Shadowrun: The Revolution

[CapnTthePirateG]

So I'm gonna preface this by saying I haven't played Shadowrun in a really long time and don't know much of the lore.

Would it be possible for the people of the Sixth World to rise up and overthrow the corporations and governments, and if so what kind of conditions would be needed?

[Stahlseele]

In theory?
No.
In Practice?
Fuck No.

That is the whole premise of the setting after all.

The Corps are basically stronger than some governments.
They have their armies, they have tactical weapons.
They have navies and airforces that rival that of mid sized countries.

But much worse:
they have all the ressources. You rebell, what happens?
The food trucks don't come to the city anymore.
Enjoy your mandatory diet untill you are docile again.

Technically, in that case, they would not even have to spend money on winning.
They would stop paying for stuff and closing it down.
See food trucks.
See privatized water and electricity.
The whole matrix, the world wide computer network that everything hangs on for survival is privately owned.
Want proof?
Lofwyr / Saeder-Krupp basically shut down europes matrix infrastructure when crash 2.0 was imminent to make it crashpoof for the most part.

[Whipstitch]

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's impossible. The fundamental question with revolutions always lies in figuring out who is on each side. Quite simply, if "the people" includes generals and military units then obviously you're in a helluva lot better shape than if you only have peaceniks.

[kzt]

Japan is the most likely to be able to bring their corps to heel, most likely time would be after they sponsored the mutiny in the bay area. They would need to partner with another top tier corp to pull it off fully.

[Username17]

Shadowrun posits relatively weak governments, relatively fractured nation states, and extremely powerful global corporate institutions. Germany, China, and The United States all have no chance of standing up to corporate interests because those countries no longer exist and have been chopped up into pieces that are individually much weaker than even the smallest corporation on the Corporate Court. And further, while the corporations are rivals with each other and even kill each other and feast upon their assets, not one of them does things intended to undermine the system - the Corporate Court itself was defied by a major corporation one time in the 2040s and it was kind of a big deal and the company in question hasn't done it again even though they routinely commit human sacrifice in order to build up magical power to predict future demand for consumer products. Meanwhile, the United Nations is kind of a joke and more than half the countries in the world don't even show up.

So there's basically no chance of the nations of the Earth getting together and rewriting global society to be without the Corporations. There are plenty of other routes for major change.

• Regions have told the corporations to fuck off, to varying levels of extent and success. While it's very difficult for political systems to successfully prevent the police and waste management from being privatized because the corporations have essentially limitless resources to bribe politicians to make that happen - it's still factually true that there's no local benefit to doing that. Having regional governments pick up their own trash and enforce their own laws is manifestly functional, and any sufficiently zealous government could make that choice at any time.
• Individual power in Shadowrun is pretty over the top. Random people can find themselves super charged by magic to the point where they are considered equivalent of nuclear arsenals by themselves. If you made a list of the one hundred most powerful things in Shadowrun, a lot of them would be corporations that own their own blue water navy, but some of them would be "this crazy guy in Venezuela who mostly talks to plants." With so much military might vested in insane people who are essentially independent of mundane concerns like supply chains and industrial bases, it is easy to imagine some very big wars having some very surprising outcomes.
• The global economy isn't working for most people. Shadowrun global GDP is lower than it is today. Most people in the world are living on rice and soy because poverty is absolutely endemic. Organizing people is difficult because fractured media and corporate propaganda and so on and so forth. But the world genuinely does have like five billion people who are willing to riot given sufficient pretext. Shadowrun has a lot of very big riots that affect whole continents at various points, and it's trivial to imagine one of those getting harnessed by someone or some group that has specific economic and political goals.
• The corporations are very rich and powerful, but the people who run the show aren't very numerous. Cross was removed from the corporate court after one plane full of important executives crashed and ten months worth of various sharks taking bites out of the corporation. Installing a new world order would require the murder or surrender of less than a thousand people.

Shadowrun posits that a sizable portion of people in North America adopted neo-First Nations religion over the course of a few years and then brought the nations of Canda, America, and Mexico to their knees with a decade long series of rebellions, riots, magical attacks, and assassinations. The Corporate Court is much more resilient to conventional national government powers of economic sanctions or military invasions, but there's no reason to believe it's particularly more resistant to large scale religious movements backed up by WMD-scale psychic powers.

