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These three entities are ever present in our 21st Century way of life. As the title says, in what form do these exist within the Imperium of Man? Are there mega-lithic private corporations? Do Imperial citizens browse the web and do online shopping? Do they play computer games? What do you guys think?

Edit: Perhaps most planets have their own planet-wide internet, but none beyond that.

All commerce is handled by family dynasties. "Corporations" as we know them do not exist. All businesses are run by noble families as an extension of their wealth and power. These 'corporations' mainly do business with the corporations of other noble families, not with the average citizen. The average Imperial citizen has little or no free time (its the middle ages dialed up to 11 here, man) and personal wealth is unheard of if you aren't a noble. Since GW is using the feudal period of Earth as a baseline for how things are run in the IoM, the tax rate is something like 90% of all that you produce. The remaining 10% barely gives the populace enough to live on, never mind leaving them with enough disposable income to burn on video games. Entertainment is more primitive (morality plays, live music performances, community celebrations on Holy days and feast days) and the more visceral (gladiatorial games, bloodsports, and other unsavory things). There is no internet, because the internet is knowledge, and the IoM needs the populace to be ignorant if it is to survive.

TL;DR there is no fun allowed in the 41st millenium. There are no lolcats and there are no memes. And you are poor.

It all depends on the planet. There are some dirt holes like squid said or there could be worlds that treat their common folk decently. But yeah, I could only see a very limited state controlled internet being available to the citizens.


As for corporations it also depends on the world. Some have companies like we know it or some have complete command economies. No galactic wide megacorporations, though.

What about navigated houses? There massive family run operations with interests on many many planets. They could be considered a corporation.

If you have a million odd wprldas in your domain odds are at least one is not a total grim dark hell hole.

Well they hapily let you learn how great emperor is, primarchs are and how you must be willing to give all for the empire, and your "god"

As head of the planet, the Imperial governor has among other things the right of granting or denying access to space (as per Necromunda rulebook). These rights can be sold/rented. There is thus the appearance of some capitalistic monetary aspects. This is also backed up in the Calixis sector sources by FFG which depict a sort of financial stock market in one of the hives. However this capitalism seems to function at the level of noble house and cartels rather than individuals. Corporations might exist but there are barriers (such as high price or various etiquette or customary laws) to anyone except the nobles or other institutions buying shares.

Although there is interstellar trade and merchant houses in 40K, the feel is very much intentionally that of the medieval era. Trade contracts could last for generations. Chartist captains are described as plying the same routes as their fathers and grandfathers, year after year. At that point, it becomes less a commercial contract and almost a feudal obligation between the two parties. An agri-world could be transporting its crops via a Chartist captain to a hive world for decades on end, and the Chartist captain in return is either paid in the local currency as his fee (or perhaps takes a cut of the produce to sell for himself to cover his expenses) . Then on the round trip, he takes a portion of tractor and combine parts from the hive world back to the agri-world. This transaction may or may not involve cash if it has been formalized over generations. The same noble house could be his customer and therefore just supply the machine parts directly in exchange for the food, plus maybe some cash on the side for the captain's fee. This can take place entirely off the open market or in a ritualized fashion of gift giving or rendering up of service and goods like a giving of tribute. The Chartist captain certainly isn't really free to pursue speculative trade on his own with his ship's cargo. He might try trading in some curios or small portable luxury goods but that is more a sideshow of his own rather than the main business of the ship.

The trade we do see is almost always in the form of capital goods or raw unprocessed commodities. What consumption there is appears limited to the wealthy elite, and even then their luxury goods appear to be more the work of craftsmen rather than the mass production consumer goods we are familiar with today. The tiny (by proportion) segment of the population involved in the making of these luxury goods or providing the services demanded by the wealthy elite are not an independent middle class either.

I think the 40K universe its very much like North Korea, a dictatorship ruled by 1 with a bunch of high officials have power and wealth through military connections. The rest of the population gets the leftovers while in a constant state of fear from its own military and outside threats (NK constant propaganda of how other countries are 'evil'.

grim dark future where there is only war... doesn't that sound like NK?

It's all very much based on where you live. Some worlds would be absolute paradises, while others are the grimdark hellholes we've come to take as indicative of the whole setting.

