Corporations in a Capitalist Dystopia
While some of it may seem trivial, it is important to first talk about what a corporation is, in it's nature. For the purpose of this post, we'll assume a Corporation to have the following characteristics:
- is a formal group of people that strengthen the corp for their own gain
- has a formalized management hierarchy
- has the power to impact the lives of employees (ex: by providing pay)
- is owned by shareholders, rather than individuals
- provides financial gain for itself and it's shareholders
- serves additional goals (ex: providing cheap clothing which helps poor people)
With this out of the way, we can talk about what a Megacorporation is:
- it has the same aspects as a corporation, but:
- additional goals are unclear
- has the power to siginificantly impact the lives of people who are not it's employees, nor customers (which is similar to the power as of a government)
Let's expand the first point a bit — while a corporation is a huge company where some motivations become unclear to individual employees, a megacorporation is a huge corporation where some actions become unclear to literally everyone. Some people working for our megacorp might want to create bioweapons, while others may try to help those in need. All of this at the same time, and despite the hierarchical structure.
As for the second point, a Megacorporation in Sci-Fi is also a new form of a Great Power. It has the same significance as countries like Great Britain or Prussia during their prime in the victorian era. It can project influence not only on it's employees (government officials), customers (citizens), but also on everyone living in the same economy (foreign countries and their populations).
So megacorporations are like corporations plus governments. The real trouble begins when we realize, that due to the hierarchical management structure derived from corporations, we have just established an authoritarian Great Power where the CEO and board of directors are chosen by shareholders, which now seem weirdly similar to aristocratic oligarchs. Gulp.
SPACE IS HELL
Nature is neither good nor evil. It is, however, indifferent to humanity. The universe is a harsh place to live in and will kill you in the blink of an eye if given the chance. A routine space walk, a sudden solar flare, or an ice storm can go from something serene or even beautifful to life-threatening in a second.
~ Alien RPG Core Rulebook
In the Alien universe the view of human civilization in space is a pessimistic one. Space is a place "indifferent" to humanity, but it is also a place where humanity was never supposed to be. Earth is our home, not LV-426 or Mars. These planets are hostile to humanity, and they may kill us. But when you think about it, our ancestors thousand of years ago could regard our own planet the same. Animals and plagues ravaged their communities at the blink of an eye. They turned to worship — just like colonists in Alien — to find meaning in an evironment that was so uneasy to live in. But with time, we managed to turn Earth into a planet that is not natural, but human. We've enslaved animals that once hunted us, genetically enginneering them through breeding to serve us. We've destroyed forests, our old homes we shared with animals, to create new ones, only for humans. "Humans are neither good nor evil, they're indifferent to us!" a city-dwelling rat could say, seconds before getting ran over by a car.
So, if humans managed to civilize Earth's ecosystems in their favor, would it be possible to do the same for space? As far as sci-fi goes, I haven't read nor watched anything that would answer this question throughly. Sure, there are some vague ideas such as Asimov's Galactic Empire or Star Trek's Federation of Planets, but these universes do not talk about space colonization nearly as much as about interactions in an already existing civilization.
A good book that at least tries to engage with this idea of humans "civilizing" space is Stanisław Lem's "The Invincible". The crew of the titular ship consists of high-trained specialists equiped with advanced weaponry, such as automatic war machines and easily deployable forcefields. While left unmentioned in aforementioned work, it is pretty clear that humanity has spread far from the solar system. Our crew is used to dealing with aliens and natural hazards, they feel almost as if they were home. And yet, in the end they're easily defeated by Lem's version of nanomachines. They can survive in the harshest of environments due to their simplistic design, and can reproduce so quickly that even nuclear weapons are unable to stop them. The book shows that evolution (in every sense) into more complex organisms or robots, as it happened on Earth, is not always preferable. As such, should we give up our humanity if we want to colonize space? Most would disagree.
Well in that case let's think what sci-fi toys do we need to civilize space without turning into microbes. I suppose we'd need to have teleporters on everyone that would allow us to travel anywhere relatively quickly, colonize most planets in the universe and get technology that would allow us to live in space without spacesuits. That doesn't sound very reasonable, and so I will leave the judgment of whether it will ever be to you, dear reader.
Going back to Alien, let's talk about the elephant in the room - the xenomorph. This creature is the embodiment of ruthless space, and by extent nature. We don't know where it came from, how it works, or what it wants. We only know that it likely acts on instinct and plans to kill the Nostromo crew. Essentially, the xenomorph is like an animal predator hunting cavemen with no idea what they've just met. It also acts on a strong natural fear in humans — fear of the unknown.
Building better Worlds
Wait but where's the corporations? I hear you scream. Too bad that no one will hear it in space… Anyway. The most powerful and important megacorporation in the Alien universe is Weyland-Yutani. If you only watched the Alien movies, you might've never even heard of it so let me elaborate a bit. Weyland-Yutani is addressed as "the Company" in the films. Among many others it hired the Nostromo crew, UASMC marines, and all the company representatives. Weyland and Yutani used to be two separate corporations that merged before humanity started colonizing space. As the Alien Core Rulebook describes it: "WY plays hard with mergers and aquisitions, buying out those they can and destroying those they can't".
WYs goal in the movies is to experiment on a live xenomorph in order to create... We don't know what exactly, but definitely bio-weapons included. The secondary reason for the experiments is the process of civilizing space. Just like we did on Earth, WY will study every space animal that gets into it's hands and turn it into benefits for itself (and by extent human civilization).
For the Company, profit is above all else. As for the aforementioned additional goals, it varies from man to man and is entirely unclear. WY can be seen as a metaphor for the xenomorph. It wants to gain profit and merge with more and more companies, just like the xenomorph who instinctively wants to kill everything that moves. Just like the xenomorph, WY doesn't have a set final goal, it acts on a monthly goal to create revenue. That's the one thing we can learn from Alien — that the most "civilized" humans are not at all that different from a vile xenomorph. In the end, Weyland-Yutani did sell it's humanity for space colonization, and no one bat an eye.