-Username17

[Longes]

[*] Individual power in Shadowrun is pretty over the top. Random people can find themselves super charged by magic to the point where they are considered equivalent of nuclear arsenals by themselves. If you made a list of the one hundred most powerful things in Shadowrun, a lot of them would be corporations that own their own blue water navy, but some of them would be "this crazy guy in Venezuela who mostly talks to plants." With so much military might vested in insane people who are essentially independent of mundane concerns like supply chains and industrial bases, it is easy to imagine some very big wars having some very surprising outcomes.

I'm not a criminal. I didn't steal a car. I didn't sell heroin, or steal an old lady's purse. I built a quantum fusion reactor in 1978, and an orbital plasma gun in 1979, and a giant laser-eyed robot in 1984. I tried to conquer the world and almost succeeded, twelve times and counting.

When they take me away, it goes to the World Court — technically I'm a sovereign power. You've seen these trials—the Elemental, Rocking Horse, Dr. Stonehenge. They put you in a glass and steel box. I'm still dangerous, you know, even without my devices. People stare at you; they can't believe what you look like. They read out the long list of charges, like a tribute. There isn't really a trial—it's not like you're innocent. But if you're polite, then at the end they'll let you say a few words.

They'll ask questions. They'll want to know why. "Why did you . . . hypnotize the president?" "Why did you . . . take over Chemical Bank?"

I'm the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could with his life.

[PrometheanVigil]

"this crazy guy in Venezuela who mostly talks to plants."

Sounds specific. Source?

And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could with his life.

Sounds like the ending of the prologue to I Was A Teenage Drug Addict, if such a NYT bestseller memoir did actually exist.

[Dogbert]

Regardless of time period or country, revolutions are the same for everyone: they're NEVER "for the people by the people."

Revolutions require three things:
1) Hunger, which the sixth world has in spades.
2) Weapons, which aren't hard to come by.
3) AN AGITATOR/WARLORD, who is always a member of the ruling class, and is orchestrating revolution to seize the means of production for themselves. In this case, the one who'd fit the bill would be Aztech (and not just because I'm Mexican), they have the means (as much power as most of the Corporate Court combined, at least as of 4E) and a motivation (survival, because the other megacorps have been out to box Aztech for a while now, Aztech would need to make a move to overthrow the rest eventually).

HOWEVER

The thing with revolution is that Shadowrun is already a dungeonpunk, and the Punkpunk genre assumes a population with a previously broken spirit (kinda like Mexico's Boomers and X/Y generations) in order to ensure a sempiternal dystopia. Basic genre convention, a Punkpunk's population will NEVER, ever rise.

Granted, nothing keeps you from running a game at your table where you graduate the setting into a Post-dungeonpunk's Act 3, but that's on you.

[Stahlseele]

There were a few serious attempts at Revolution.
The Ghost-Dances. But they did not care for anything outside their borders.
The "American Revolution!" Same deal, just from the non native indian side.
Crash 1 and 2 were both started not on accident but on purpose by entities.
In an attempt to shift the power to their liking. That did not work out either.
Technically, Amazonia counts. As does the Magocratic Sibera?
There the shapeshifters and other sapient critters and the such rebelled.
But again, they did not care for anything other than what was in their borders.

You simply have no worldwide united block of people who share one goal.
Even in a total corporate war, there will not be total global war.

Even when the dragons staged their coup they were contained in italy.

The bugs. Contained to north america in general with some outliers otherwise.

Even the AI War did not change much of anything.

It will simply not happen in this universe.

[erik]

[quote="Dogbert]
Revolutions require three things:
1) Hunger, which the sixth world has in spades.
2) Weapons, which aren't hard to come by.
3) AN AGITATOR/WARLORD, who is always a member of the ruling class, and is orchestrating revolution to seize the means of production for themselves.[/quote]

[Dogbert]

There were a few serious attempts at Revolution.

