Bender describes his collection of cleanly packaged, post-apocalyptic products as a comment on the way companies market to consumers and the eases with which buyers accept corporate messaging:

By presenting a fictitious worst-case scenario as genuine the Anarkon project questions the influence of corporate, branding and advertising power in a culture consumed by consumption. Its goal is to encourage citizens to examine their response to commercial messaging and to play a more active role in determining the limits of corporate power in American society.

Anarkon [okay beta via Lovely Package]

Communist Amerika

Although the United States passionately feared a communist takeover, there is surprisingly little science fiction that imagines what the United States would be like under communism. During the Cold War, there were a lot of movies about communist spies and communist agents and communist invasions, but few stories tried to grapple with what the United States would look like in a long-term communist scenario. The propaganda movie Red Nightmare from 1962, with its grim portrait of small town commie USA, gestured at this idea a little bit. But it wasn't really until the 1980s with the miniseries Amerika that we saw a fully-fledged communist USA. The miniseries imagines what the United States would be like 10 years after the Soviets invade in the late 1980s. Hint: It's evil and must be stopped.

Two books from the 1990s offer slightly more plausible scenarios. In Maureen Mchugh's China Mountain Zhang, the United States suffers an economic collapse in the 21st century, followed by a revolution led by Chinese communists. China has become an economic superpower, while America founders through its own cultural revolution. And in the British short story collection Back In The USSA, Theodore Roosevelt is reelected as a progressive candidate in 1912, thus setting in motion a series of events that lead to a people's revolution in the United States in 1917. Russia, however, remains Czarist. It's a fun thought experiment for people who like to geek out about early 20th century American progressive politics.

Could it happen?
It's telling that Back In The USSA has to reach so far back in history to make its scenario plausible. And McHugh posits a future disaster. The point is that this scenario is an extreme deviation from the country's current trajectory. Sure, anything could happen – there are always black swans. But this possibility feels more like a thought experiment than a genuine possibility.

Fascist Fragments

Americans have feared a fascist takeover perhaps as much as they have feared communism in the past. In fact, the two are often lumped together in political polemics. But in science fiction, Philip K Dick's early 1960s novel The Man In The High Castle set the standard for fantasies of a fascist takeover. In Dick's vision, FDR is assassinated early in his presidency, which results in a weak government that fails to pull the country out of the Depression. So the United States doesn't have the economic or industrial capacity to aid the Allies, Germany conquers Europe, Japan conquers the Pacific, and the United States is broken up and divided among its conquerors. Parts of the nation remain free, parts go to Germany, and most of the West Coast goes to Japan.

Other fantasies about a fascist United States also imagine the country as having broken up. Even the recent television show Jericho depicts (at one point in the series) a post-nuclear apocalypse in the U.S. resulting in its fragmentation into small, authoritarian regions. Obviously there are some alternate histories that imagine a unified United States going fascist, but the idea of a fragmented country falling prey to authoritarians is a common one.

Could it happen?
The United States has sometimes flirted with authoritarianism. Presidents like FDR and Richard Nixon consolidated so much power that many historians would call them proto-fascist. The fact that the United States does not have a parliamentary democracy often makes it appear to resemble nations whose leadership is confined to a small cadre. However, the country also has a history of correcting itself when power is too closely tied to one group. Term limits were set for presidents after FDR died, and the Watergate scandal destroyed Nixon's regime. The question is, would this self-correcting mechanism remain healthy if the country fragmented into smaller pieces? The Man In The High Castle, even after all these years, still makes a persuasive case that a divided America could become fascist.

Corporate Feudalism

Many cyberpunk stories are predicated on the idea that in the near future the United States will be ruled by corporations who are more powerful than governments. This is the premise in William Gibson's classic Neuromancer, Marge Piercy's post-cyberpunk He, She, and It, and is even an important idea in the TV show Fringe. Although a shell of the U.S. Government might remain intact in these scenarios, true power is held by multinationals. Neal Stephenson does a terrific job showing what this would be like in his novel The Diamond Age. Corporations create enclaves with their own cultural norms that function as city-states. (One such enclave adopts Victorian social values and fashions, for example.)

This situation leads to a scenario like feudalism because the corporations become like kingdoms, with an executive class serving as aristocrats and workers as serfs. The world is fragmented economically and culturally, but in many versions of this story the governments remain the same. Still, these governments are more ceremonial than anything else. The world is run by capitalists, not politicians.

