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by Asooka 3467 days ago
If I may quote from the rulebook for Fantasy Flight Games's New Angeles board game (go play it, it's awesome!)

There’s something they used to call ‘the Myth of Shareholder Value.’ It goes, basically, like this: everything any corporate officer does, at any level, must be dedicated to only one thing, which is to increase shareholder value.

...

The Weyland Consortium are the high priests of the cult of Shareholder Value in today’s economy. The Consortium is less a corporation and more an algorithm, buying and selling corporations and extending its tendrils out through every sector of industry: research, transportation, you name it. The Consortium moves and acts like a living thing. No one executive or committee steers that ship. Shareholder Value is its only captain, and every decision made by its chief officers is pre-destined, an inevitable result of gears turning for decades, of market forces filtered through AIs running on corporate servers.