Actually, a third Great Ghost Dance would be just the thing to start some serious shit, except the Indian Nations already got what they wanted, and having the rest of the world at each other's throats in a perpetual game of musical chairs keeps them off their lawn, so the current status quo is just peachy for them. In addition, the megacorps know better than to cross an opponent who can dance whole nations off the map so a clash isn't something that's happening any time soon... turns out all the nuyen in the world are little next to the power of the force after all (at least when backed by a whole nation of top-tier magi).

[kzt]

I did do an amusing sub-plot where the 10,000 Utes are trying to control the 350,000 Navajo and maintain their monopoly on power as shown in the books.

The original writers were careless idiots about a whole lot.

[Username17]

Even the AI War did not change much of anything.

It will simply not happen in this universe.

The thing where major events don't change things in surrounding areas is caused by authors not talking to each other, not by inherent resilience of the setting. When Pueblo (population 12 million) conquered the Los Angeles basin (population 18 million) and was subsequently written up with a population of 12 million and not 30 million, that's not because the setting is inherently resistant to population numbers changing, it's because the person making the demographics boxes didn't bother to read the part where another writer had more than doubled the size of the country. When the equipment lists talk about a reformed Czechoslovakia and the Marienbad Council plotline talking about the Czechs annexing Die Pfalz, and then the 6WA map uses the Google Maps borders of Czech Republic, including neither Slovakia nor Die Pfalz, that's not because the borders are inherently resistant to change, it's because the guy doing the map didn't consider (and possibly did not read) the written descriptions of border changes when making the graphics file.

The thing is that Shadowrun has always posited fairly rapid change and fairly fragile institutions. From the beginning of SR1 to the end of SR4 is about 25 years, and during that time we've seen the rise and fall of nations, corporations, religious movements, zombie uprisings, and ethnic identities. The setting only seems static because the 2nd and 3rd order changes those events would naturally bring have been largely ignored because of the "authors not talking to each other" issue.

If someone were to write a rant about life in the Pueblo Corporate Council right now for 5th edition, they would almost certainly go to some sourcebook that had a decent amount of information about the PCC. Like the NAN books or possible Neo Anarchist's Guide to North America. The fact that since those books have been written the PCC apparently conquered and absorbed a mega city with more people than their entire country (SoNA), fought a zombie uprising (YotC), had a great dragon conquer a major city that they owned a piece of as part of a treaty that ended a regional war (also YotC), were used as the global template for rebuilding the Matrix as a wireless mesh network (SF), became the power stronghold of two new Megacorps (NeoNet and Horizon) (SR4), and went full Leroy Jenkins on their largest neighbor by expelling the corporate presence of Aztechnology, and straight up absorbed the entirety of the Ute (population 12 million) by some means... and that's just shit that literally happened inside the actual borders of Pueblo. One might expect there to be effects from their neighbors having various wars, plagues, religious movements, demographic shifts, and corporate power struggles as well.

The "detailed" nation writeups that the next author goes back to are almost worthless. It's like trying to write up Croatia based on a tavelogue from 1984 Yugoslavia. Obviously the next person who writes about this stuff is going to be ignoring much of the major events that happened in and around the PCC while writing up the PCC. But that doesn't mean the PCC is resistant to change, it means that the people writing these books don't have a good internal event wiki nor do they have a decent global events director. They are probably going to write the nation's population as 12 million again, because that's what it said the last time it got a demographic text box. Or maybe the 38 million quoted in Sixth World Almanac, which still doesn't include the population they picked up from the Ute annexation.

-Username17

[Nath]

Crash 1 and 2 were both started not on accident but on purpose by entities. In an attempt to shift the power to their liking. That did not work out either.

I don't remember any source that suggest the 2029 Crash was purposely planned. The only source I know of, the Dragonheart Trilogy novels, says the 2029 virus was only intended to wipe out one or two corporate systems on Thomas Roxborough's behalf (though Dunkelzahn's role is not entirely clear). The more or less direct effect such as the overthrowing of the French government, the union of Canada and American states or the takeover of the Eastern European megacorporation Keruba International by Japanese investors (and the global shift that put the Japanese megacorporations, Renraku, Fuchi and MCT, in control of the technologies used to create the Matrix).

