The Great Corporations are the transnational monopolies that form the backbone of modern society. Nation-states are mere appendices to the Great Corporations; almost all their administrative and welfare apparatus is contracted out (e.g. to HSC, IFC, or TL) and they operate under extreme regulatory capture, to the point where nominal high officers of state typically also sit on important corporate boards. (For this reason, it is anachronistic to refer to nations, rather than simply regions.) The boards of directors of the Great Corporations interlock, and they do not generally view themselves as being capitalist corporations in competition with each other, but simply as the global social leadership in a post-democratic world.
There are eight Great Corporations, which have divided much of the economy between themselves. Being a shareholder of at least one of the Great Corporations is essentially required for full participation in modern industrial society; most shareholders actually own stock in all of them due to population contraction/inheritance and deliberate portfolio diversification.
uMon Corporation - The monopoly on synthetic persons of all kinds.
Human Services Corporation - Healthcare, welfare, education, sanitation, food service
Evodowsyn Corporation - Agriculture, bulk chemicals, agricultural machines
World Energy Technologies, Inc - Energy production, nuclear reprocessing
Integrated Facilities Corporation - Construction and repairs, real estate, transit
RGSH Resources Group - Mining, recycling, heavy machinery, climate engineering
Transnational Logistics, Inc - Retail, delivery services, financial services, journalism
The infoTronics Group - IT, telecom, entertainment, sex work, sports (excluding mon sport)
The Great Corporations operate many subsidiaries, such that their actual names are not all familiar to the common citizen. Also, there are many other corporations that actively compete with each other in a conventional fashion, operating in sectors that the Great Corporations do not dominate.
Some historical antecedents for the Great Corporations include the Japanese ''zaibatsu'' and Korean ''Chaebol''.
The rule of the Great Corporations has, at least, largely ended war; the vaunted military-industrial complex has been mostly subsumed into other corporations. Militaries are limited in size and exist mostly to suppress civil unrest.