A world of Tyrrel Corporations?

Jorge Costa Oliveira

In “Blade Runner”, a 1982 science fiction noir directed by Ridley Scott, the futuristic vision of Los Angeles in 2019 is that of a post-ecocide society, marked by massive environmental destruction with acid rain, rare surviving natural animals, and an urban landscape dominated by the giant pyramidal building of the Tyrrel Corporation. This massive tech firm specializes in the production of humanoid robots – replicants – identical to humans, “more human than human,” used for space exploration and in off-world colonies where many people had already migrated.

Today, environmental degradation is still far from an ecocide of that scale, although much remains to be done to preserve biodiversity and prevent the destruction of ecosystems, natural habitats, and species. What does bring us closer to the world of “Blade Runner” is the rise of enormous tech corporations, many of them holding monopolistic or duopolistic power in their respective sectors.

The reasons for this concentration of corporate power are well known: control of innovative technology, economies of scale, barriers to entry, acquisition of competitors, and government regulation.

Examples include Alphabet and Meta, which dominate the online advertising market, Amazon and Alibaba, which control a huge portion of e-commerce, Apple and Alphabet, which dominate the mobile operating systems market, and Visa and Mastercard, a duopoly that rules card payments. We can also add Chinese giants such as Huawei, Tencent, ByteDance, and Ant Financial.

Interestingly, the tech conglomerate most similar to Tyrrel Corporation is the one led by Elon Musk. It invests heavily in humanoid robots (Tesla), space exploration and colonization (SpaceX), and brain-computer interfaces (Neuralink).

The increasing flow of vast funds into Artificial Intelligence companies means that some of the largest tech giants of the future will be AI firms – ASML, NVIDIA, TSMC, Anduril, Anthropic, OpenAI, DataBricks, SSI, Ripple, Thinking Machines, Broadcom, DeepMind, DeepSeek, xAI, Palantir, and Perplexity AI.

In the European Union, several major tech companies have been accused of anti-competitive practices and pressured to break up into smaller firms.

This is not the case in the United States or in China, where political power clearly considers them key assets for geostrategic supremacy. In the United States, after inconsequential antitrust investigations carried out by government agencies under the Biden administration, the Trump administration is an example of how political power is dominated by economic power. It will be interesting to follow developments in China, where historical materialism is an integral part of the State-Party ideology.

Do we really want a world controlled by new Tyrrel Corporations?

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