Some private consortia will license the patterns for certain things, whether that's guns, vehicles, toasters, microwave oven, sleek and sexy bodygloves, hand sanitizer, whatever, from the Adeptus Mechanicus. The privilege for which they pay out the wazoo. In turn, they will construct these items and sell them in whatever market they seek to enter, to recoup their costs of production and make money. The Forges of Hive Gunmetal in the Calixis Sector are an example of this arrangement.

The internet does not exist in any format that we would recognize. On any Imperial World where both the technology exists and there is a liberal-enough Mechanicus faction to teach people how to use it, the fact remains that media in the Imperium is state-controlled. The Inquisition and the Ecclesiarchy ensure that the population is fed only the religious dogma and sanitized news reports that they want the populace to hear (think Orwell's 1984). However, such a world, in which there is a "personal cogitator" in every home, and that Little Timmy and Susy are educated enough in its functions to make use of an internet-like equivalent is... pretty far-fetched for the setting.

More likely, what you will find is not an internet but an intra-net, which is the network of systems within, say, an Administratum office complex, a Mechanicus Forge or an Arbites precinct system. Such a network is going to be like a modern-day corporate network, holding business-related documents, inter-office memos, business plans and protocols, and all that sort of thing, behind various levels of security, rather than forums of people being a-holes to one another and posting pictures of cats.

The closest thing I would equate to the "Internet" would be the Mechanicus "Noosphere" but purly dedicated to what the admech do with lots of data on mechines and the whole deal.

A "noosphere" is a thing that exists in real life.

Wikipedia wrote:The noosphere (/ˈnoʊ.ɵsfɪər/; sometimes noösphere) is a concept used by Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin to denote the "sphere of human thought". The word derives from the Greek νοῦς (nous "mind") and σφαῖρα (sphaira "sphere"), in lexical analogy to "atmosphere" and "biosphere".

.. it's basically the totality of perception and belief (or analysis) of input (data, stimuli, etc.).

From an AdMech perspective, the noosphere is the sum total of a machine-intelligence's perception of the world around it, so it's all the data feed from its auspex systems, its targeters, its human-brain pilot, the analysis performed by its cogitator systems on all that incoming data, etc.

If you linked two or more systems of this kind together, you would expand their noosphere to include the data of the other, as is evidenced in maniples of Titans, where the Scout Titans feed data back to the battle-Titan, and the battle-Titan feeds its tactical analysis down to the Scouts.

The Administratum does have a 'computer matrix' complete with cyber criminals which are tracked by detectives from the Arbites. To me that sounds like an internet but it is not for the use of private citizens; apart from those cyber criminals of course who could be anyone. In many of the BL novels, particularly those by Dan Abnett, then private citizens do have access to computers, or cogitators, and often have illegal access to planetary/Imperial computer systems.

As for toys and the like, the Rogue Trader in 'Eye of Terror' dreams about a rock'em sock'em style space marine toy with a chainsword that could be controlled to chop apart a mutant and maybe an alien too. In 'Titanicus' a toymaker makes wind-up clockwork Titans.

 Gogsnik wrote:
The Administratum does have a 'computer matrix' complete with cyber criminals which are tracked by detectives from the Arbites. To me that sounds like an internet but it is not for the use of private citizens; apart from those cyber criminals of course who could be anyone. In many of the BL novels, particularly those by Dan Abnett, then private citizens do have access to computers, or cogitators, and often have illegal access to planetary/Imperial computer systems.

Yeah, but that's almost definitively an intranet that some members of the Administratum access via what we would call a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in the modern age. Simply because it is not intended to be accessible to the public, and serves only a single function (that being the dizzying variety of business of the Administratum) prevents me from considering it an "internet". It should be noted that, at least in Abnett's stories, most of the people who have access to personal cogitators are either members of the Inquisition, or are fairly wealthy private citizens (in one case a doctor who lives in a what is basically a ski-resort town, and is very well-off)

As for toys and the like, the Rogue Trader in 'Eye of Terror' dreams about a rock'em sock'em style space marine toy with a chainsword that could be controlled to chop apart a mutant and maybe an alien too. In 'Titanicus' a toymaker makes wind-up clockwork Titans.

Yeah, though in both cases, those are fairly low-tech, and in the former case owned by an incredibly wealthy person. Toys like Rock 'em Sock 'em robots have been around since the 1960s, and I'm sure the mechanical applications by which the game functions have been around far, far longer.

The Imperium would also stray from a true "internet" because they are like the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Linked computers are banned as they are too close to artificial intelligence. Only the Adeptus Mechanicus walks the thin line towards that area.

