Retweeting myself(!!!!) to springboard off of this to make a broader point about corporations, but also corporations as they pertain to cyberpunk. There is a rich tradition of corporations in cyberpunk media being portrayed as a den of evil, calculating vipers, real masterminds. https://twitter.com/KaiTave/status/1194873608167809025

Slick sharks in six-figure suits playing, I dunno, cyberchess with the global stock market or some shit. Security systems that are fiendishly difficult to crack, protecting top secret black-ops tier prototypes while the board of directors plucks the strings of society etc etc.

And folks, I am here to tell you with god and the entire internet as my witness, if you never believe anything else I say, believe me when I say this: rich people are, collectively and individually, some of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet.

The reason I bring this up is that in a lot of cyberpunk TRPGs, the megacorps are almost always portrayed as these sorts of hyperaware monolithic entities, a neon-drenched Eye of Sauron that's poised to fix its baleful gaze upon your players the moment they breathe funny.

But that's not really true, is it? Not really. Corporations are where you find databases storing passwords in plaintext folders, where random executives plug USB drives they find in the parking lot into secure networks, it's where a broom handle falls down and bars the door shut.

I mean, the part where they manipulate stocks and steal and fund paramilitary death squads and inflict untold suffering upon the world, in measures great and small? Yeah that shit's all true, absolutely. And in many ways, the ignorance and incompetence makes them MORE dangerous.

Think of all the times a corporation has fucked up someone's life not out of calculated evil but because they were just too dumb to figure their self-driving cars needed to understand that pedestrians might use crosswalks.

Something that I appreciate about Hard Wired Island is that they seem to understand that while corporations may be helmed by greedy, shitty assholes, one of the real dangers poised by the corporations as they move into Grand Cross is how they fuck everything up without trying.

And the flipside of this, the benefit to understanding that corporations are in fact incredibly dumb, is that it opens up so many more possibilities for the players to approach them in game. Shadowrun encourages hyperparanoid plans-within-plans in order to do a simple job safely.

Meanwhile HWI says "yeah you can probably get access to the secure records by telling the temp secretary that you're Bob Computerman from IT here to update the firewall and you need someone's password, now what do you do when you GET those files?"

tl;dr I think more cyberpunk fiction, and cyberpunk games, should highlight just how dysfunctional megacorporations really are instead of presenting them as incredibly well-oiled machines, because that dysfunction is a large part of WHY they're dangerous.

postscript: there's probably something to the way megacorps were portrayed in that 80s/90s style of cyberpunk that stems from the attitudes of the period about how businesses could be WAY more efficient than that cruddy ol' government, now in 2019 we know these people are morons.