Fiction:PGPS/Empire Of The Credit

Empire of the Credit: The Corporate Culture of the Draconid Imperium by Yasser Martineu, contributor to L'Économe vol. 20, iss. 15, March 2801

Picture the moment: After a hard day's work you sit in a sofa to read a digital copy of "Swarms of the Eons", Estoranus' twelfth Symphany playing on the radio as you sip from a glass filled with a frothy sample of Trastius' finest. In the golden era brought by the Gigaquadrantic Intergalactic Trade Organization (GITO) we can enjoy the finest the First Gigaquadrant has to offer. The heart of Andromeda is one of the sources of this great age of luxury, as over the past three decades one particular civilizaion has been spreading its arms and sharing its riches in an unprecedented manner. This benevolent giant is the Imperium of the Draconis, or more commonly; the Draconid Imperium.

In an age where the increasing prevalence of replicators and a cornucopia of resources from automated sites within the interstellar medium, the Imperium has been intriguingly defiant in following the trends of other civilizations, who have decided that currency has little purpose in an age of plenty. The Mimidian Credit, which has risen to become a highly-trusted reserve currency, firmly establishes the Imperium as one of the greatest commercial bastions in the Xonexi Cluster, perhaps even (at a stretch) all of known space. Certainly other great powers may be much larger and with a larger population to satisfy, but none of them match the sheer habitat-by-habitat volumes to which the Imperium deals on a daily basis.

Wealth In The Age of Plenty
So how in this age of plenty does the Imperium continue to uphold itself as a capitalist bastion? The answer is that despite being a monarchic empire - a domain where the highest authority is a monarch chosen on the basis of his or her bloodline - the Draconid Imperium is a society still driven by money and power. While other societies such as the habitats of the Milky Way Cooperative or my own home of the French Colonial Empire utilise a command economy to provide for its citizens (where goods and services are provided by government institutions), the Imperial economy is very firmly in the hands of privatised industry, who supply various goods and needs for an agreed-upon price. Some readers may have heard of the Shipwright's Triumvirate; a trio of extremely large shipwright's firms - Utopis Fleet Concern, Valle Astroengineering and Domcar Manufacturing - which are also the lead contractors for ships and equipment for the Imperium's vast military industrial complex. These three, as well as hundreds of other organisations, are firmly in private hands: They trade stock on the GITO markets, provide for foreign groups and a portion of the Imperium's military budget is spent buying ships and equipment from them.

This is an example of the corporate culture that currently grips the Draconid Imperium so tightly. Other nations have had a period of mercantilism with at some point industry leaders or political figures eventually convincing these captains of industry and commerce that they do not need their fortunes. The Imperium however appears to have achieved a peculiar synthesis within the halls of its government institutions in the form of its noble families. In the Imperium, many of the noble classes are also economic tycoons or at least significant figures within one or more commercial organisations. The distingiushment between nobility and top earner becomes blurred as politicians are able to use their corporate incomes to fund their operations such as more business ventures or political initiatives. This does have some positive side-effect in that politicians can be trusted to pay themselves and that their political success can be measured on the stock markets and vice versa. Only a handful of organisations - namely imperial law enforcement, the largest university institutions and the largest energy provider - rely on state funding and supply. Theoretically, it is likely that nothing less than a paradigm shift could feasibly dislodge this current system.

The Imperium is one of the largest trading nexi on the GITO netowrk because as well as a hand-in hand attitude to its corporations domestically, the Imperial adminsitration is also somewhat hands-off in its international affairs. As of writing, Utopis Fleet Concern and Domcar Manufacturing have been making headway within the Cyrandia Cluster; establishing offices and manufacturies and hiring local citizens in order to provide for local markets and further bolster their profit margins. They provide job opportunities to local citizens and goods that they might consider exotic or appealing for their foreign attraction. As well as exporting, the Imperium imports a varied manner of raw and manufactured goods from other members of the GITO network, the Andromedan Galactic Commonwealth and other powers outside of these two, providing an eclectic variety of imports and exports on commercial havens such as Araveene and Minos'Drakon's famed Salpathi commercial district.

