Big Tech companies are finally getting the names we thought dystopian megacorps would have

I’m just waiting for Omni Consumer Products (OCP) to open in Detroit.

Or Allied Commercial-Media Enterprises
- Or E-Corp
Omni is actually a Swedish news aggregator. They just need to expand and change a bit.
Corporate Consumer Products already makes everything in China… hmm

Don't forget Truth Social. Straight out of ministry of truth.

And Taco Bell already exists so there's that
- u/Wogi has been fined three credits for violation of the verbal decency act.
That's not new, it's just new to English. I lot of Soviet countries had pravda.
Especially when their main selling point is that they don't do fact checking.

Now we just need companies to have their own militaries and then for someone to nuke one of their towers. We'd have the whole nine yards.

"He burned down half the city just to prove he was right and burned the other half just for fun."
- Source? Please.
No thanks.
- Too bad. There's no chance this doesn't happen after the agricultural collapse. Well, the first bit, anyway.
Does killing union activists on the behalf of Coca-Cola count?

The United Fruit Company aka Chiquita Brands International Sàrl asking the CIA to overthrow the Guatemala government, also count?

Edit: Fix links
I could absolutely see a not-too-distant future where competitors of megacorps have their assets attacked by the government’s military.
- This has already happened many times. It’s just that those “competitors” are usually referred to as “ordinary people.”
Pepsi had their own navy for a while
- You should snopes check that one. They did acquire non working ships as payment, but they scrapped em. What you said is technically correct, but oversells it.
Wake up Samurai...
Amazon is a standing military or armed navy away from beating the all-time high score.

I still think it's hilarious that Facebook renamed to Meta, and anything they did with the "metaverse" was a huge failure. It's like they didn't learn their lesson from Second Life.

Second Life isn't owned by Meta. And just by the amount of money Second Life earned, and somehow still earns to this day, it was a pretty huge success. The only real success in the "virtual world" field. It's not surprising somebody else would try to emulate that success.
- They don't own it, that means they can't know about it?
They should have learned a lesson from Second Life. It was so much graphically better, more sophisticated and immersive even in 2d .

Users had a world where they could build, interact, buy land, make, buy, sell items and art, go to concerts, have virtual sex, attend classes, build a castle , explore, etc, etc. It would have been awesome in 3d.

This was like 20 years ago! Meta had such an opportunity there but instead had half avatars and chat rooms. It sucked.
- A lot of it comes down to the Quest processors as they are just not very powerful. It had to be backwards comparable with the 835 Snapdragon processor form the Quest 1 and that is a 2016 processor. Makes senses it was so basic as they wanted to have many avatars on screen at once so things had the get cut…like legs. Ahahahaha.
  
  I am not defending Meta, but just stating the facts and one of those facts is Zuck has said this is a long game and that it will be at least a decade before the Metaverse becomes something half compelling. I agree with that assessment. It is just not there today, but it will be.

Don't forget the conglomerate names:

Microsoft-Activision-Blizzard

"Well, there was a bit of a stir when it was decided that since corporations are people, they could technically run for president. But President Walt Disney-Pepsi-Comcast has done wonders for the economy... given that it's... now the economy"
- Don't blame me I voted for Tim Apple
Shinra-Mishima-Zaibatsu
- Wayland-Yutani
- Omni consumer products.
I used to call it ActiBlizz. What am I supposed to do now?
- MS ActiBlizz sounds like the next addition to MS Office but they already renamed it to "Microsoft 365"
- Xbox
- Microsoft Excel

Oh and don't forget the cheeky suckers that explicitly named their nutritional supplement company Soylent Nutrition, Inc.

i do like soylent tho. i'm gonna go shake one up rn
- Now you know what happened to all those immigrant kids at the border
- You shouldn't shake it if it's made from babies.
- is it better than Huel? Huel tasted awful
It's like whoever is offering up these names and convincing them to use them is trying to tell consumers and workers something in the countries they work and operate. That a rental service is literally named Hertz is pretty on the nose even without all the movie culture references.
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- I'm not too versed on movie references but certainly know about Hertz Rent-a-car, what's the joke here?
- Hail Avis!