Shadows of Europe, Loose Alliances and SOX featured a plot about divination allowing members of the Black Lodge and their allies from the French nobility to anticipate the crash and set the stage for the military coup d'état, but the were only taking advantage of the crash itself.

Even when the dragons staged their coup they were contained in italy.

The "dragon coup" in Italy was Great Dragon Alamaise and some followers terrorizing and eating people in northwestern Italy. They were not contained: they never tried to move elsewhere. They specifically choose to do so in the only part of Europe (and possible the world, save Antarctica) that had no established or recognized political authority (legally that would be the only remnant of the 1946 Republic of Italy, as all the rest have been claimed by governments that joined the 2044 Italian Confederation). I'm still not sure what was supposed to be the meaning behind that choice. But their territorial claim was somewhat limited in scope when you compare it to Hualpa control of Amazonia and Dunkelzahn election to the presidency of the UCAS.

Actually, a third Great Ghost Dance would be just the thing to start some serious shit, except the Indian Nations already got what they wanted, and having the rest of the world at each other's throats in a perpetual game of musical chairs keeps them off their lawn, so the current status quo is just peachy for them.

In 2014, the Sovereign American Indian Movement was claiming the entirety of USA and Canadian territories and the removal of all the people from European, African or Asian descent. That's not what they got with the Treaty of Denver. So it's quite possible that there was a faction within the SAIM that wasn't satisfied, and may possible still exist in the NAN.

[OgreBattle]

What makes living under corporate rule different/worse than living under a normal dystopian government anyways? Is it like being Indian in the 1800's?

[deaddmwalking]

Governments nominally care about the people - even autocratic regimes typically provide education, for instance. If you can't make a profit it from it, corporations don't care. There are no 'rural electrification' projects when corps are in charge because nobody gets subsidized.

[hyzmarca]

Governments nominally care about the people - even autocratic regimes typically provide education, for instance. If you can't make a profit it from it, corporations don't care. There are no 'rural electrification' projects when corps are in charge because nobody gets subsidized.

You can make a profit from education, though. You need educated workers to do all the jobs that robots can't do. And as Robots get better and better your workers have to get more and more educated. Megacorps do have a huge incentive to provide education. And Corporations will want to have strong internal markets, because that way they keep their worker's wages instead of giving them to other corps. If I pay you a million nuyen a year and you spend it at the Renrakyu Arcology Mall, then I've lost a million nuyen. If I pay you a million nuyen a year and you spend it at my company store, then I have lost nothing, I'm essentially not paying you at all.

At the megacorp level, the economics changes drastically, they have internal economies comparable to modern countries.

Basically, the Megacorp is where Capitalism becomes Socialism. Its a planned economy where the Corp provides you everything you need to be a good employee. Including dark sarcasm in the class room.

[Omegonthesane]

Governments nominally care about the people - even autocratic regimes typically provide education, for instance. If you can't make a profit it from it, corporations don't care. There are no 'rural electrification' projects when corps are in charge because nobody gets subsidized.

You can make a profit from education, though. You need educated workers to do all the jobs that robots can't do. And as Robots get better and better your workers have to get more and more educated. Megacorps do have a huge incentive to provide education. And Corporations will want to have strong internal markets, because that way they keep their worker's wages instead of giving them to other corps. If I pay you a million nuyen a year and you spend it at the Renrakyu Arcology Mall, then I've lost a million nuyen. If I pay you a million nuyen a year and you spend it at my company store, then I have lost nothing, I'm essentially not paying you at all.

At the megacorp level, the economics changes drastically, they have internal economies comparable to modern countries.

Basically, the Megacorp is where Capitalism becomes Socialism. Its a planned economy where the Corp provides you everything you need to be a good employee. Including dark sarcasm in the class room.

You only need enough educated workers to saturate the pool of employees so that your current crop of educated workers are easily replaceable if they complain about having to work 90-hour weeks for peanuts in an oven. (The fact that it's probably not efficient to have people who use their brain to serve you work such long shifts notwithstanding.)

You're hitting a serious point of diminishing returns if you're reduced to scouting outside large population centres for next year's wage slave harvest.

