I just saw the headline, “Coca-Cola Calls for FIFA’s Sepp Blatter to Step Down Immediately.” The article mentions that Visa, InBev, McDonald’s and other huge, multifaceted, multinational organizations have joined the call for his ouster. “Love that word.”
Depending on how you look at it, FIFA is as big and powerful as a country. So are those corporations. Blatter’s power rivals that of many elected leaders of smaller countries, even if he doesn’t have an actual army under his control.
The older I get, the less I like dystopian visions. But at the same time, I also see more and more parallels to, for instance, the fiction of William Gibson and others who got started in the cyberpunk genre. One of them “can’t remember who” imagined a future where we are automatically sued for traffic infractions by connected bots built into passenger cars. The suits are settled by both sides’ computers, for a few dollars. In this novel it happens so often and quickly that it’s hardly more than an annoyance. Doesn’t sound too farfetched anymore, does it?
Neither does the idea that the leader of a global sports “read that “commerce”” conglomerate could behave like a tinpot dictator, only to be taken down by an alliance of corporate sponsors flexing their economic muscle to prevent the devaluation of the brand they’ve invested in with their advertising dollars. It’s just gonna get weirder.