I would also have to argue that looking for any kind of morality in a cyberpunk landscape is pretty difficult. The entire world is built on a sense of moral ambiguity that was created when the world’s population put more of an emphasis on selfish technology that ultimately left its fate in the hands of morally corrupt corporations.
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I interpreted “real, honest to goodness UN certified” to mean that the program produced credits that has fake UN certification precisely correct, bit for bit.
I understood it to be a counterfeit mint. Like a bitcoin mine, except it’s mimicking the UN’s proprietary authentifications for credits instead of one that is supposed to be openly available for everyone to do.
So It doesn’t steal money from anyone, it just generates inflation. Very shaper! Anarchs would destroy money even if no one got it, and Criminals would take money only if they got to keep it.
My interpretation is not necessarily correct even at all, I just find it fun to talk about. Perhaps the Magnum Opus just works a 9-5 and gets paid, and that’s how it fills up.
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it does make exactly the same amount of money for 4 clicks as day job 
…
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I think magnum opus being tied to inflation is a great idea, and could spawn some interesting Corp cards. Maybe something that should limit the number of credits the runner could gain in a single turn.
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I interpret magnum opus to be somethign similar to a bitocin mining rig. It does work within some kind of bitcoin-like system and gets paid in return.
Though it is said to make credits…perhaps it jsut auto-converts whatever bitcoin-esque currency it makes into credits straight away, or as others have said it actually hoolds a real job of some kind (though the principle is essentially exactly the same as bitcoins-processing power traded for a currency).
Cool thread, @Romakarol, I enjoy talking about this kind of stuff.
But i think trying to rate the factions as a whole is a bit of a mistake, since they can vary from individual to individual pretty drastically. Noise and MaxX don’t seem to generally care about anyone but themselves and their associates, whereas Reina is a freedom fighter (as evidenced by her subtitle on her ID), and Valencia spends her spare time giving people who have been blacklisted by corporations a second chance (per her flavor insert in O&C). @voltorocks also gave excellent reasoning in his awesome post.
But, I’ll go ahead and rate them anyway. 
In terms of corps, it’s really tough to do anything but rate them all equally evil. At their best, they all seem pretty good, or at least, not bad. Weyland builds wonderful structures for people to use, dedicating entire towns to both themselves and their employees. HB creates robots to perform dangerous jobs and offer new services to people. Jinteki offers all kind of advancements in the medical field through their work, and NBN provides a million different consumer products to everyone.
At their worst, Weyland burns down city blocks to kill one person, HB forces cybernetics and dangerous operations onto their employees, Jinteki represses the rights of clones - sentient beings - and NBN invades everyone’s privacy so they can know everything - their alt-art is the perfect representation of this.
As for runners, I would generally rate the main factions as Shapers > Anarchs > Criminals.If I include the mini-factions, Sunny would go in front of Shapers, and the other two are not rate-able, I think. Apex and Adam are both just doing what they do; what’s in their nature to do, and so you can’t really rate them on their morality in that way.
Note that this is the factions as a whole - individual runners might be higher or lower. I would probably rate Silhouette as more moral than Noise, for instance. When you average out the individuals, this is probably about where you come out.
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Awesome thread.
I think to look at the morality of the Corps, you have to imagine what would happen if each of them would “win”, ie, gain effectively unlimited power. If each of them were free to completely reshape the world as they saw it, with no other megacorps or runners in the way, what would they do?
HB would end humanity as we know it, turning our race into a race of cybernetic creatures. We would exist as much in software form as in meatspace, and the difference between a pure mechanical bioriod and a pure biological human would simply be a spectrum of technology, the same difference as skin colour today. Does that frighten you? Or do you think that humanity as an evolved technological race is an interesting future? Your answer to that determines what you think of their morality.
