PREKURSOR.MIX 2 : CORPORATE (Various artists / Visual album)

The second chapter of the Prekursor mix series composed of new and original music from the operators behind Prekursor. This episode documents the corporate culture of Shinja city, from the technocratic neural networks of Machine to the augmented dreamscapes of AVR. Featuring music by Skunkworx, Clear State, Dead Channels, 碳凤凰 (Carbon Phoenix), Bob Noon, 조용구, and more - When the old world order governments fell, the old economic structures fell in succession. Already decades into terminal decline, the capitalist doctrine was unable to absorb the environmental and cultural externalities that the new world required; without it the final droplets of democratic-capitalism’s legitimacy evaporated. Politicians and captains of industry along with their families were arrested, tried and executed en masse for their sociopathic crimes that destroyed economies and ecosystems, clearing the way for something much darker. In the resulting power vacuum, a fragile technocratic government shored up its legitimacy with the delegation of decision-making to various military AI. The use of AI culminated in the development of Machine, an AI to undertake all critical lawmaking and regulatory duties. Fearing its corruption by future groups of elites, laws were passed to enshrine the sovereignty of Machine to regulate the nation for posterity. The result was termed Black Box Capitalism due to the impenetrable regulatory decisions of Machine. Industries have been outlawed and reinstated in a matter of days, markets pumped and crashed. Food prices run rampant and rolling blackouts have brought the country to a standstill. Black markets have proliferated and collapsed and yet Machine’s edicts have always remained beyond reproach. Thirty years since Machine took the reins and things remain the same; corporate culture is still a mix of sociopathy and ennui, innovation and fraud, but the ever changing landscape means that fortunes are made and lost everyday. The gap between rich and poor is as large as it ever was, but on what side of the line one resides has never been in such flux.