Iracundus wrote:
As head of the planet, the Imperial governor has among other things the right of granting or denying access to space (as per Necromunda rulebook). These rights can be sold/rented. There is thus the appearance of some capitalistic monetary aspects. This is also backed up in the Calixis sector sources by FFG which depict a sort of financial stock market in one of the hives. However this capitalism seems to function at the level of noble house and cartels rather than individuals. Corporations might exist but there are barriers (such as high price or various etiquette or customary laws) to anyone except the nobles or other institutions buying shares.

Although there is interstellar trade and merchant houses in 40K, the feel is very much intentionally that of the medieval era. Trade contracts could last for generations. Chartist captains are described as plying the same routes as their fathers and grandfathers, year after year. At that point, it becomes less a commercial contract and almost a feudal obligation between the two parties. An agri-world could be transporting its crops via a Chartist captain to a hive world for decades on end, and the Chartist captain in return is either paid in the local currency as his fee (or perhaps takes a cut of the produce to sell for himself to cover his expenses) . Then on the round trip, he takes a portion of tractor and combine parts from the hive world back to the agri-world. This transaction may or may not involve cash if it has been formalized over generations. The same noble house could be his customer and therefore just supply the machine parts directly in exchange for the food, plus maybe some cash on the side for the captain's fee. This can take place entirely off the open market or in a ritualized fashion of gift giving or rendering up of service and goods like a giving of tribute. The Chartist captain certainly isn't really free to pursue speculative trade on his own with his ship's cargo. He might try trading in some curios or small portable luxury goods but that is more a sideshow of his own rather than the main business of the ship.

The trade we do see is almost always in the form of capital goods or raw unprocessed commodities. What consumption there is appears limited to the wealthy elite, and even then their luxury goods appear to be more the work of craftsmen rather than the mass production consumer goods we are familiar with today. The tiny (by proportion) segment of the population involved in the making of these luxury goods or providing the services demanded by the wealthy elite are not an independent middle class either.

Of course there are the rogue traders and black market dealers in the 40k universe as well.

The Imperium would be highly suspicious of any vestige of the Dark Age of Technology. While some luxuries might exist for the nobles of a hive world or the fortunate administrators of a garden world, things like video games or Amazon.com would be unimaginable to the majority of the imperial citizens. Both because they are too poor (giving their produce, wealth, and lives in the never ending galactic war of survival) and because the imperial administrators are well aware of the polluting influence that such luxuries might have on the general population, making them soft, less martial, less devoted to the emperor, more open to the taint of Chaos.

The imperial citizens seem to be serfs, tied to their planet, and subject to the orders of their planetary governor. Clearly smugglers, rogue traders, and profiteers seek to make money by supplying the people with some things (mostly narcotics). But in imperial society, I imagine most people just aren't encouraged to look beyond their horizons. Just imagine any society where you are indoctrinated from birth, and everyone you've ever known was taught the same lessons since infancy. Even on Earth you can find countries and cults, and see how that changes people. Imagine an entire planetary cult, raised with the same mindset, how impossible it would be to break out of that.

The WH40K universe doesn't make sense - let's face it.

But with that reservation: My impression of the IoM is that it is alike the late Roman Empire (say AD 300-350) - it seems to be well, can gather impressive military forces and have a very sophisticated administration. But almost everything went to keeping the army alive and kicking. Taxes were often taken in utilities for the army (cloth, metal etc), not in money. I would say that the same reasoning rules IoM - "we don't need money, we need lasguns, tanks and men to keep the military running". And that mindset does not encourage capitalism, corporations or consumerism.

An internet after the Horus rebellion would be an superhighway for Chaos into human brains. The scrap code (chaos computer viruses) that scourged loyalist Mechanicum forces on Mars probably led to an extremely safe, but also extremely basic and controlled (no Web 2.0 where any user may create stuff more advanced than text) datanet. You could read Charles Stross Laundry series for examples of what computer programmers and Internet could lead to (and in the Laundry world "chaos" is far less active than in WH40K).

For what it's worth, the speaker for the chartists of space merchants and commerce is sometimes a high lord of Terra. (apologies if that's been brought up already)

The closest to anything like an 'internet' I've ever remembered in 40K was one reference in the old 1st/2nd edition Epic stuff (one of the Titanicus books) where it mentioned all the forge worlds and Admech stuff were linked together by a transmat link made up of psychic servitors. And even then I'd hate to thing about the lag they must suffer.