Consumerism's Mark
The origins of this system can theoretically be traced back to the Imperium's own intra-imperial trade networks. While the value of other currencies are regulated by a single government and weighted against other fiat and representative currencies, the Mimidian Credit is in fact an amalgamated value of thousands of domestic currencies of varying kinds. The Imperial economic machine is maintained by a dynamic transfer of goods between the various provinces that the Imperium has aquired over the millennia, the dynamism of which has allowed many of the provinces to specialise in the production of one form of good or service to provide for others. There are so many provinces that it is inevitable several compete for dominance over a particular kind of service and it appears that this is permitted, perhaps encouraged, by the Imperium's commercial regulators. In my original stetement I used purely Draconis-sourced cultural products but I am sure that more alien-made artifacts, productions and services can be found on the galactic markets thanks broadly to the wish of entrepeneurs to spread their markets as widely as possible.

Indeed, while it could easily be identified as the doing of the government that the numerous commercial firms reach out to provide the wider gigaquadrant with all that the Imeprium provides, at most they merely establish the initial channels that give these various firms the ability to set up within outside powers. They give the opportunity for the opposite as well due to the dynamic exchange ideas that make up the lifeblood of its economic system. The most intriguing factor is what I have heard economysts on Araveene refer to as "three-node-exchange"; a system that, with the consent of the first party, permits the second party to sell the first party's product on to a third party and so on along a chain while providing a portion of the sale price to the first party. Common between businesses, Araveene traders advocate this system on an international scale and advocate for trading parties to act as the second node as it allows a single party's product to reach more distant markets while providing the first party with a little extra income.

It would be prudent by now to explain the Imperium's own currency, as it is easy to assume that by the name it is a single unified currency. The truth is that it isn't that simple. The credit (An acronym of the Dracid term for "currency exchange unit") is a gestalt value calculated from hundereds, perhaps thousands of planetary or smaller interstellar currencies. What is stored in foreign vaults is representations, and the credit's value is jsut as vunerable to the fluctuations of the value of its constituent parts as it is to outside influences. The reason for this is related to a clause in their domestic social system where laws, politics and even currency are permitted to be retained in the interest of maintaining cultural identity. Because the value of a single currency influences the value of the Mimidian Credit more than vice versa, these planetary currencies are more protected from wobbles in the ingergalactic markets. It is a complicated system that the Imperium's Commercial Council is tasked with regulating. Thus, the health of itself is tied ot the health of its members.

The variety of different societies within Imperial space is vast, leading to a highly varied mass media available, much of which the corporate Imperium. The sheer diversity and cosmopolitanism of its internal society apepars ot offer no end ot the variety of novels, films and games which, quite frankly, are getting everywhere due to its society's desire to share and export what it can across the First Gigaquadrant. This is likely to do with the three node exchange system and the increasing transnationality of major businesses originating from their territories. The image I presented in my opening statement is becoming increasingly common as Draconid film and holovision increasingly ingrains itself into public conversation; what happened in the latest episode of Vencortium Underworld for instance or a group's enjoyment of the latest summer film from an Andromedan studio. The Imperium has a near limitless pool of cultural identities to take advantage of due to the number of provincial territories under its banner; Which aside from the occasional mandate from the imperial government and providing for the military, appear to expand and develop largely as they please. WHich only seems to make the reach of the Imperium grow even faster as each province, taking advantage of the high technology of the Draconis, expands and settles at their own pace. Some faster, some slower, but all completely free to expand peacefully; unburdening the beauocracy yet providing for the great economic machine.

In some respects, the Draconid Imperium's corporate culture is self-perpetuating. The government allows corproate business and constituent state alike to expand with little need for consent from the grand senate while the Imperium as a whole benefits from these fruits in the form of an ever-increasing gross domestic product and commerical base financed, administered and in some cases operated by individuals with significant political power within the governemnt system. Driven by the desire for ever larger profit margins and customer pools, the result is a turn of phrase that has come to emerge to desribe the extent of which the Draconid Imperium has come to reach: "In order to explain where the Draconis can be found, simply mention where they cannot", a simple but effective explaination that rather simply, the Imperium is everywhere. They have come to understand that every market is an oppertunity for greater expansion, influence and prestige and were it not for the influence of the mimidian credit and the role it plays in development and expansion, the Imperium and the Gigaquadrntic Intergalactic Trade Organization - one of the prime catalysts for the golden age at the end of the 2700s - would be half as widespread as they are today.