Lore: Corporate Wars
Check out the lore styleguide.
What counts as a Corporate War
A conflict deserves the label Corporate War when firms (or firm-blocs) are the main strategic actors and most of these are true:
- Primary belligerents are firms, not states.
- War aims are corporate: market control, resource rights, IP, chokepoints, compute, logistics—not annexation or ideology.
- Force is organized as corporate capability: private military, security, contractors, deniable proxies, sabotage teams, cyber units.
- State power is subordinated: states act as captured regulators, contracted muscle, or “legal cover,” rather than the principal driver.
- Theaters look corporate: ports, undersea cables, satellites, fabs, shipping, data centers, standards bodies, payment rails, app stores.
- Victory conditions are corporate: ownership, exclusion, collapse of rivals, enforced dependency, closed ecosystems.
Key terms
- Belligerents: the real drivers of strategy and escalation (who is actually fighting).
- Strategic terrain: what “ground” is being controlled (routes, resources, standards, platforms, compute, etc.).
- Coercion: how pressure is applied (violence, coups, debt, lawfare, lock-in, deplatforming, etc.).
- Chokepoint: a narrow dependency corridor others must pass through (shipping lanes, ports, app stores, identity rails).
- Enclosure: converting a commons into gated access under private rules (land → concessions → markets → platforms).
- Private law: rules enforced by private entities (contracts, ToS, algorithmic enforcement) that govern participation.
The Four Corporate Wars
(approx. 1600–1857)
Core pattern: corporations are quasi-states by charter.
The era where corporations acted as quasi-states by charter, controlling sea lanes and resources through company navies and monopoly rights.
(approx. 1890–1970)
Core pattern: firms don’t need to be states; they can capture them.
The era where firms captured states to serve as proxies for resource extraction, using coups and private security to maintain control.
(approx. 1980–2010)
Core pattern: the firm rules by standards + supply chains + finance, not flags.
The era where firms ruled by standards, supply chains, and finance, enforcing market access and privatization through systemic coercion.
(approx. 2008–Present)
Core pattern: enclosure returns, but it’s digital: identity, attention, compute, data, discovery, and distribution become “land.”
The current era of digital enclosure where identity, attention, and compute are the new land, and firms control the means of participation.