Warrior, Worker, Entertainer, Whore – and Corporations as God

I read a lot of science fiction in-between 12 and 14. When your mind is stretched like that, it never goes back to its original shape.

I don’t read that much sf anymore, but I still do read it. I watch an occasional movie, too.

Blade Runner was always one of my favorite movies. Like all science fiction – literature, movies, TV – it never gets the specifics right, but in general, it’s very often right on the money.

One of the things that stuck me about Blade Runner is that there isn’t any portrayal of what kind of government. There are cops, but they don’t run society. Who they work for is never mentioned.

What appear to run society are corporations, specifically the Tyrell Corporation. It’s housed in a pyramid-shaped building, a hundred or so stories tall. The portrayal of society in the movie is that it is one both ancient and modern, both advanced and degraded – and the Egyptian pyramids were a symbol of the degradation of an advanced society.

The movie is telling us that future corporations will be more powerful than governments, and when they get too big and powerful, it’s a sign of the degradation of society. And that is the case today.

I call modern corporations “Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations.” In the world of Blade Runner, they are Cosmodemonic Interstellar Megacorporations.

Mussolini defined fascism as “corporatism,” so I’d guess the world of Blade Runner is a fascist one. Since corporations are creations of the State, they are inherently as anti-free-market as can be. Thomas Jefferson, for one, despised them as "the moneyed interests" and wanted to make them illegal.

Corporations don’t care about human life, only profit. That’s the way they always have been. For example, contrary to the myth, the American War for Independence was not about taxation.

It was about the largest corporation in the world – the East India Company (aka John Company) being given a tax rebate of millions of pounds to run its small American competitors out of business.

The war was caused by a corporation, one that put money ahead of life. But then, don’t they always?

In the world of Blade Runner the Tyrell Corporation has learned to grow genetically-engineered people. I assume it’s in artificial wombs, which has been a staple of science fiction.

If test-tube babies aren’t bad enough, those in Blade Runner are genetically-engineered to fulfill certain roles.

Roy Batty, who appears to have wolf DNA inserted into him, is engineered to be a Warrior. Leon, who looks like a turtle (and who is asked questions about turtles) is mentally slow and engineered to be Worker in dangerous environments.

Kris, playful as a raccoon (in one scene she sprays a black mask across her face) is engineered to be a “comfort girl” – a Whore. Zora, who is an entertainer, performs with a snake (and tries to strangle her pursuer).

When corporations get the power to engineer people, including inserting animal DNA into them, they will do it. And at that time, corporations will be playing God. Not, I’ll add, that they aren’t trying to do it already.

There has been at least one movie that I am familiar with that is somewhat of a spin-off of Blade Runner - Soldier, with Kurt Russell.

It’s set a few hundred years in Blade Runner’s future, and Russell is also a genetically-engineered soldier. At the end he shows himself to be human, just as at the end of Blade Runner Roy Batty shows himself to be human, just as all the replicants showed themselves to be human and not just non-human “skinjobs,” as one police officer referred to them.

The purpose of Corporations (which are creations of the State) is to turn you into a Working/Consuming Machine. The purpose of the State is to turn you into a Killing Machine.

Workers and Warriors – that’s all the fascist marriage of State and Corporations wants from people. To turn them into machines – organic machines. And all they supposed is need to cheap sex and cheap entertainment. Whores and bread and circuses.

Organic machines sometimes engineered through genetics, sometimes through drugs, and always though propaganda.

In fact, if the State and Corporations had their way, we’d be engineered to look like the Moties in The Mote in God’s Eye - Warriors all blades and Workers with two arms on one side and one on the other.

Our future is going to be as strange as the strangest of science fiction.