Three Examples of Cooperative Dystopia in the “Alien” Universe
Analyzing and sharing what popular culture can teach us about career development, leadership, and the cooperative enterprise model is something we do really well on this website. My contention is that the Alien universe is probably a cooperative dystopia from which we can learn a lot. But first we need to analyze and understand the value of cooperativism.
Karen Miner and Sonja Novkavic’s “Cooperative Enterprise Model” is a type of socioeconomic organization that is governed and owned by its members who participate in the rewards and challenges of their activities. Unlike other business models that focus on profits for shareholders or owners, cooperatives seek to generate value for their members and the communities they serve. In the Alien universe, these principles have been systematically perverted to create what appears to be cooperative governance while serving corporate oligarchies and power-thirsty, weirdly programmed super-robots who may or may not get “shares” in the corporations for which they grind, deceive, and sacrifice.
So, what would a dystopic cooperative model look like? Here are three examples of cooperative dystopia in the Alien universe (co-written with AI because, well, this is the world we’re building).
The Five-Corporation Pentarchy as Multi-Partner Cooperative
The governance structure dominated by five major corporations (Weyland-Yutani, Prodigy, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold) superficially resembles a multi-stakeholder cooperative model. Each corporation represents different ‘stakeholder’ or ‘partner’ interests – biotechnology, space exploration, manufacturing, resource extraction, and terraforming – and counts governments and workers as partners in their efforts to exert influence and control in the galaxy. A nod to cooperativism, for example, is evidenced by the need for Prodigy and Wayland-Yutani to engage in arbitration to broker a resolution regarding the spaceship-full-of-monsters crash, theft, and overall corporate espionage and quarantine violations; this example of cooperation reveals the appearance of democratic decision-making and balanced power distribution.
The five corporations in the Alien universe seem to share power in a really bad reminiscent of the Mondragon Corporation’s networked structure. In the Alien universe, however, collaboration mainly protects their own interests and former nation state seem to have been demoted to “tier two partners,” most likely having less voting power and economic clout.
History shows cooperatives are remarkably adaptable, even thriving under autocratic and oligarchic regimes. Look at Northern Italy under Benito Mussolini: cooperatives survived by supporting state goals, sacrificing genuine member democracy but keeping their doors open and their ledgers balanced, not unlike the member-owned mining companies or worker-science-coops that undoubtedly became twisted into power-enabling peons for the pentarchy.
The “Working for Extra Shares” Labour System
Member Economic Participation and Democratic Ownership are principles of the cooperative model – members, not shareholders, own the enterprise and contribute to its socioeconomic potential through their human and financial capital. The pervasive culture of workers “earning shares” in enterprises reflects a corrupted version of member economic participation. In genuine cooperatives, member-owners receive dividends based on patronage (use of the cooperative) rather than receiving dividends from an expanded capital investment. It appears that in the Alien universe, this system has been transformed into a sophisticated control mechanism.
In the Alien universe, the five-corporation pentarchy mimics a cooperative model, but true democratic participation is absent. Power remains concentrated among corporate leaders, who use arbitration and collaboration primarily to preserve their own dominance, echoing historical examples where cooperatives survived by serving autocratic goals.
Workers are led to believe they gain ownership through share accumulation, yet share distribution is tightly controlled by cyborgs like Morrow (the Office Space bros would call him “management”). Extra shares foster dependence rather than genuine empowerment. The illusion of eventual ownership obscures the reality of perpetual worker subordination to corporate interests, not to mention the greed of accumulating more shares will inspire really, really bad decisions from under-trained, poorly supervised crew members aboard spaceships full of monsters.
Weyland-Yutani’s Isomorphic Cooperative Network
Weyland-Yutani’s dominance across multiple sectors represents institutional isomorphism, which is the process by which organizations become increasingly similar in structure and practice. The corporation has probably absorbed or partnered with smaller cooperatives over time, creating a network that maintains cooperative branding while centralizing control. Or at least this is a very iron-clad theory!
Weyland-Yutani’s grip over various industries is a textbook case of institutional isomorphism – organizations morphing to look and act alike, stifling innovation and democratic decision-making. Over time, the company has likely absorbed or teamed up with smaller cooperatives, creating a network that wears the cooperative label but is run from the top down. Sound familiar?
In the Alien universe, this isomorphic trend doesn’t just set the rules – it encourages all sorts of risky behavior. When all members of the pentarchy push boundaries or take on hazardous jobs or take experimentation on alien lifeforms and robots too far they do so because driving this sort of innovation is necessary to win at all costs. Mimetic isomorphism—copying what seems to work—spreads these questionable shortcuts throughout the network, regardless of whether they’re safe or fair. Training programs reinforce this, teaching “best practices” that just so happen to favor the corporate higher-ups instead of true cooperative ideals.
Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani’s “best practices” reveal doors that never lock, hackable interstellar communications, zero-safety protocols in laboratories containing space monsters, and de-motivated staff who will sell-out their teammates for a few more ownership shares. Even the show’s artificial beings seem to pledge loyalty to the system over their own crew or emerging autonomy (xenomorph-synth-buddy-cop scenes excluded), showing how isomorphic control can erase individual quirks and turn the galaxy into one big, hazardous company town.
Lessons from History
History shows us that cooperatives can be stretched, bent, and experimented on in corporatist laboratories. According to the Ivano Barberini Foundation, Italian Fascism sought to transform the cooperative connective tissue of socioeconomic networks and enterprises to serve its new agenda:
Though marred by contradictions, not least that of the forced combination of authoritarianism and the semblance of self-management, the project was to be set within the much larger plan of totalitarianism. The Regime’s immediate main objective with regards to cooperative politics was to strip the movement of its popular-proletariat nature and to create an alternative model which could be interpreted as to represent the underlying tenets of Fascism. Depending on whether or not they considered this goal successful, they would swing between the use of the term ‘fascist cooperativism’ or ‘cooperativism under Fascism’.
Also, what’s a creepier experience: Boy Genius reading Peter Pan to robot children or Benito Mussolini shouting the book to droves of screaming and/or terrified spectators?
Whether it’s the Alien universe or Italian cooperatives, democracy gets hollowed out, elites capture member benefits, and efficiency is prized over actual member control. Even today’s credit unions sometimes trade member service for profit-chasing, proving that cooperative ideals can be lost when the Neverland of real democracy disappears.
The Alien universe demonstrates how cooperative structures can be weaponized against their own members through three primary mechanisms:
- Democratic Capture: Maintaining democratic forms while eliminating democratic substance
- Economic Dependence: Using cooperative benefits to increase rather than decrease member dependence on corporate systems
- Isomorphic Control: Standardizing cooperative practices to serve corporate rather than member interests
Conclusions
My hope is that you had some fun with this cooperative thought experiment (the Lost Boys seem positioned to have fun with their new, more egalitarian world order that is now overrun with space monsters, murder-robots, and some of the worst human beings a dystopian cooperative enterprise has ever produced…).