Cartel

From ManMachine

The Cartel: Clandestine meetings of the cartel exist within endocannabinoid space, or espace Under the ruse of a psychedelic masquerade, the Chief Executive Officers formalize economic and political transactions. Their true identities are effectively scrambled, using a top secret technology held by Ffr. The end of the twenty first century saw the end of the primacy of the nationstate, and the formalization of corporate hegemony over human affairs (see the Corporate Wars). The Cartel was intended as a temporary antidote to the dissolution of the worldwide economy and political order. However, the Cartel leadership quickly recognized that they had stumbled with the reach of the Holy Grail via endocannabinoid AI: the ability to seamlessly merge a human consciousness into an artificial, potentially immortal form of information. The temptation was irresistible. However, the thermodynamic and entropic cost of the enterprise was formidable, even cataclysmic. The Cartel proposed a radical solution to the seemingly unsolvable set of problems representing their final obstacle: one that they claimed would enable eternal life for all living humans: the dumping of massive quantities of destabilizing entropic waste into a parallel universe in order to marshal incredible amounts of energy with minimal entropic cost. This single project galvanized human society into a crusade against death itself, and served to justify draconian measures, often in broad daylight, against nonconformity or resistance. While in the past many human holidays had involved a national or religious theme, the Cartel developed a series of new holidays based on the resolution of the Corporate Wars, important sales of key products, and technological developments-- those which they were willing to share with the public.