Weyland on the other hand would replace the structures of society with one giant slightly chaotic but ultimately functioning plutocracy. Crime would be low, jobs and homes would exist for all who want them, humanity would continue to colonise and explore the galaxy, but the notion of personal freedoms, life without duty to those that govern you, social mobility or freedom of expression would vanish. How much you think that a future like that in Aliens, or the Alliance in Serenity is a right-wing dystopia vs a “sacrifices for the common good” human collective determines what you think of their morality.
Jinteki, similar to HB, would replace our very definition of humanity. Clones, psionic evolution, lab grown humans and notions of racial purity would become the norm. Success and status in society would be defined not by wealth, nor merit, but by what you are, your genome. We would think of humans the same way we think of racehorses today, and the purest among us would guide us to our “destinies”. Disease, sickness, and aging would be virtually eliminated, and society would turn its attention toward how a race of super-science Methuselahs can preserve their future. We would become somewhere between vampires and elves. Again, how much you think the loss of what we think of as humans vs the gains in power and longevity and societal cohesion is good or bad determines what you think of Jinkeki.
Lastly are NBN. As we know, they aren’t really a News company, that’s just something they do to gain capital and power. They are an information company, the Google of the future. If NBN ruled the world, it wouldn’t be long before they had compete control and mastery of all the information that exists now and at any time. But what is information, its just numbers right? Except not. Information is knowledge, the knowledge of what people are thinking, where they are moving, what the have done and are going to. And not just people either, cities, weather, structures, space, light, markets, products, hopes and fears. NBN will know everything. Does humanity change genetically as a result of this knowledge? Well, no, but it moves it very close to omniscience, which is essentially close to Godhood. What do human gods do? I’m not sure even NBN knows, but they want to take us there, or at least take the select few. Is that a moral idea? Hmmm…
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this is an interesting way to look at the corps, but I think it’s important to recognize that for good or ill, intentions and goals are not the same, or inherently more important, than methods and means. many an incredible evil has been committed in the service of good intentions or noble goals; likewise, many great acts of kindness or charity have stemmed from dubious, patronizing, or even plain selfish goals.
When you just look at “what this corp do if they had no opposition” you aren’t taking into account “what would this corp do to realize this dream, given that there would be people who oppose it?” When it comes to ‘means’ I think all the corps lose a lot of points (in a game where everyone’s score is deeply negative…).
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Hey now, only runner scores are negative in News Team meta.
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A very good point. After all in Watchman, Ozymandias’s goals were world peace (an altruistic peace at that, not a 1984 totalitarian peace). But he was prepared to kill 10s of millions of innocent people to achieve this. By most people’s standards he’s pretty damn evil.
Weyland come out pretty bad in this angle. I’ve just been flicking through the Worlds of Android book, and it suggests that the Weyland Corporation has literally created global-scale natural disasters like Tsunamis and Earthquakes (through GRNDL) just to cache in on real-estate and insurance deals and increase shareholder profit. As the most chaotic of the organisations, with their leadership a Kafkaesque nightmare, its even debatable if they have an overarching moral plan. Perhaps they are are as moral as a cockroach - a simple product of natural evolution that consumes nearby resources to survive.
On the other hand, Jinteki come across pretty bad on the “what would they do”? I’m not talking about their Net Damage and the number of runners that they flatline - that is just having electric wire on their bank vaults rather than padlocks ( aggressive defence, yes, but not really immoral). I’m more concerned with Clone Rights. Yes, its something that in the Android world is a kind of liberal yoghurt-eating crusade, but its hard to come up with a philisophical argument that doesn’t say that clones aren’t the same as people. After all identical twins in the real-world are natural clones. In what way are identical twins not people? Jinteki is specifically removing human rights from an entire caste of people, effectively creating a slave race purely for the purpose of cheap labour and disposable research. It’s pretty close to Nazism.