It is possible in some way they may use astrotelepathy to 'coordinate' information in some vaguely internet-ish fashion (the Eisenhorn novels IIRC even had psychic email I vaguely recall) but I wouldn't expect t it to be anything like the internet we're used to.

As far as consumerism or corporation goes... depends on the world/region. Economics are going to be as variable as everything else in the Imperium, as well as standard of livings and access to technology/possessions.

squidhills wrote:
All commerce is handled by family dynasties. "Corporations" as we know them do not exist. All businesses are run by noble families as an extension of their wealth and power. These 'corporations' mainly do business with the corporations of other noble families, not with the average citizen. The average Imperial citizen has little or no free time (its the middle ages dialed up to 11 here, man) and personal wealth is unheard of if you aren't a noble. Since GW is using the feudal period of Earth as a baseline for how things are run in the IoM, the tax rate is something like 90% of all that you produce. The remaining 10% barely gives the populace enough to live on, never mind leaving them with enough disposable income to burn on video games. Entertainment is more primitive (morality plays, live music performances, community celebrations on Holy days and feast days) and the more visceral (gladiatorial games, bloodsports, and other unsavory things). There is no internet, because the internet is knowledge, and the IoM needs the populace to be ignorant if it is to survive.

TL;DR there is no fun allowed in the 41st millenium. There are no lolcats and there are no memes. And you are poor.

Taxation was actually quite small in the Dark Ages; roughly 5-7% of GDP. GDP is a terrible gauge, but it's decent for rough estimations. Nowadays it sits around 25-45% in the West. Sure, serfs had it gakky, but actually paid less tax than say Norwegians do these days (if you count half their work hours being "owned" by nobles as the same as 50% income tax). The main difference is that we got helluva lot more productive during the Industrial Revolution.

The way I see it is that the state has taken over most of the industry and uses it for war, which thus feths over any sort of private leisure as the economy is completely screwed.

wufai wrote:
I think the 40K universe its very much like North Korea, a dictatorship ruled by 1 with a bunch of high officials have power and wealth through military connections. The rest of the population gets the leftovers while in a constant state of fear from its own military and outside threats (NK constant propaganda of how other countries are 'evil'.

grim dark future where there is only war... doesn't that sound like NK?

This, pretty much.

Maximus Bitch wrote:
These three entities are ever present in our 21st Century way of life. As the title says, in what form do these exist within the Imperium of Man? Are there mega-lithic private corporations? Do Imperial citizens browse the web and do online shopping? Do they play computer games? What do you guys think?

how would an internet work across stellar distances. You would be sending packets for decades or centuries until you got confirmation that they were received.

Every planet is an island in that respect, they might have an planetnet or they might not, but connecting one planet to another in a different star system would be very difficult. As or right now the only way to communicate across such distances is via psykers, which are difficult(but not impossible) to integrate into the net

Big E's webway project might have been a way to connect humanity, to build a galaxic net that would not only transport but also facilitate communication for all of humanity. Didn't work out the way he planned.

I'm presuming the reason there's no internet is the resemblance to AI, and seen as the IoM is gak-scared of this guy, such things are verboten.

Edit: Perhaps most planets have their own planet-wide internet, but none beyond that.

Maybe, but only the very lucky. Standard hive worlds will most certainly not have a personal computer or laptop for each person. There may be some kind of planner or digital noticeboard, and some access terminals on the streets, but no free internet. Any internet would most likely be only accessible to the administrators of the planet and purely built to share work data. Regular civvies wouldn't see it or use it at all.

And even in those luckier worlds, their internet would most certainly be monitored and restricted. Nothing illegal or heretical could ever occur on it, due to the totalitarian goverment spying in.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
Maybe, but only the very lucky. Standard hive worlds will most certainly not have a personal computer or laptop for each person. There may be some kind of planner or digital noticeboard, and some access terminals on the streets, but no free internet. Any internet would most likely be only accessible to the administrators of the planet and purely built to share work data. Regular civvies wouldn't see it or use it at all.

And even in those luckier worlds, their internet would most certainly be monitored and restricted. Nothing illegal or heretical could ever occur on it, due to the totalitarian goverment spying in.

so no Youtube?

I doubt it.

An internet, in WH40k, would simply be a gateway for Chaos corruption. If a planet had an internet, all that it would take is a touch of Scrapcode, and the Dark Mechanicum would rule the world.

All of these things can exist planet to planet or even on a system basis.

