many of the terrifying societal problems we see in fictional stories are all too real for many people alive today. Even exaggerated and over-the-top stories are probably closer to reality than we tend to think at first glance.

At its core, speculative fiction is a reflection of our societal fears and anxieties. It gives authors and readers alike a medium to explore and confront ideas by disconnecting them from reality and presenting them through a different set of eyes. Its purpose is to help us think more and in new ways about these issues, not to help us forget about them.

I labelled this post as Part II because I previously looked at corporate dehumanization as depicted in the show Severance, plus I've actually already discussed Murderbot & Chain-Gang together in another recent piece. (As always, you can find a somewhat-organized list of my work here.)

Murderbot & the Preservation team, by asterion-out-of-the-maze

Life as a Commodity

Where Severance depicts characters stripped down to their function as members of the workforce, Murderbot and Chain-Gang All-Stars explicitly show living beings as commodities – or slaves, as characters in both books call out.

Chain-Gang doesn't have to reach very far in its depiction of American prisoners as slaves: the prison-industrial complex in our own world is already built on a profiteering, corporate system that keeps a massive population imprisoned and working indefinitely while paying them a small fraction of minimum wage.

What author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has added is the option for prisoners to forgo their sentence by joining the CAPE (Criminal Action Penal Entertainment) program, through which they could technically see freedom in three years time – provided they win thirty-six gladiatorial deathmatches and also avoid being killed outside of the arena by a jealous or ambitious 'teammate'.

Called 'Links' on 'Chains', everything from the athletes' bodies to their trauma and criminal record are objectified and commodified by sponsors, media and the CAPE program itself. Their short lives and inevitable deaths are points on corporate earnings charts; their humanity stripped entirely away by the simple fact they are criminals (even if, as with an estimated 5% in real life, they're actually innocent). Adjei-Brenyah pulls various aspects of this system from the NFL & WWE, where profits have always come before athlete health, in addition to collegiate sports, where unpaid players generate billions in corporate revenue each year.

Art from this Esquire article

As I've written about a few times, Murderbot depicts a galaxy shaped by the existence of the Corporation Rim, where capitalism and contracts rule all. Our titular protagonist, a cyborg Security Unit, starts off the series as a literal commodity, rented out to protect (and spy on) other corporate clients. When the Preservation team rescue Murderbot from this existence and bring it to their relative utopia, they must do so by purchasing it; even then, it's only a legal person within their non-corporate territory.

On my first read – and informed by similar narratives in Ann Lackie's Imperial Radch and Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire – this distinction about the rights of various artificial intelligences was my main takeaway. After all, we experience this story through the eyes of one of those characters.

But both my re-read and the first four episodes of the Murderbot adaptation have opened my eyes to how bad most humans have it in the Corporation Rim as well. Early on, the series shows desperate workers signing contracts they don't have the education to understand, consigning themselves and possibly their descendants to lives of underpaid labour. (If you saw Alien: Romulus, protagonist Rain's situation is pretty much the same.)

It's only later in the series that we learn about corporate takeovers and salvage rights. Sure it sucks to be in indentured servitude, but it gets a lot worse when your company goes under and your entire distant operation or colony is forgotten about. Centuries later, when your descendants are finally getting on their feet, another corporation can then swoop in, claim them as salvage and force them into slave labour.

We already live in a world where lives are built and broken on the shifting tides of the market, but rarely are the stakes quite this terrifyingly high. Nonetheless, human trafficking is a real issue: this segment from John Oliver about the (essentially) enslaved workers responsible for most of the spam text messages we receive lives in my mind rent-free.

"The Future of Work: Compulsory", art by Tracy J. Lee

Humanity

I'm sure there are events in our world's history – perhaps happening right now – that make even the CAPE program and the Corporation Rim look downright utopian in comparison. It's important to remember that while these potential futures are terrifying and exaggerated in their own ways, both are based on real fears and I think both are eerily believable.

Both stories also have groups fighting this system: in Chain-Gang it's a group of protestors not unlike you might pass on the street, in Murderbot it's a university-backed team fighting corporate claims to salvage planets and people. In each case, it's ultimately about fighting for and educating people about human rights. So join those protestors, and try not to support companies already well on their way to mirroring these practices.

Because if we don't fight for our rights, we won't have them for long.

Thanks for reading and until next time <3