Could it really happen?
As we see in the TV show Fringe, corporate feudalism seems as if it has already happened. Although the show is not set in the future, the corporation Massive Dynamic clearly has as much power as the government, if not more. Wealthy companies like Google and Microsoft have more money than many nations. If Google merged with Northrop Grumman and bought Blackwater, could they take over the U.S. Government? Sounds a helluva lot more plausible than a communist revolution.

Since we still live in a democratic society, go ahead and exercise your right to vote. Take our poll and tell the world what you think is going to happen to the U.S. Government.

I've been wondering lately if the current econom-ick could see the return of Zaibatsu capitalism, only in the U.S. this time. Zaibatsus were family-controlled vertical monopolies, which were pyramid shaped: at the top, you have a holding company. And then below, you have a wholly-owned banking subsidiary, and then several industrial conglomerates which borrow from your bank. No money ever has to leave the company, because you own the bank as well as the industrial firms. These monolithic mega-corps rose up after World War I and helped to spur Japan's expansionist policies, because of their hunger for natural resources. When the U.S. government occupied Japan after World War II, the Zaibatsus were reformed and broken up, although some of them survive to this day in modified form.

So now that we've deregulated our banking system so heavily, and companies are so desperate for capital, could we see the rise of Zaibatsus in the U.S.? Could industrial firms merge with banks under limited ownership (if not actually one family) and create vertically integrated super-corps? I decided to ask Randall Morck, a business professor at University of Alberta, who's the co-author of the Zaibatsu classic A Frog In A Well Knows Nothing Of The Ocean, plus the author of A History Of Corporate Governance Around The World.

Here's what he said:

I don't think zaibatsu capitalism would make sense for the US. The Americans had such structures until the 1930s (they were called "pyramids" instead of "zaibatsu", but were precisely the same thing). A major part of FDR's New Deal was about forcing their breakup into numerous independent firms. The main factors that would prevent this are:
1. The double taxation of intercorporate dividends in the US was deliberately set up to make business groups tax disadvantaged
2. The Investment Companies Act regulates US firms whose assets are too much shares in other companies and too little PP&E as investment funds, not ordinary corporations.
3. The Public Utilities Holding Companies Act restricts intercorporate ownership in a long list of "public utilities" sectors in the US.

The zaibatsu model was used in most countries in the early 20th century, and is still used in many. It's main problems are:
1. Huge economic, and therefore political, power for the small number of families that controlled the pyramids (FDR and his New Dealers did not like such concentrated power, and I suspect Americans still don't)
2. The IRS worried that pyramid member firms could engage in phony transactions with each other to hide taxable income (the pyramids almost certainly did this).
3. The FTC worried that opaque control chains let one pyramid control seemingly competing firms and thereby run concealed monopolies (the evidence that this was a genuine concern is less clear).

Zaibatsu capitalism remains the main form of corporate governance throughout Latin America, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Arab World, Russia, Thailand, etc. and seems to generate poor results overall. A
few zaibatsu capitalism systems - Canada, Korea, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore, Sweden, ... - work passably well, but the concentration of power is controversial in all of them.

So there you have it. Even if we see corporations gaining more power, we'll never see the kind of vertically integrated powerhouses taking over in the U.S. again, unless we repeal several laws designed to stymie them. But that doesn't mean our Megacorp-dominated future is averted... possibly just taking a different form. Illustration from Tekken, which features the Mitsui Zaibatsu.

Since the cyberpunk 1980s, when the most popular visions of the future included corporate-urban caste systems, the idea of financial disaster has haunted scifi. While Babylon AD may have been a flop as a film, it's merely the latest in a long line of scifi tales that show a resource-depleted future divided between a tiny, glowing group of rich people and a global, subaltern class that lives in shantytowns. Even Dark Knight veered toward this vision of a future overrun by criminality, where skyscrapers have become dank, impoverished husks, and the ranks of public servants have shriveled down to one good cop, one good DA, and a mercenary weirdo.

The Road, both the Cormac McCarthy novel and the movie coming out next month, depict a future of nomadic poverty whose origins remain unexplained. Clearly there's been an economic disaster, but we're not sure if it's been spurred by Max Headroom-style corporate greed or something like a nuclear war.

One thread that runs through stories about financial collapse is the idea that corporations run wild while government withers away. That was certainly the basis of cyberpunk classics Blade Runner and Neuromancer, and that tradition continues today in spirited satires like Max Barry's novel Jennifer Government. In that book, everyone takes the last name of their employer — our hero, a detective, is one of the tiny group of government workers who barely hold their own against the money-fueled shenanigans of the corporate classes (even Jennifer has to send her kid to a McDonalds school).