It’s perhaps a bit more grey for HB and bioroids. Are bioroids people? You might say that Data from Star Trek should have rights as a person (cf: The Measure of a Man, season 2), but should Robby The Robot have rights? Where are bioroids on that spectrum? Does physical form matter (Eli and other ICE are software only)? In the real world, humanity has had the luxury of almost binary scale intelligence: the smartest animals (chips, dolphins, parrots) are still pretty far away from human intelligence. So we as a race have yet to had to solve the philosophical difference between human sentience and humanity (the latter granting what we think of as “fundamental moral rights”, the former just being the ability to solve complex tasks). I think your opinion on that would determine how you see HB’s bioroids, and thus how you see HB’s morality, as again they have quashed any discussion on the subject to preserve their bottom line.
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Good rundown. I definitely think of weyland as a “snake with no head,” i.e. they will stoop to anything but their ends are straight-forward: serve the shareholders by earning money; an extreme but natural outgrowth of capitalism and old money. Jinteki definitely has the opposite issue, they have a clear and basically evil ends: create and sustain a slave class of humans. But their means of doing so, medical and biological innovation, isn’t necessarily evil at all.
I actually think that HB has one of the better cases here - It’s not intrinsically clear that bioroids would be better off without HB to continue to improve and enhance them (in addition to providing some level of protection for them from a populace that blames bioroids for economic troubles). HB looks less than great when you consider the body-sovereignty issues that cybernetics bring up (see: defective brain chips, etc), but on the bioroid front I don’t think it’s clear that they’re inherently doing wrong.
Update on this thread!
If we consider the flavour on Global Food Initiative, we see that not everyone in any given corp is good or evil. This includes entire branches too.
I think to properly answer this question we need to look at Individual divisions/IDs, and for that, I’d say that Palana Foods is the most ethical corp by far. Their backstory is that they feed millions(billions?) of people in the Middle East and Asia with affordable food that would not be as readily available without their trademark Agroplexes. Sure, they make a little profit off of it, but they’re a corporation and need to turn a profit to keep afloat. If they weren’t there, there would likely be food shortages and/or jacked food pricing world-wide.
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Food companies are every bit as scummy as companies in other sectors can be and more. The United Fruit Company repeatedly killed hundreds of workers, destroyed the environment, murdered politicians, union leaders and rival bussinessmen. It even led the US to organize a coup in Guatemala.
I can imagine Palana, being a branch fictional company specialized in human cloning in an unsubtle cyberpunk world is ten times worse.
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I put the corps in 2 tiers in terms of being evil.
HB and Jinteki are leagues beyond the other two, in my eyes. Both corps are profiting from the willful exploitation of millions+ of slaves. It is hard to imagine a worse moral stance. They are monstrous.
NBN is evil primarily because it enables HB and Jinteki. There was a great post about how NBN has basically won. I think that’s true. They ARE the idiot box. It is their responsibility to alert everyone to the monstrous nature of their new corporate overlords, and they prefer to feed us sugary clickbait.
Weyland is the last vestiges of the old economy, the suckers who try and get rich by making stuff and selling it. I wouldn’t call them good (these are the jerks with snipers and earthquake machines), but their model is, at its core, entirely amoral rather than willfully evil. One can imagine Weyland as a force for good, whereas anything that HB and Teki get up to is going to be tainted by the fact that they’ll craft expendable slaves to do it and heartlessly exploit them.
Runners:
It’s hard to put a peg into any of the factions, just because they are each so diverse. Nonetheless:
Anarchs run because they are angry. I think they have a right to be. They are dominated by fiendish corporations that wouldn’t be out of place as the villains of a cyberpunk novel. I think the ‘good’ anarchs, Val, Reina, are the most good runners. They recognize that the system is monstrous and give their lives fighting against it. The evil Anarchs, the Noises of the world, are probably among the more evil runners. They exploit the power that the new world has given them to harm the helpless.
Criminals run because they are greedy. I think they are much more uniform than the other factions, just because it is easy to condemn their thuggery. They are an explicit evil, but an understandable and scalable one. Basically the Weyland of runners. Gabe is a bad man, but he’s not about to hack into a hospital and turn off all the machinery because it is funny.
