Interesting post over at the Freeman blog, touching on how fictional dystopias are formed:
Second, let’s say that we are indeed right now living in a capitalist dystopia, yet, for the vast majority of us, it really doesn’t look or feel much like the dismal world of Blade Runner or Elysium. If the hyper-capitalist world depicted in those films isn’t present-day United States (or Japan or Germany or Singapore), then where is it? Where is or when was that dystopic Googleland? Does it exist and has it ever existed? Answer: It doesn’t and it hasn’t.
Writer love to bits a corporatist dystopia, but it’s unrealistic. For as much as corporations benefit from state powers they are merely one of the spikes on the morning star, not the strong arm swinging it around. Starbucks has no “moral” or legal sanction to kill you and or jail you—two very big distinguishing properties of a government—if you refuse to buy their product.
A corporation can’t don the wretched mantle of state hegemony without becoming more like a government.