Other authors, like Octavia Butler, imagine that the collapse of government in America will be accompanied by a rise in gang power, as well as (more dangerously) the power of Christian militias. In her intense, believable novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Christians kidnap "unbelievers" and put them in horrifying work/reeducation camps. Written before The Road, these novels also include harrowing scenes of homeless nomads on the road, trying to survive attacks from cannibals, Christians, and worse.

Having destroyed civilization or divided humanity into rigid economic castes, science fiction can try to solve problem Terminator-style, but throwing its characters out of the timeline in the hopes that they'll remake the world or find a better one. Japanese comedy Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust has the most literal take on this plot device: A woman in contemporary Japan uses a washing/time machine to travel back to the economic boom days of the early 1990s in the hope that she can get a bunch of cash to help her out of present-day debts. The trouble with this kind of time-travel solution is that it may get our heroine out of debt, but it doesn't exactly save the world.

For world-saving solutions, you've got to go offworld and start terraforming. Butler's hero in the Parable novels works tirelessly to create generation ships that will take the downtrodden of Earth to another planet where they can reboot the economy. Ursula Le Guin's award-winning novel The Dispossessed takes place in a universe where a woman like Butler's heroine has succeeded and founded an anarchist-feminist colony on a moon in orbit around a planet of caste-divided capitalists. Unfortunately, the anarchist-feminists haven't solved all the problems of their parent society, and in fact the resource-hungry moon where they live has created a society of poor people whose government controls where they work and live.

The economic disaster of the planet Arakkis in Frank Herbert's Dune franchise is another target for terraforming. After hero Paul leads the oppressed Fremen in a successful revolution to wrest control of the planet's resources from a colonist ruling class, they slowly work to transform the planet from a desert to a rain-soaked, livable biosphere. Unfortunately, they recreate all the problems they suffered under despots like the Duke who rules Arakkis in the first Dune novel. Royal families battle to control the Fremen society, and rich family dynasties still control the destinies of the still-disenfranchised masses.

More successful are the colonists in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy, where several of the early colonists are explicitly trying to build an economy that is more just than the ones back on Earth. Even if these imaginary societies ultimately fail, there is still a tremendous pleasure in destroying them repeatedly to watch them flounder towards productivity again. Robinson does this by destroying most of Mars in a spectacular space elevator crash. But you can see this same urge to smash and rebuild the economy in the popularity of videogames like Sim City and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a space colonization strategy game that was a spinoff of the wildly-popular Civilization I and II.

Perhaps the most popular solution to economic turmoil in science fiction is slavery. This is the subject of Brian Frances Slattery's recent novel Liberation, but is also the a cornerstone of pop fantasies like Blade Runner (slave replicants), I, Robot (slave robots), Planet of the Apes ("uplifted" ape slaves), and of course Battlestar Galactica and The Matrix (both have angry machine slaves). Each of these slave classes is created to make a broken economy run again. The idea is that humans, freed of drudge work, will become more productive and create inventions to bring about a better world.

Sometimes those inventions are themselves robot slaves. Scientists are also always trying to solve the economic crises of Earth by inventing amazing AIs that will allocate resources perfectly for us. This is precisely what happens at the end of Asimov's original I, Robot book, where a robot becomes world president and no humans ever want for resources again. Less-successful efforts to save the economy via AI can be found in David Gerrold's underrated When HARLIE Was One (read the original, not the rewrite) and the movie Demon Seed. In the former, HARLIE the mega-bot would rather hallucinate and write poetry than come up with strategies to build more efficient widgets. And in the latter, Proteus the AI would rather imprison and rape Julie Christie than explain how to fix Earth's financial crisis.

And so you might say slavery is in some ways the classic science fiction fix for economic crisis. It provides a quick solution that spins out an infinitely-reproducible number of crises, problems, and moral dilemmas. Like time travel, slavery does not fix the financial collapse for everybody — just for the few who remain free. Even worse, your slaves tend to revolt Dune-style, take over the planet, and fuck things up exactly the same way you did. So slavery shares with terraforming the basic problem that wherever the human species goes, there it is.

You'll never get a good story without conflict, so scifi may not make a good model for real-life financial fixes. And yet it does manage to reflect at least one truth about real-life economic systems: We cannot seem to dream up a way out of our economic failures that does not have its own failures built in from the start. We are, like the humans in Planet of the Apes, always replacing one kind of slavery with another.