[deaddmwalking]

There are 'for profit' educational companies.

As a corporation, you benefit from having trained workers. From a strictly logical standpoint, you'd expect corporations to have good training. But instead, we see that they PREFER to expect workers to come to them ALREADY TRAINED, then complain when they can't find anyone that has the skills they need.

Training is one of those things that everyone benefits from having it done, but everybody benefits MORE if someone else does it.

[Iduno]

There are 'for profit' educational companies.

Yeah, but they also collect government subsidies.

Besides, education is way more expensive than charging your employees $2,000 per rating for skillwires that cost you $500 to make. Even if you give them a 10% discount for having it taken directly from their paycheck. Then, you work them to death, harvest the skillwires, and sell it on to the next slave.

The schools in SR aren't there to educate how to do things, they for indoctrination. Why hire some jerk off the street, when you can hire someone whose family hasn't known the outside world for generations, and who *believes* the corporate line?

[Username17]

Mega Corporations are indeed the point at which government concerns and corporate concerns overlap, merge, and change into one another. If you are very rich and powerful, it makes sense to dump sludge into the lake because no one can stop you. But if you are so rich that you own the lake, it makes a lot less sense to dump sludge into it because you are fucking up your own lake.

One basic fact of Shadowrun's economy that gets surprisingly little play is that the big corporations are right on that line. So sometimes they would like to get involved in education because there's public or private funding that they would like to leech off of. Sometimes they would like to get into education because they are big enough that there isn't a body of workers they can rely upon in the next generation other the ones they train "in house". Sometimes they see like a vampire squid trying to suck life out of the state, sometimes they fucking are the state.

That's most clear in the question of security. The police in most jurisdictions are contractors. The local governments hire security firms to act as their police. But sometimes Ares or Aztechnology just owns enough stuff that the police become a public utility again - the corporation provides the police for "free" because the local power structure they are charging for the protection is themselves.

These sorts of changes have historical precedents. Consider the position of the government with regards to labor unions in the Peoples Republic of China, for example. Mao's PRC was totally all-in pro-union, until it suddenly became completely brutally anti-union. As long as the unions were negotiating with capitalist warlords, the government was happy to take their side. The instant that the unions started finding themselves negotiating with state-owned capital, the upper hand was on the other foot. We could easily imagine the Chinese state flipping back to supporting labor unions if it finds itself needing to rein in the power of the various oligarchs that have been spawned in the last thirty years.

Corporations of a power described in Shadowrun are sort-of and sometimes the government in a structural way. And that means that they sort-of and sometimes are incentivized to support things we'd think of as public goods like transportation infrastructure, food security, and education. And sometimes they are incentivized to tunnel the resources out of such endeavors and run off with a sack that has a big nuyen sign on it.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

What makes living under corporate rule different/worse than living under a normal dystopian government anyways? Is it like being Indian in the 1800's?

Work in any of the 50 places part of the Best Place to Work mafia and you'll know the answer.

[maglag]

Corporations of a power described in Shadowrun are sort-of and sometimes the government in a structural way. And that means that they sort-of and sometimes are incentivized to support things we'd think of as public goods like transportation infrastructure, food security, and education. And sometimes they are incentivized to tunnel the resources out of such endeavors and run off with a sack that has a big nuyen sign on it.

-Username17

To be fair, there's not exactly a lack of governments that do the exact same thing, driving their countries to ruin only to run away with all the treasure they can carry at the last moment.

[Shrieking Banshee]

From my personal experience, it's naive to think that governments inherently care more about people. In my country, the government ended up scaring away all investors through negligence, corruption, and instability.

[Longes]

Corporations of a power described in Shadowrun are sort-of and sometimes the government in a structural way. And that means that they sort-of and sometimes are incentivized to support things we'd think of as public goods like transportation infrastructure, food security, and education. And sometimes they are incentivized to tunnel the resources out of such endeavors and run off with a sack that has a big nuyen sign on it.

-Username17

To be fair, there's not exactly a lack of governments that do the exact same thing, driving their countries to ruin only to run away with all the treasure they can carry at the last moment.

True, but Shadowrun megacorps are generally run by immortal atomic supermen who are here to stay.