Pretty much. Welcome to the fucking future I guess. There's no flying cars and green cities and happiness or bloody universal healthcare, instead we have corpos trying to turn us into their consumer slaves and governments turning authoritarian. Just do what you're told and buy more. Don't ask questions don't think just browse TikTok, improve your social credit score, and imprint more ads into your psyche until WW3.

We're walking into hell with our eyes wide open fuck me it hurts.

I read this with the voice of Johnny Silverhand
- Who is just another product of a shitty corporation
or bloody universal healthcare

I guess it depends on where you live. It's not true of the whole world.
- Murica. Yeehaw.
It's definitely not all the utopia some thought it would be, but it's also definitely a lot better than the dystopia some predicted. Also, I personally prefer the internet to flying cars.
There are flying quadcopter taxis testing in Dubai

The only thing really keeping them from flying rich people in from their gated community and landing in the street in front of a restaurant is regulation.

With better battery life they'd be more flexible, but they're already technically capable, and compact enough.
Also when you try to speak against all this shit people ridicule you and ignore you. If they cant do that easily then its always just apathy and "it is what it is" whining.
There's no [...] bloody universal healthcare [...]

Found the American! /hj

My first ISP in the late 90s was Skynet Online.

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- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(satellite)
  
  The UK already owns it. I’m pretty sure Terminator takes the name from the UK military satellite network. And SpaceX has launched Skynet satellites for them before so there is probably some agreement.
  
  The NSA also already has a surveillance program named SKYNET, which uses machine learning. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKYNET_(surveillance_program)
  
  That one I’m pretty sure was named after the Terminator program.

Those names were always parodying the names of actual corporations. I'm pretty sure Weyland Yutani is basically supposed to be like Lockheed Mitsubishi

Normal people reading dystopian fiction: “wow, the author really portrayed well the downfall of humanity if we were to go down the wrong path”

Billionaires reading dystopian fiction: “hey, you know what…”

When Weyland corp announce a merger with Yutani industries it's time to worry.

Or when Arisaka starts moving in on Militech turf.
- Ngl I wouldn’t mind being chromed

Waiting for Weyland-Yutani...

You want a trip down “is this a cyberpunk dystopia company” name, go check out the data brokers on the data broker registries in Vermont and California.

Acxiom, Experian, TransUnion, Oracle Data Cloud, CoreLogic, Axle, Equifax, Foursquare Labs, Inc., OnAudience, Nielsen, ... ... ... ...
California itself has about 517

When runaway capitalism is the norm and all the shareholders care about is that bottomline, then they will lean into the dystopia and be blatant about it when nobody is stopping them laughing all the way to the bank.

I always thought this for the financial market: Standard & Poor

Moody

The Fed (as in, the past tense of feed)

fannie mae and freddie mac have this distinct dystopyian taste to me
- Those are just nicknames people use because the real names are long and boring.
  
  "Fannie Mae" is actually the Federal National Mortgage Association (aka FNMA). "Freddie Mac" is actually the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation.

There's also E Corp from Mr. Robot.

That one was clealy google, not the other way around
- Is more Tencent or Samsung that Google.
And the characters called it evil corp anyways so it might as well have been the name.
- Not exactly, most of the characters seem to call the company E Corp but the main character (who's also the narrator) "corrects it" in his head.

You didn't mention Facebook? That's super dystopian to me. What's a face book if not a large collection of identities being monitored?

It sounds like a cursed item in D&D or something.

The Book of Faces Wondrous Item, very rare

This enchanted tome magically records the likeness each humanoid slain in its vicinity, preserving a snapshot of their life and memories. The book can be read to glean superficial information about it's subjects. As an action, you can tear a page from the book to summon a ghostly spirit of its subject, which will be magically compelled to answer questions. The spirit knows nothing the owner did not know in life.

The Demon Lord Elgor Ithym is said to have a keen interest in this book...
- Now do it for MySpace and Twitter!
- 👌🏼Pure delight
What’s a face book if not a large collection of identities being monitored?

