We don’t have companies called Militech or anything, we have companies named shit like Poob. Palantir is the only suitably evil sounding company
Jeff Bezos, and Amazon actually sound kinda evil
Blackwater was appropriately unsettling. Constellis just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
That’s fine, just give them 6 months to do another “oopsie” warcrime and they’ll rebrand to something even worse.
Cyberpunk companies are named like the Bloodweb Syndicate and their company propaganda is dudes in LED face helmets holding big science guns. It rules. Like I could see myself on a hover cycle raiding their HQ with all my half-robot underclass buds.
Real life evil companies make propaganda in flat pastel colors and make social media posts like “Erm, did someone say coffee?” We live in daycare center aesthetics.
Daycare centre aesthetics really fucking nails it. I also really hate how people have internalized and regurgitate patronizing HR speak as if real people should ever say ‘touch base’.
Same thing with how normalized a bunch of therapy speak has become, but of course that has the additional wrinkle of everyone misusing it because they’re not licensed therapists.
Old and busted:
“We just injected you with the Necrosis nanovirus. In exactly twenty-four hours you will be a corpse… that is unless of course you can do a job for us…”New and bazinga:
“By purchasing a license to use our proprietary product, you agree to accept cookies and promotional notifications. Your likeness and all content you produce is solely owned by us…”
I dunno, Elon Musk sounds exactly like the type of name used for a corporate villain in a dystopian novel.
His mom looks like straight out of the capitol district.
Raytheon sounds pretty evil. BlackRock as well.
Palantir. Literally an evil wizard orb.
Anduril. Flame of the west. Spankbank fantasy of every white supremacist techbro that wants to murder nonwhites through drone proxies.
Ackshually the palantir were created by Feanor in the first age and were just kinda like telephones. The orbs themselves are neutral leaning towards good, it’s just evil wizards got 2 of the last like 4 that are around.
ill give you credit for having at least read some of the silmarillion (or maybe watched that amazon show? do they cover that?), but know this is done begrudgingly and I do not condone this behavior
I am a massive Tolkien nerd. Can’t stand fantasy otherwise
Raytheon sounds pretty evil
Probably why they rebranded to RTX after the recent merger.
RTX OFF
RTX ON
Evil names peaked at “Rupert Murdoch”
Fiction: Damien Knight, an enigma who is suspected to be a former US black ops soldier whose records were erased in the Crash, bought out a controlling stake in ARES MACROTECHNOLOGY with assistance from the dragon president Dunkelzahn.
Reality: An inbred south african apartheid failson bought out the right to be called technoking.
Dunkelzahn (circa 13,000 BC – August 9, 2057) was a Western Great Dragon. He was the 7th President of the UCAS elected, during the UCAS Special Presidential Election of 2057, but was assassinated on the night of his inauguration, later believed to be a self-sacrifice ritual to prevent the Horrors from crossing over into the Sixth World early. The policy led by his successor Kyle Haeffner can still be considered as marked by Dunkelzahn’s ambitions to fight racism, exclusion and poverty and renew UCAS international relations.
the bit about fighting racism, exclusion and poverty made me actually laugh out loud when I read it. Even in the cyberpunk future with elves and orcs libs talk like libs I guess.
There’s a chance it was satire, because they never did obvious things like disband the cyberpunk-fantasy version of the KKK, but I’m a lot more likely to just say the authors were all libs.
PRESIDENT KYLE SIR!
Tír Tairngire is where Shadowrun’s wine liberals go to congratulate themselves on being (re)born correctly and consequently being superior to everyone else.
🍷clink🍷
they learned that astro-turfing and pleasant titles are more effective than naming themselves something like: Evil Corp LLC.
I see all lowercase corporate names with Memphis cartoon shit
as the new evil.I’d arguably trust Evil Corp LLC more.
Remove the context(or maybe don’t) and ‘Elon Musk’ is a perfect cyberpunk baddie name, ‘Elon’ sounds exotic and even futuristic to the western ear(tbh it used to remind me of the ‘Eloi’ from The Time Machine when I’d just heard the name and didn’t know much about him), and Musk implies he’s a no-good stinky doo-doo head
I used to briefly entertain the in-joke about corpo executives in Shadowrun LARPing as Shadowrunners or selling the Shadowrun experience to New Exciting Retail Product seeking consumers as part of his schemes, but now we’ve already had
using a JC Denton avatar and claiming he’s a cool subversive rebel while being the government-funded richest man in the world. 
For real. Also: I was promised tons of cool dangerous unregulated tech to go along with it! Can’t get a machine gun rocket launcher arm prosthetic but at least you can purchase a the license to a jpeg of one with dumb little speaker which is spying on you to sell your data. Shit blows.
I blame Steve Jobs for the cringe aesthetics, such as the lower case quirky names for everything and the “minimalist” and New Memphis cringe engineering and visuals
Sure, there’s nostalgia-baiting attempts by corpos to churn out the le neon and the le razorgirl waifus in the treats, but they feel very insincere and stripped of meaning outside of blue curtain spankbank self indulgence.
Did Jobs do the quirky names or was he just an iThing guy?
His also-ran imitators certainly did.
Boeing sounds silly, goldman sachs sounds boring, meta just sounds stupid…
