That’s part of why I’ve generally been putting quotation marks around the word “corporation.”

It’s not meaningless though, because the underlying structure will likely remain essentially the same as it was when it was merely a corporation. And the relationship between the “government” and its “citizens” will have evolved from a relationship between a business and its customers/clients, and will undoubtedly retain some aspects of that. Most notably, the whole concept of public servants will vanish. Instead, the “government” will offer some specific services to potential citizens-as-customers, who can take them or leave them. Or, additionally or possibly even alternatively, the “government” will demand specific things of citizens-as-employees who will have the “choice” of following their demands or seeking employment-as-citizenship elsewhere.

In either event (or any other - this can’t possibly be an exhaustive list), the basic dynamic between “government” and “citizen” will be notably different from any of the ones we’ve seen before (though likely broadly most similar to feudalism).

Maintaining a large private army would be expensive and time consuming.

So is maintaining a large workforce and infrastructure, but they do that as a matter of course. And already, there are corporations with operating budgets larger than some countries. That’s only going to become more the case with time.

What stops another corporation with a private army from coming in and robbing them of everything they have?

The same things that generally stop countries from doing it to each other - insufficient forces and/or unacceptable losses and/or a preference for stability and/or established alliances and/or any of countless other considerations.

This isn’t rocket science. Realpolitik is a fairly straightforward thing.

Where is the corporation getting their funding from?

From the sale of goods and/or services.

Duh.

Someone’s got to be paying them.

Yes. Consumers of whatever goods and/or services they provide.

Duh.

So, they are using a sovereign currency created by a government using a central banking system chartered with the government.

Or more likely not.

Here’s just one quick idea - accept local currency with a handling fee sufficient to cover any potential losses on exchange (which are unlikely, since at that point their currency will likely be harder than about any government’s), and advertise a discount for the use of their private currency, accompanied by the offer of free and automatic currency exchange with an account at the corporate bank.

So you promote your currency, avoid the hassle of dealing with competing currencies and gain new bank accounts, all at the same time.

And that’s just one idea, off the top of my head.

I just don’t make u-turns at busy intersections, specifically because they’re problematic.

If I need to go back the way I just came, I make a left into a parking lot, turn around there, then pull back out onto the street, or if that’s not possible, I simply go around the block.

My view is that doing unnecessary things that interrupt the flow of traffic is always a bad idea.

All other considerations aside “Thiel-backed” guarantees all by itself that it’s technofascist bullshit explicitly intended to benefit the oligarchs at the expense of everyone else.

Whoever wants in on it really.

Primarily I presume it’d be the corporations themselves, but banking is certain to change to accommodate the growing independence of the “corporations,” and I expect that to some notable degree, the two will merge - that the largest “corporations” will have their own banking sibsidiaries and will handle most everything internally.

There’s a broad point underlying all of this - all that’s really necessary is that enough executives/owners at enough institutions have a desire to divest themselves of associations with governments and establish their own “states.” Once the will is there and they possess enough wealth and power to enforce their will, the rest is just details. They have entire staffs who are employed to figure out how to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish, and they will figure it out.

Of course. Gambling is a hallmark of civilizations in decline.

The Polymarket thing is a bit different though. It’s built on a foundation of saps hoping to strike it big, but it promarily benefits insiders, who are turning their knowledge into financial windfalls.

Just another of the privileges afforded the wealthy and empowered few.

So?

In the first place, a “corporation” could set up a legal system easily - draft some laws, build some facilities and appoint some officials, and done.

But they wouldn’t even need to do that. They likely would, because an impartial system wins voluntary compliance and thus promotes stability, but the only really necessary part of a legal system is sufficient power to enforce its dictates, and with enough armed professionals, that’s relatively easy, at least within secured borders.

Yes.

And specifically one of the things that impressed me about Snow Crash’s predictions was the idea that federal governments didn’t get overthrown or cease to exist - they were simply irrelevant. The “corporations” had amassed enough wealth and power that they could, and did, simply ignore the governments.

Sure.

They could even do it today simply by paying in Bitcoin.

I expect though that the future will see private currencies backed by the-entities-formerly-known-as-corporations.

Governments don’t monopolize currencies because nobody else wants to issue one, but because it’s in their interests to monopolize them, and they have sufficient power (for the time being) to enforce their monopolies.

No and yes…

A business entity that is proactively protected from liability could not exist without government charter.

However, a business entity could employ its own paramilitary and/or hire mercenaries and effectively make itself immune to liability, which works out to the same thing pretty much.

And I’m reasonably certain that that’s the future - that corporations will continue to acknowledge and submit to governments only as long as it’s to their advantage to do so, and that when the costs outstrip the benefits, they’ll simply stop, and instead manage their properties as essentially states unto themselves. And at that point, whether or not they have an official declaration of their corporate identity will be irrelevant.

Weird how so many techbro ideas boil down to registering your identification with the techbros…

Absolutely not - it’s a good idea

It would be a 2:1 ratio of kidney beans to black beans.

Perfect.

If the US has free and fair and honest elections, the Republicans will lose their majorities, therefore Trump (with the brazenly dishonest support of the corrupt and compromised conservatives of the Supreme Court) will see to it that the US does not have free and fair and honest elections.

Nobody said he wasn’t.

I’m not even really talking about Trump per se - he’s just the inspiration. Reading the linked story, and with all of the past similarly insane things he’s said and done, it struck me that he almost doesn’t even exist as a person. Rather, he’s more like just a vehicle for his ego (and, now that you mention it, for his lusts and his delusions). As if, where other people have thoughts and ideas and beliefs, he just has the incessant yammering of his ego (etc.).

And then that in turn got me to wondering if that was part of the origin of myths of demonic possession - if people more or less like him in the past were seen by others the same basic way that I see him - as if whatever personality he should have had has been pushed aside by his overwhelming ego (etc.).

Or in their more primitive interpretation, by a demon.

So this makes me wonder about legends of demonic possession.

In a sense, it could be said that Donald Trump is not President of the United States, because Donald Trump in a sense doesn’t even exist as an individual. Instead, he’s essentially a vehicle for his gargantuan ego. He’s really just a sort of mindless zombie, lurching from one thing to another as his ego dictates.

Which makes me wonder if that was really the way he would’ve been seen in a more primitive past - as if the person who should be inside of him had somehow been pushed aside and he was possessed by a ravening demon. And if that’s the way that other delusional egomaniacs like him were seen in the past.

The correct answer to any question of the form, "I’m facing [this risk], so should I take [this safety precaution]? is always “Yes.”

Concern trolling about the fediverse or lemmy.

It seems like it shouldn’t even be possible to be that irrational and function - like a person whose brain is that broken could never even make it out of the house because they can’t figure out how to work a doorknob.

I’m not an anarchist by chance.

Thanks for the response.

So at the very least, one would think there would be some sort of consequences for the plain fact that Trump’s thugs keep blatantly lying.

Furure sociologists are going to be spending entire careers trying to sort out how the US went so badly wrong.