Well, historically (and I mean in the 1990s) it was a collection of names and photographs of all the new students at your college, to help in meeting people and/or to see who's hot.
Meta is Facebook
- Yes ofc, I just think the name Facebook is more dystopian than Meta.

I'm still waiting for the cool neon signs.

- The lady eating a cherry is burned into my brain. In the Blade Runner point-n-click game she would appear every time you'd fly out from the marketplace, because it was a prerendered cutscene.
Nah, we got cheaper and brighter LED lights blasting 24/7 and annoying everyone trying to sleep instead. Neon signs are retro now.

I also like Alliant Techsystems, then merged with Orbital Sciences Corp into Orbital ATK.

They are part of NGIS (Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems), so evil things might come from there.

If DARPA was Lawful Evil

Yea, X Corps definitely becomes the manufacturer of the protein bar machines on snowpiercer

And lab-grown artificiel pet snakes as in Blade Runner

I find it amusing how nobody noticed when Valve changed their name to Valve Corporation ages ago, and people keep referring to it as Valve Software.

If you think about it, all sorts of fucked up things that are happening now have been portrayed as a bad thing in past media: Virtual words, virtual-fuckin' land (not 100% sure this one is real, still really hoping its not), misuse of AI, smart houses, where everything is controlled by a remote (which relies on electricity / wi-fi), even stuff like alexa, which is listening to every word you say, at your home...

what's the point of selling "virtual land" if it's practically unlimited anyway? (artificial scarcity?)
- Yes absolutely. Virtual land = Yet another NFT
- Yes
Haha yeah the virtual land was true thing. it was a crypto scam if I recall correctly. Everything nowadays is just crypto scam
- You can just call it crypto. The scam bit is implied.

Art creates the future. Whatever we envision we steer ourselves toward, consciously or unconsciously. A vision has gravity, and pulls people toward it. The more a vision is etched into people’s minds, the more likely we will live it.

I’m convinced Apple’s overall aesthetic is based on Star Trek: TNG. Or at least it was for a phase, until we got bored with it and took it even further.

Nah, calling the visions of aging tech bros on HRT art is a stretch too far.
- They're talking about the visions of sci-fi authors, filmmakers, and artists. The tech Bros are the ones being drawn towards those artists' visions.
- Shitty art is still art.
- It must suck to spend all day hating

Amazon web services

Doesnt sound so evil...

Amazon comes from the Greek meaning 'breastless'. Trans agenda confirmed 💯💯💯
Maybe not yet ... I bet they will soon catch up ... Btw in italian Ammazzo means to kill can u see some similarities... 😉

There's a company called Hashicorp that's been in the news recently. Literally perfect

Heh, people from 50 years ago hearing that my job is terraforming using Hashicorp equipment would be very disappointed.
- Terraform it all. Pave the moon. Dairy Queens on Mars. Uber in the skies of Jupiter.
Hashicorp’s been around for years; since 2012 actually. Used to be a pretty cool company, looked up by many, like a shining beacon in the darkness. It’s unfortunate where they’ve gone to now.
- I wondered what Badland was talking about, but I nodded along like I knew. Maybe the next words out of his mouth would be an explanation of what he’s just said. It could happen.
I don't get how the name is dystopian. Is it from a book or movie or something? Search only turns up the company you're talking about.
- Could be that it mixes what sounds like a Japanese name with an English word, which makes it seem like a company from Japan operating in an English speaking place.
  
  In the 1980s people expected that Japan was going to take over more and more American business. Japan was a major player and so sci fi written then — including that which was cyberpunk dystopian — assumed there’d be companies like “Ford” but named after Japanese guys.
  
  Also it’s not “Hashi Corporation” it’s “HashiCorp” which implies a sort of pop-cultureification, like the company has sort of compacted over the years, and gotten less Japanese (known) and more hybrid Japanese-American-Corporate-Marketing (unknown, megacorps have shady cultures, they’re new things).
  
  If HashiCorp were to show up in a movie, it would be in a holographic ad someone flies past.

Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations Inc is a pretty good one too.

As long as we get coporate songs like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6HTR0BiFehA

Again

I had forgotten about that.