Shapers run because they are curious. I tend to think that they are better, on the whole, than criminals. Running to prove some nebulous point, or wake up the sheeple, or what have you. In my mind they slot above the Gabes of the world, beneath the Vals. This is the loosest characterization though. The game is a world where a bored child might use her stuffed dinosaur toy and do battle with Director Haas’s monstrous plan to phase out humanity and rule forever. Is the child good? Well, she’s opposing a great evil. But only because homework sucks. You be the judge, I guess. Jesminder fighting for her sister is evil because she is a criminal backing up a politician, or good because that politician is trying to emancipate Jinteki’s abused children?
The mini factions…Sunny is just trying to make her way in the world. At best one might say that she works within the system for change. Put her above criminals/shapers, beneath those trying to fight back against their oppressors.
Adam is an arrow fired by a hidden figure. In a sense, he’s a complete innocent, with no choice about his actions, but that also means we can’t give him any credit. A moral blank, in my eyes. Millions of Adam-equivalents are the sin of HB.
Apex…it’s just a monster, right? Like, we should see it as primitive folks saw sharks or other deadly predators? Dangerous, but unless it has a consciousness I can’t really call it evil.
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Yay, Spiderman !
I, for one, welcome our new NBN overlords.
I do believe that NBN has already won and it’s aware of almost everwthing.
About the rest of the corps, i like the sinister HB side (sleepers, upgrades, alpha and beta test of the hellion…)
Sunny and Valencia are the most ethical runners, that’s it.
A mom struggling to gain money and doing wathever it takes for her family? How can that be wrong! (NBN will turn that story into a movie someday, you’'ll see)
A journalist that risk herself to uncover the truth, that’s needed today as well!
As factions, i think Shaper-> Anarch-> Criminals, as many before have said.
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The ethical/moral distinction is common but a bit curious. The words “ethics” and “morality” are basically the English versions of Greek and Latin terms that covered the same topics in the ancient world. In the modern world, we have attempted to splinter the two so you could say that you don’t believe in morality (over-arching value systems) but you are ethical (within a certain framework of agreed upon rules). To draw a distinction between ethics and morals is something that would have been incomprehensible to a Plato or Aristotle – also impossible since they did not speak Latin. My perception is that this distinction is advanced most often to make it easy to talk about things like business ethics or medical ethics without having to get bogged down in complex and often divisive discussions about universal values and “right and wrong.”
As others have pointed out, cyberpunk pretty much blows up any ground for talking about either ethics or morality in any meaningful sense. It is predicated on a post-modern critique of the very ideas upon which talk about good and evil can be carried on. There is “your” good and “your” evil, but in the moral imagination of cyberpunk there is no such thing as “good” that is universal or transcending human construction. This is pretty much the common belief in our world as well. You can have an interesting exercise in thinking about what is moral or ethical from the point-of-view of Aristotelian ethics or Thomistic ethics or Confucian ethics, but the idea of a universal category called “ethical/moral” no longer makes sense to us.
Someone might say that is not true. You might point to something that seems universally condemned – saying killing babies – and say that shows that we have some shared and universal convictions about ethics. But if you press very hard, those things tend to fall apart. What about dropping bombs in time of war? What about selective abortion? What about cultures that historically have left babies out to die? Etc.
All this is a long way of saying, you can’t really determine what factions in Netrunner are more or less moral/ethical until you can agree on what it means to be moral or ethical in the first place. This thread is actually an interesting illustration of that point. Some of the disagreements about whether Shaper or Anarch are more ethical, for instance, are determined more by what the writer means by the term “ethical” than by what the faction actually represents or does within the game.
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I’m just replying here because I really enjoyed this thread and hope people will continue with it. Nobody mentioned Sunny or Adam. I think Sunny is an interesting case, as she knows how bad the corps are and so she uses her free time to fight them, even as she maintains her day job for her childrens’ sake.
Thanks for the interest lol. Is that a fact about sunny, I just assumed her in the game was white-collar hacking. As for adam pretty sure no one knows much about him.
I still maintain jinteki is the worst corp.
I don’t actually know that this is the case about Sunny. I have always just thought this was the story.