How Amazon and ‘Ready Player One’ are connected

President Trump is waging a one-way war on Amazon, a company he views with disdain and suspicion. Monday morning, the president took to Twitter once more to accuse Amazon of costing the U.S. Postal Service “a fortune” despite all the evidence to the contrary. Trump is a man deeply unsettled by visions of future disruption and change––his campaign slogan said as much.

This mindset, that of the regulator, extends beyond his romanticization of the coal industry and his skepticism of free trade to the strangest of places: the dingy government hellscape that is the average post office. The idea of an Amazon drone delivering your packages within hours isn’t exciting to everyone, but it is what’s coming.

What unites both the populist Left and Right is fear of change. Conservative fear manifests itself in the culture wars, while the progressive Left looks to regulators to slow technology that raises relatively predictable safety concerns.

Consider the automated vehicles debate, bouncing between safety and displacement of workers as a rationale for maintaining the status quo of transportation as we know it, which is already exceedingly wasteful and dangerous. Amazon enters in as an example of a multifaceted company with a desire to have a hand in a number of industries from retail, grocery, healthcare, mail, transportation, and, oddly, defense. They aren’t the first, and they won’t be the last.

The all-encompassing corporation is a deep-seated fear in our civic consciousness, once expressing itself through Hollywood and strong unions around the country. Today this paranoia lives on in an increasingly conglomerated Hollywood, and also in Washington, thanks to the populist explosion following the 2008 financial crisis. Maybe it’s a product of right-brain creatives’ long quest for success in entertainment within corporate boundaries or a legitimate Marxist conspiracy, but film and television does not often reflect kindly on corporations. Think Cyberdyne Systems (“Terminator”), Umbrella Corp (“Resident Evil”), Omni Consumer Products (“RoboCop”), Buy n’ Large (“WALL-E”) or even the character Lord Business (“LEGO Movie”).

This week’s new release, a film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 sci-fi novel, “Ready Player One,” adds to the long list.

The $53 million weekend for Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” was a reminder of just how enduring the corporate villain is in pop culture. Here’s a quick primer on the plot about a virtual reality treasure hunt in a not-so-far-off dystopian future. It was “The Goonies” of 2018 and quite aware of its 1980’s aesthetic and reliance on classic materials to make the concept work. An awkward boy, an it-girl, a band of similarly misfit and loveable nerds taking on the world and hunting for digital gold all the while. Archetypes like these are invaluable tools in storytelling, and “Ready Player One” hit on all the ones for a story like this, but there were some tropes as well. Enter Innovative Online Industries , this fictional world’s shadowy and all-encompassing corporate overlord helmed by Nolan Sorrento (portrayed by Ben Mendelsohn). Given the mood of the day, you could have swapped out Sorrento for Bezos and IOI for Amazon and the populist left and right would have nodded in agreement.

Villains deploying quadcopter drones to surveil and hunt the youthful heroes of “Ready Player One” could not have been more appropriately timed for the vibe of this political moment. However, for all its relevance, it has to be made clear just how bizarre these themes are to free market advocates who see a distinction between crony capitalism and capitalism proper. The two are rarely distinguished in pop culture, relieving typically liberal filmmakers from having to answer for how government factored into the supremacy of a single corporation in the daily life of their fictional characters. Throughout “Ready Player One,” IOI surveils civilians, deploys armed forces to detain their opponents, bombs residences, and holds debtors to their company in quasi-digital detention centers for manual labor bordering on torture.

Police or government is nowhere to be seen until the last five minutes of the movie, raising the question … how did Innovative Online Industries get so all powerful in “Ready Player One”? Economist Ludwig von Mises once said “the essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning,” but time and time again our most popular movies share that feature with market forces. Presumably, a company like IOI cannot gain this latitude without forcing out its competitors from the marketplace by way of rigid intellectual property law or a regulatory stranglehold on the safety apparatus it takes to uphold their VR wonderland OASIS. (Don’t get me started of the legitimate safety red flags of OASIS, there are just too many.)

A new report from the Heritage Foundation dissects crony capitalism and all the wicked ways business and government collude to the benefit of the few and detriment of the many. It’s an illuminating piece of work at a time when the ideas of capitalism are facing generational headwinds and a continuing siege from Hollywood. Researcher Lauren Brubaker writes “Smith was aware that natural liberty faced natural obstacles in the form of human nature and particularly the desire by “merchants and manufacturers” to use the power of government to procure for themselves ‘systems either of preference or of restraint’ that distort the free market to their advantage.”

Go see “Ready Player One” because it’s a fun and memorable movie, but ask the right questions. How did this corporation gain the ability to use force? Where are their competitors? Are there any VR innovators out there that can emulate the experience of OASIS without the debt slavery? If so, where are they? These questions will lead you back to governance.

Corporations are not the ultimate good, but they are not the ultimate evil. Human dignity and natural rights have the best chance to flourish when both operate within silos, free from collusion and cronyism.

Stephen Kent (@Stephen_Kent89) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the spokesperson for Young Voices and host of Beltway Banthas, a Star Wars & politics podcast in D.C.