But the only means of long-distance communication for the Imperium is unreliable Astropaths, so there's not much in the way of broad culture or media.

I imagine that some of the lesser (but not the bottom) tiers of society would have some form of email. I'm imagining something like typing up a message on a Gothic-looking (and offline) PDA and then queuing up at the local "Communicorum Administratus" (post office in fakus Latinorum) to have it approved and sent off. On the other side, the message could be printed off and hand-delivered by a post officer.

That way, people could contact each other planetwide. They'd hardly set up an airmail service just for letters. I imagine there would be private couriers to deliver objects, but this would be expensive and probably just used to transport goods between two factories or whatever. The elite nobility would have their own agents to make deliveries for them, and probably have full-featured holographic communicators for conversing real-time with their rich, immortal friends on the planet's leisure moon.

If people had any sort of public internet, it would most likely be purely for the purpose of receiving messages from the local government. Which, come to think of it, sounds like a really cool way to start a Chaos cult...

EDIT: Now I'm imagining a secretary rushing into the office of a vice-governor, brandishing a piece of parchment that had been spat out of some bizarre-looking printer that had, for the first time in years, sprung to life without warning.
"My Lord, a message from the governor's office!"
"How dare you! This can't be so important as to interrupt my-"
"An Inquisitor is coming!"

I think that the internet on Imperial worlds (if it existed) would largly be a Chinese version of the internet. There are just huge sections of data that are restricted by the govt and you cant see them. From a logistical standpoint I cant imagine that there isnt some sort of automated communication tech like an intranet (as mentioned before).

On a chaos ruled world I think the internet would be rampent and very common though. I mean Slaanesh has to encourage it's use....

alas, since its chaos and grimdark, it is run by Comcast and you spend half the time on the phone with customer support. Khorn likes this though since it drives people into an uncontrollable rage and after being transfered like 4 times and told different things each time the person calling starts screeming "Blood for the blood god!"

Maximus Bitch wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
Maybe, but only the very lucky. Standard hive worlds will most certainly not have a personal computer or laptop for each person. There may be some kind of planner or digital noticeboard, and some access terminals on the streets, but no free internet. Any internet would most likely be only accessible to the administrators of the planet and purely built to share work data. Regular civvies wouldn't see it or use it at all.

And even in those luckier worlds, their internet would most certainly be monitored and restricted. Nothing illegal or heretical could ever occur on it, due to the totalitarian goverment spying in.

so no Youtube?

If it existed, it would be nothing but religious/government agit-prop all day every day on every channel.

Inter-planetary communications are, of course, handled by Astropaths, so there's no other way (other than a RT or other pilot) flying from Point A to B and delivering the news by hand (or word-of-mouth).

It all comes down to the planet. I like to think there are a handful of worlds within the Imperium that aren't too terrible to be on and where they have access to some pretty normal things. But the Imperium as a whole is in a constant state of war. Consumerism probably doesn't exist much, if at all, on most planets because people rarely have enough to consume as is. Unless it's like... normal stuff the Imperium needs to survive.

squidhills wrote:
All commerce is handled by family dynasties. "Corporations" as we know them do not exist. All businesses are run by noble families as an extension of their wealth and power. These 'corporations' mainly do business with the corporations of other noble families, not with the average citizen. The average Imperial citizen has little or no free time (its the middle ages dialed up to 11 here, man) and personal wealth is unheard of if you aren't a noble. Since GW is using the feudal period of Earth as a baseline for how things are run in the IoM, the tax rate is something like 90% of all that you produce. The remaining 10% barely gives the populace enough to live on, never mind leaving them with enough disposable income to burn on video games. Entertainment is more primitive (morality plays, live music performances, community celebrations on Holy days and feast days) and the more visceral (gladiatorial games, bloodsports, and other unsavory things). There is no internet, because the internet is knowledge, and the IoM needs the populace to be ignorant if it is to survive.

TL;DR there is no fun allowed in the 41st millenium. There are no lolcats and there are no memes. And you are poor.

This is not entirely true. This is not the middle ages turned up to 11, it is the perception of the middle ages turned up to 11. The average European citizens in the medieval time period enjoyed something like 80 or 90 different feast days throughout he year, and also didn't work on Sundays. they had more free time than today average corporate worker, mainly due to the fact that religion was a much larger influence on society and how it regulated itself. While this lent to the autocracy and civil immobility, it did provide many days of rest and celebration.