Cultural Appropriation and Cybercrime

[grk 2]

It's a shame that Zorajit was quickly identified as trolling, because there's a lot of interesting thought to be dug into here, even though Zorajit themselves thought just enough about what criminality means to get themselves into trouble.

It's interesting to note that there are no corporation cards which indicate an independent state power. No cards which say, drop a line to the local police force to arrest a tagged runner. Note that I'm not claiming there are no manifestations of what we think of as state power in the cards, just no independent ones. Part of this is an artifact of how the game is played, but it is consistent with the archetypical cyberpunk world, in which state power is completely subsumed by (or "perfectly merged with" if you interpret it as fascist) corporate power.

The end result is here is no power we would recognize as legitimate to condemn the actions of runners or corporations as illegal. When we discuss criminality, we must do it through the lens of the fictional hegemonic thought of netrunner's fictional world. Since the media is another facet of corporate control, it's easy to deduce that "criminal" merely means engages in behavior that corporations disapprove of. Note that when corporations do something "illegal" the response is not state power, but bad publicity tokens. As the corporations define illegal, the punishment for being found doing something illegal is merely a decrease in their perceived legitimacy.

As a result, all runners are criminal as decreed by corporations (and the runner faction names are just the way hegemonic thought labels their criminality) but not criminal, as defined by us the players who shouldn't recognize the legitimacy of netrunner's corporations.

Unless you are of the belief that corporations should be allowed to decree what is and is not illegal, but I'm not interested in conversing with literal facists, so **** you.

[Grimwalker 647]

^ See, now why can't we have this conversation that's actually got something interesting to say about the will to power and the legitimacy of authority. You see, Zorajit, this is why we can't have nice things!

 

I think the closest things to government involvement is something like NAPD Contract, but that is purely a municipal entity. There's the "Government Contracts" agenda, but nowhere does that imply that the government in question has any authority over the corporation. 

When corporations have runner problems, their go-to responses are to Close Accounts, ****** & Grab, send in Dedicated Response Teams, hire Freelancers, or just Scorched Earth. The fact that even the criminal elements are not subject to organized law enforcement concerns certainly evoke a quasi-fascist society, and kudos to you for actually knowing what fascist means, rather than most people who bandy the term about to mean "whatever Obama's doing this week that I don't like".