it's crazy how plausible all the shit the corporations do in the murderbot diaries is. that one scene when murderbot was talking to those humans who had signed a 20 year corporate work contract and it asked them if the contract specified 20 years by the standard local calendar or by a proprietary calendar created by the company was downright unsettling đŹ if the ceos of modern earth companies read these books they would probably start crying because the government won't let them do most of this in real life.
hey fun fact this has absolutely happened before. part of the push to standardize time/timezones was because factory employers had clocks set to the pace of their machinery. meaning of the workers were not doing enough, time would run slower until they had reached their goal. there is historical precedent.
Yup. All the shit modern Capitalism is pulling is mostly a rework of the shit Capitalism did in the 1800s. This is WHY people fought and died to unionize and pass labor laws. Now those labor laws have been weakened or companies found loopholes (ie, gig workers are contract workers and not protected by many labor laws) so they're pulling the same shit again. The Corporation Rim, of course, HAS no labor laws so the companies have been able to crank up their evil to 11 because nothing is stopping them. It is genuinely a really good bit of worldbuilding on Martha Well's part, she's done a great job projecting the tech bro bullshit of our times into the future that Musk, Zuckerberg etc would build if they could.