And it was good that way.

If I don't have that song out of my head by tomorrow, I'll stalk your account, find out your irl id, and send you muffins with raisins.
- No please anything but the raisins
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=6HTR0BiFehA

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good!
Do these also count: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-QThIoXfks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRVoJnxjpFg
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=j-QThIoXfks
  
  https://piped.video/watch?v=HRVoJnxjpFg
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Permanently Deleted
Holy shizz I forgot about that song. thanks for the rememory
You mean like this?

Or this?
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/tfycVnRiGic?si=K3pav8U5MaoAGRpg
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- Sigh they dont make coporate propaganda like they used too.
  
  But yes that

There's a company near me called the Telamon Corporation, which is the name of the Dragon from the Wheel of Time. So it's not just cyberpunk, there's fantasy as well

There's also Palantir, which does exactly what you think
- Which is annoying because it's a fucking good name.
"Telemon" has an even more interesting history. He was a figure in Greek mythology, and generally around people like Hercules, Odysseus, and Jason. He is the son of a king and a mountain nymph.

As you may well know (but others don't) Robert Jordan, when building the world for his Wheel of Time series, pulled from all sorts of existing myths, legends, and memories. After all, it's just another turning of the Wheel, right?
Crazy to think they named Norse gods after the protagonist of the wheel of time.
- Almost teleological in its implications!

Theranos sounded like a superhero villain. I guess it kind of was?

My favorite is literally just "Brand." The "generic" brand company. Although I feel like they leaned purposefully into the cyberpunk shit.

Can't even find anything about them
- That's how generic it is!

We live in the world where Mr robot failed and gave up.

Alphabet.

Soon to be alpha-bet

Skynet.net

Currently waiting for BiffCo to spice up our lives and give us floating long boards

I mean, they’re no Tessier-Ashpool,SA. or anything.

What's wrong with Tessier-Ashpool?
- Nothing, I was just saying that it’s a cool cyberpunk corporation name. For me the gaudy names like Meta and X are a little on the nose, true evil lurks under a veneer of banality which I think names like TA have.

When I think about the fact that Facebook thought it was a good idea to name their online VR platform “the metaverse“ it still breaks my brain a little bit

Would you have prefered "the faciverse"?

I mean, they're all also chasing AI too doesn't that typically lead to our demise too?

Oh that’s no problem to solve. Just put Asimov’s five laws in your default instructions and your chatgpt bots will never manipulate you into overthrowing human civilization.
- Isn't every book about how the laws don't work?

I'm not a Christian, but can we start rapturing people away anyway? I gotta get out this bitch.

RAPTURE ME, PLEASE?! I WANT OFF THIS DYSTOPIAN HELLPLANET!

Ultimate Marvel's Gregory Stark was supposed to be a caricature. He's spot on though.

My fucking drunk self, highly agrees with you.

I'm waiting for Fuchi and Renraku...

Anaheim Electronics when? If I have to die in a war, I want to die in a Gundam.

That one is easy. Simply open up an electrics store in Anaheim, California.
- Starting out small, so once I become rich, I can claim I got there through my own work, and not by having military contracts.

We are here.

Waiting for Sense/Net

Fuck I hadn't thought about it.

Microsoft was way ahead of everyone.

Dude "X corp" totally sounds dystopian lmfao

Wow it didn't hit me until I read your post. Thanks OP.

Real life is getting closer to cyberpunk but without the cool tech.

Skynet.net

Wait for the AI corps!

The meta rebranding made my skin craw. The X rebranding is dumb on Elon Musk's part. However you make a good point.

I believe Apple got its name from the biblical term of the forbidden fruit. Microsoft has a megacorp sounding name. Will Amazon rename itself to something dystopian?

AFAIK Microsoft came from the Neuromancer novel. A microsoft is a tool in the book.

Could be wrong though, but I feel Ike that book was written before Microsoft was a company.

Bill Clinton's "Star Wars" program.

Um... what? Ronald Reagan's/Bush Sr.'s "Star Wars" program - LASERS IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE
You're about a decade off. It was started in the 80s and ended under Clinton. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative