When Corporations Become Governments

I’ve always looked over the horizon for the shape of things to come.

It’s why I fell in love with science fiction as a child in Paris—reading Asimov, Herbert, Bradbury, and others, drawn to worlds where no constraints existed, where every system could be questioned, where imagination had no boxes. It’s why I pursued a Juris Doctor degree—to understand the ethical and legal frameworks we build societies upon. And it’s why I started developing the Newdawn Saga in 2011, long before AI dominated headlines and corporate power became the defining conversation of our era.

I saw patterns forming. Trends building. And a question that’s haunted me for over a decade: What happens when we wake up in a world no longer of our own making?

As tech executives take government positions and “efficiency” becomes the language of policy, that question isn’t speculative anymore. We’re living in the early chapters of a transition I’ve been mapping since 2011.

Through my work with corporate founders—helping them navigate strategic foresight and future-state planning—I’m in rooms where these decisions are being made in real-time. I see the logic. I understand the pressures. I watch brilliant leaders making rational choices that, when extended over decades, lead somewhere most of them haven’t fully considered.

Here’s what I’ve learned from looking 70 years ahead.

The Pattern Is Already Visible

In my consulting work, I hear the same themes from founders and executives:

• “Government moves too slowly for the pace we need.”
• “Regulatory frameworks can’t keep up with innovation.”
• “We’re solving problems governments can’t or won’t address.”
• “Our stakeholders demand efficiency above all else.”

These aren’t villainous statements. They’re honest observations from people trying to build, create, and solve real problems. But when I map these sentiments forward through the Newdawn framework, I see how rational decisions during crisis become permanent infrastructure.

The trajectory isn’t conspiratorial—it’s incremental.

What is the Conclave System in Newdawn 2098?

The Conclave System in Newdawn 2098 is a corporate form of government that replaced traditional nation-states.
Through decades of crisis, mega-corporations assumed sovereign control over cities and resources, transforming employment into citizenship and efficiency into law. The result is a world where loyalty to brand supersedes loyalty to country.Discover how corporations evolved into sovereign powers in Newdawn 2098. The Conclave System redefines governance, citizenship, and freedom in a future built on contracts instead of constitutions.

Introduction: The Question We’re Not Asking

What happens when corporations stop lobbying governments and simply become them? When quarterly earnings replace democratic mandates? When citizenship is determined not by birthplace but by employment contract?

In 2025, we watch tech giants influence elections, pharmaceutical companies shape health policy, and financial institutions hold economies hostage. We debate corporate power while standing at the threshold of corporate governance.

Newdawn 2098 doesn’t ask “what if?” It asks “what next?”

The Conclave system—where mega-corporations evolved into city-states, where corporate citizenship replaced nationality, where loyalty to brand superseded loyalty to country—didn’t emerge from violent revolution. It emerged from choices we’re making right now. In Ang City 2098, The Conclaves are nothing more than Corporations disguised into governmental entities running countries.

This is the story of how democracy didn’t die with a bang, but with the sound of a contract being signed.

What My Legal Training Taught Me

My background in law shaped how I see this trajectory. Legal systems are about frameworks—who has power, how it’s exercised, what constraints exist, how we balance competing values.

The question that haunts me from my legal education: What happens when the entities being regulated become the regulators?

When corporations provide the infrastructure of daily life—housing, healthcare, information, transportation, food systems—they don’t need to formally govern. They already do.

The law is supposed to create checks on power. But law requires enforcement. Enforcement requires governmental capacity. When governmental capacity erodes through crisis and corporate solutions, who enforces limits on corporate power?

This isn’t hypothetical. I see it in my work with founders who genuinely want to do good, who are solving real problems, but who are also building systems of control that will outlast their intentions.

What I See Working With Founders

In my strategic work, I help corporate leaders think through long-horizon implications of their decisions. Here’s what I observe:

The Founder Mindset: Founders are optimizers. They see inefficiency and want to fix it. They encounter obstacles and want to remove them. They identify problems and want to solve them—fast.

This mindset built our technological world. It’s also the mindset that, when applied to governance, leads toward the trajectories I map in Newdawn.

The Questions They’re Not Asking:

• If we solve this public problem privately, do we create dependency?
• If we optimize society for efficiency, what gets sacrificed?
• If we accumulate power during crisis, how do we give it back?
• If our solutions become infrastructure, who controls that infrastructure in 50 years?

Most founders I work with are brilliant, ethical, genuinely trying to make the world better. But few are thinking in 70-year timescales. Few are mapping where their rational decisions lead when extended across generations.

That’s what speculative worldbuilding does—it extends current logic to its endpoint and asks: Is this where we want to arrive?

Science Fiction as Strategic Foresight

I often tell the founders I work with: “Science fiction feeds our imagination, answers undisclosed aspirations, and nourishes our soul while science facts shape our consciousness today, paving our lives tomorrow—ultimately transforming science fiction through our human ingenuity into science fact.”

This is why I developed Newdawn not as entertainment (though I hope it entertains) but as a strategic foresight tool.

Worldbuilding is scenario planning at scale.

Instead of PowerPoint slides showing three possible futures, I built a complete world showing one detailed trajectory. Instead of bullet points about “corporate governance risks,” I created characters living under that system—their daily experiences, their moral choices, their adaptations and resistances.

Through WindHorse Entertainment and Windom Media, I’ve been developing Newdawn as both narrative and interactive experience—books, games, immersive content—because the future needs to be felt, not just analyzed.

I started this work in 2011. Before AI was mainstream conversation. Before “corporate governance” was trending. Before tech executives entered government.

I saw patterns forming—not through prophecy, but through the same skill that made me successful in advertising and Hollywood: understanding what story people are telling themselves, where that story leads, and what happens when the narrative shifts.

How Did Corporate Power Expand in the Early 21st Century?

Today’s Reality: Corporate Power Unchecked (2025)

Right now, corporations wield power that rivals nation-states. Apple’s market capitalization exceeds the GDP of most countries. Amazon determines retail survival for millions of small businesses. Meta shapes political discourse for billions. Google controls access to human knowledge.

But power isn’t just economic. It’s political, social, and infrastructural:

Political Influence: Corporate lobbying in the US alone exceeds $4 billion annually. Tech companies help write the regulations meant to govern them. Pharmaceutical giants determine drug pricing policy. Energy corporations shape climate legislation. The revolving door between corporate boardrooms and government agencies spins constantly.

Social Infrastructure: We live in corporate ecosystems. Amazon delivers our goods. Google organizes our information. Apple manages our health data. Microsoft runs our workplace software. Tesla might soon control our transportation. These aren’t just services—they’re dependencies.

Economic Control: Corporations determine employment, set wages, provide healthcare (in the US), manage retirement funds, and increasingly, provide housing and education. Company towns never disappeared—they went digital and scaled globally.

The question isn’t whether corporations have power. It’s whether democratic institutions can meaningfully check that power.

Newdawn 2098 extrapolates: What if they can’t?

How Did Crises Enable Corporate Takeover?

The Transition Begins: Crisis as Opportunity (2025-2050)

When Governments Fail, Corporations Fill the Void

The path to the Conclave system doesn’t begin with corporate coup. It begins with government failure during cascading crises.

The Climate Crisis (2025-2040): As coastal cities flood and resource scarcity intensifies, governments struggle to respond effectively. Budget constraints, political gridlock, and bureaucratic inertia slow action to a crawl. Meanwhile, corporations move fast.

Tech companies build the seawalls governments can’t afford. Agricultural conglomerates develop drought-resistant crops and control food supply. Energy corporations manage the transition to renewables—on their terms. Private security firms handle evacuation logistics. What begins as public-private partnership slowly becomes corporate takeover through competence.

The Economic Collapse Cycle (2030-2045): Repeated financial crises erode faith in traditional governance. When governments bail out banks but not citizens, when austerity becomes permanent, when democracy seems to serve capital rather than people—alternatives become attractive.

Corporations offer stability. Guaranteed employment. Healthcare tied to corporate citizenship. Education provided by company universities. Housing in corporate developments. Retirement secured by corporate funds. The social safety net that governments shredded, corporations rebuild—with conditions attached.

The Efficiency Argument: By 2045, a narrative solidifies: Corporations are simply better at governing. They’re agile where governments are slow. Efficient where bureaucracies are wasteful. Innovative where democracy is gridlocked. They can make hard decisions without electoral consequences.

This narrative isn’t entirely wrong, which makes it dangerous.

What Newdawn characters witness:

• The Seattle Experiment—Amazon’s pilot program offering “corporate citizenship” with full benefits
• The Pharmaceutical States—health companies controlling entire regions through infrastructure ownership
• The Grid Wars—energy corporations leveraging power supply for political control
• The Data Kingdoms—tech giants using information monopolies to influence governance

People don’t choose corporate rule because they love corporations. They choose it because democracy increasingly feels like a luxury they can’t afford. When you’re hungry, employed and fed beats free and starving.

What Is the Conclave System and How Does It Work?

The Conclave System Emerges (2050-2070)

From Corporate Influence to Corporate Sovereignty

By 2050, the transition from corporate power to corporate governance is formalized. The Conclave system isn’t imposed—it’s negotiated, ratified, and accepted through a series of treaties, contracts, and gradual surrenders of sovereignty.

How It Works:

Geographic Control: Major corporations claim territory—not through conquest but through infrastructure ownership. Ang City, Newdawn’s megapolis, is divided into Conclave zones. The Tech Conclave controls the upper districts and orbital interfaces. The Industrial Conclave manages manufacturing sectors. The Agricultural Conclave oversees food production regions. The Financial Conclave regulates commerce.

Borders aren’t national anymore—they’re corporate. You don’t cross from one country to another; you cross from one Conclave to another. Your passport is your employment contract.

Corporate Citizenship: Traditional nationality dissolves. You’re not American or Chinese or Brazilian—you’re Tech Conclave, Industrial Conclave, Agricultural Conclave. Your citizenship determines your rights, your access to resources, your legal protections, your social standing.

Employment becomes citizenship. Lose your job, lose your legal status. Get promoted, gain new rights. Corporate loyalty isn’t just encouraged—it’s mandatory. You pledge allegiance not to a flag but to a logo.

Legal Systems: Each Conclave operates its own court system, writes its own laws, and enforces its own justice. Corporate arbitration replaces public courts. Contracts supersede constitutions. Terms of service become law.

If you’re accused of a crime, you’re not tried by a jury of peers but by corporate tribunal. Your guilt or innocence is determined by algorithms analyzing productivity data, social credit scores, and loyalty metrics. Justice becomes efficiency.

Resource Distribution: The Conclaves control everything necessary for life—water, food, energy, housing, healthcare. Access depends on your citizenship tier. Elite employees live in pristine upper districts. Mid-level workers occupy comfortable but monitored middle zones. Low-tier workers crowd into dense lower levels. The unemployed fall outside the system entirely.

What this means for individuals:

A character born in Ang City’s Tech Conclave zone grows up understanding that their future depends on corporate performance. Their education focuses on skills valuable to the Conclave. Their healthcare is excellent—as long as they remain employed. Their housing, beautiful—as long as they maintain productivity. Their rights, protected—as long as they don’t dissent.

Freedom exists within corporate-defined boundaries. You can choose anything as long as it serves Conclave interests.

What Did Humanity Lose Under Corporate Rule?

The Cost: What Democracy Lost (2070-2098)

The Trade We Made

By 2098, the generation that remembers democracy is dying. Their grandchildren know only the Conclave system. To them, corporate governance is normal. The idea of electing leaders seems quaint, inefficient, even dangerous.

But Newdawn doesn’t let us forget what was lost:

Political Agency: You can’t vote out your corporate overlords. There are no elections, no referendums, no peaceful transfers of power. Dissent isn’t illegal—it’s simply economically impossible. Criticize your Conclave, lose your job. Lose your job, lose your citizenship. Lose your citizenship, lose everything.

Privacy: Corporate governance requires total transparency. Your Conclave monitors your health, tracks your location, analyzes your communications, predicts your behavior. Privacy isn’t a right—it’s suspicious. Only those with something to hide want privacy.

Equality: The Conclave system is explicitly hierarchical. Your worth is measurable: productivity metrics, loyalty scores, innovation contributions. Some citizens are more valuable than others, and the system makes no pretense otherwise. Equality isn’t even an ideal anymore.

Collective Action: Labor unions are corporate departments. Strikes are breach of contract. Protests are disruptions to efficiency. Organizing outside official channels is impossible when your Conclave monitors all communication and controls all resources.

Alternative Futures: Under democracy, even flawed democracy, change is possible. Elections can shift direction. Movements can grow. Different futures remain imaginable. Under corporate governance, there’s only optimization of the current system. Innovation serves profit, not people. Efficiency is god.

Character stories from this era:

• The Last Election Worker—an elderly woman who remembers voting, trying to explain democracy to her granddaughter
• The Defector—a mid-level manager who abandons his Conclave, losing everything for freedom
• The Optimized—a corporate success story struggling with the emptiness of perfect efficiency
• The Forgotten—those who fell outside the system and built something different in the margins

Who Resists the Conclave System?

The Resistance: Those Who Remember

Newdawn 2098 isn’t a story of complete submission. Even in the Conclave system, resistance persists:

The Analog Underground: Networks operating outside digital surveillance, using pre-digital technology, preserving knowledge of alternatives. They remember what democracy was, maintain archives of history the Conclaves would rather erase, and keep alive the possibility of different futures.

The Grey Markets: Economic systems outside Conclave control, trading in goods and services without corporate oversight. They’re inefficient, unoptimized, beautifully human. They prove that corporate efficiency isn’t the only way to survive.

The Border Runners: Those who move between Conclaves, never fully belonging to any, avoiding total control by remaining in the cracks of the system. They’re society’s margins, but margins have freedom.

The Ideological Holdouts: Communities that rejected the Conclave system entirely, choosing harder lives with self-determination over comfortable servitude. They’re small, struggling, but free in ways Conclave citizens can’t comprehend.

These aren’t heroes defeating the system. They’re people surviving within and around it, preserving alternatives, keeping questions alive that the Conclaves would rather answer permanently.

Why Does the Conclave System Matter in 2025?

The Questions We Should Be Asking Right Now

As someone who works with corporate leaders and maps future scenarios, here are the questions I think we’re not asking loudly enough:

For Founders and Executives:

• If your company solves a public problem, are you creating temporary partnership or permanent replacement?
• If your systems require monitoring for optimization, who controls that monitoring infrastructure in 30 years?
• If efficiency is your primary metric, what values aren’t being measured?
• If crisis gives you power, what’s your plan for returning it when crisis ends?

For Policy Makers:

• Why are corporate solutions more attractive than governmental ones? (And how do you address root causes rather than symptoms?)
• What public capacity needs rebuilding before dependency becomes irreversible?
• How do you maintain speed without sacrificing democratic accountability?
• What happens to sovereignty when critical infrastructure is privately owned?

For All of Us:

• What are we optimizing for, and who decided those were the right goals?
• Where’s the endpoint? If corporate methods improve government, where does integration stop?
• Can we reverse course once corporate infrastructure manages public functions?
• What alternative exists between dysfunctional government and corporate takeover?

Why This Story Matters Now? Why Am I Sharing this Now?

I’ve been developing these frameworks for over a decade. I’ve kept much of my strategic work private—done through consulting with founders and speaking engagements with corporate and government leaders.

But watching current events—tech executives in government, efficiency as policy language, corporate power conversations intensifying—I realize this can’t stay in consulting rooms and speculative fiction.

We’re making choices right now that echo for generations.

The Conclave system isn’t science fiction warning about a distant possible future. It’s extrapolation of present trajectories.

We’re already seeing the foundation:

• Company towns 2.0: Amazon’s HQ2 cities competing to reshape themselves for corporate preference
• Corporate healthcare: Employment-tied insurance controlling access to basic care
• Private governance: Special economic zones where corporations write their own regulations
• Surveillance capitalism: Business models requiring total data extraction
• Algorithmic management: AI systems controlling worker schedules, evaluations, and terminations

Every corporate merger increases concentration. Every public service privatized shifts power. Every regulation weakened removes checks. Every crisis that governments handle poorly creates opportunity for corporate alternatives.

The question Newdawn asks isn’t “Could this happen?” but “Are we already choosing this?”

The Advantage of Looking Over the Horizon

My international background—growing up in France, studying in Canada, working in Hollywood, now back in Provence—gives me perspective on how different governance systems handle crisis, balance efficiency with values, and navigate change.

My legal training taught me to think in frameworks and long-term implications.

My advertising and entertainment background taught me that the stories we tell ourselves shape the realities we build.

My work with founders taught me that intention and impact often diverge over time.

And my decade-plus developing Newdawn taught me that the futures we build are choices, not inevitabilities.

We’re not choosing between corporate governance and democratic governance.

We’re choosing whether the transition happens deliberately or accidentally, with safeguards or without them, with public awareness or public ignorance, reversibly or irreversibly.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s what makes the Conclave system troubling: For many people, it works. Corporate governance delivers stability, efficiency, and prosperity—if you’re the right kind of citizen, if you can maintain productivity, if you never question.

The trains run on time. The infrastructure functions. Innovation continues. Standards of living are high for corporate citizens. The system optimizes for efficiency and delivers it.

What it doesn’t deliver: freedom, dignity, agency, equality, or alternative possibilities.

The choice the Conclaves offer is real: security or liberty, efficiency or democracy, optimization or human messiness.

Newdawn doesn’t tell you which to choose. It shows you the cost of each choice through character stories, through lives lived under corporate rule, through those who thrive and those who resist.

What Happens Next

I’ve built the Newdawn universe in extensive detail—not just the mechanics of corporate governance, but the human experience of living within it. The daily accommodations. The moral compromises. The resistances that persist. The costs we don’t see until we’re already paying them.

It’s speculative, yes. But it’s grounded in pattern recognition, historical analysis, and systematic extrapolation. It’s informed by my work in corporate strategy rooms and my understanding of legal frameworks and my decades reading science fiction that became science fact.

The value isn’t in the fiction—it’s in the conversation it enables.

So I’m putting this framework into the world more publicly. Through articles. Through the Newdawn blog. Through conversations like this one.

Because I’ve been looking over the horizon for over a decade, and what I see requires all of us to look with clear eyes at the path we’re walking.

An Invitation

I work with corporate founders on strategic foresight and future-state planning. I help them think through long-horizon implications of today’s decisions.

I’m opening this conversation to a wider audience because these questions can’t live only in consulting rooms. They need public discourse.

So let me ask you:

Where do you see this trajectory leading?

If you’re a founder or executive, how do you think about power accumulation during crisis?

If you’re in policy or governance, what’s your plan for maintaining democratic institutions when corporate solutions seem faster and better?

If you’re watching this unfold like I am, what do you see that I’m missing?

The future isn’t written yet. But we’re writing it now, one quarterly decision and election cycle at a time.

Let’s write it intentionally.

What Questions Does The Conclave System Leaves Us With?

The Question That Haunts

The most haunting question in Newdawn 2098 isn’t “How did this happen?” It’s “Would you have chosen differently?”

When democracy seems ineffective and corporations offer solutions, when stability requires surrendering rights, when your children’s futures depend on corporate citizenship—what do you choose?

The characters who accepted the Conclaves weren’t villains. They were people making rational choices in impossible situations. The characters who resisted weren’t heroes. They were people who couldn’t accept the trade-off.

In 2025, we face earlier versions of those choices. Every time we trade privacy for convenience, rights for security, democracy for efficiency—we’re deciding what 2098 looks like.

Explore the Conclave System

The rise of corporate governance is one pillar of Newdawn’s world. Discover how the Conclaves function, who profits, who suffers, and who resists. Follow characters navigating corporate citizenship, fighting the system, or trying to change it from within.

This is political science fiction that doesn’t lecture—it explores. It doesn’t predict—it extrapolates. It doesn’t answer—it questions.

Enter The Gateway. Read the political lore. Understand the warning.

Because recognizing where we’re heading is the first step to choosing a different path.

The Newdawn Saga explores these questions in depth through speculative worldbuilding and character-driven narrative. For more on this framework, visit the Newdawn blog where I examine corporate futures, AI integration, climate adaptation, and social transformation through the lens of strategic foresight and anticipatory fiction.

If you’re interested in discussing these frameworks for your organization’s long-term strategy, connect with me directly.

Dominique Luchart

Related Lore:

• The Seattle Experiment: Corporate Citizenship’s First Test
• Conclave Structure: How Corporate Governance Functions
• The Last Election: Democracy’s Final Day
• Character Spotlight: Life Under Corporate Rule

Continue Reading:

• The Great Migration: How Crisis Enabled Corporate Power
• Surveillance Capitalism’s Final Form: Privacy in 2098
• The Resistance: Those Who Refused the System