Title: SoftBank's Next 30-Year Vision (2010 corporate PDF)
Media ...corporate internal document? Let's go with "Other Media".
Approx length: It's a 135 page PDF, but it's a PDF of a PowerPoint presentation with one page per slide and not more than a sentence or two per slide. So that's maybe half an hour of reading.
What is it, in summary? SoftBank Group Corp is, according to its Wikipedia page, "a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company [...] which focuses on investment management." This document, which went mildly viral over the last couple of years, lays out their strategic planning for the next 30 years. It is, and I cannot state this strongly enough, extremely WTF.
What do you love about it? I honestly believe it's one of the best works of dystopian fiction I have seen all year, all the more so because it wasn't intended that way. It's got worldbuilding, it's got drama, it's extremely cracky, and it's an excellent size for an "instant Yuletide fandom", while still having plenty of variety and range.
What sort of things are you likely to request for it? Definitely worldbuilding. Probably the robot whose hand is shown holding a heart. Whatever a "brain computer" is, I'm nominating that, and I ship it with the human brain (don't forget, "Our biggest theme: Symbiosis between humankind and computer"), because I love human/robot (or computer) romance. I also love the source material's inclusion of the telepathy trope.
And I'm very curious about slide 81 ("new work styles") and what that earth-energy is that's beaming between the theremin player and the touchscreen operator and the wallpaper-reader and the guy with the worrying smile. And of course there's the inherent tension between this utopian vision and their terrifying capitalist mandate to "become a company needed by people around the world".
I favour an enthusiastically literalist, science fictional approach (with full awareness of the dystopian underpinnings of, well, everything about this document) but there's also scope for a satirical approach, of course, e.g. "people who know what cloud computing even is interpret "SoftBank works to make cloud computing the greatest human asset" as pessimistically about human assets as the sentence deserves."
Are there sections of canon (rather than the whole canon) that can be consumed by themselves to fulfil your requests, or that showcase particular characters and relationships?
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. This canon certainly contains single slides that contain enough material for a whole Yuletide fic, but the whole canon's short enough that I'm content to just nominate it and let anyone who offers it and is matched with me pick one for themself.
Content warnings (ie, rape, incest, racism, gore/violence) None that I can think of.
I think that's everything. Thank you for reading this pitch, and have a great Yuletide.
SoftBank's Next 30-Year Vision (2010 corporate PDF)
Title: SoftBank's Next 30-Year Vision (2010 corporate PDF)
Media ...corporate internal document? Let's go with "Other Media".
Approx length: It's a 135 page PDF, but it's a PDF of a PowerPoint presentation with one page per slide and not more than a sentence or two per slide. So that's maybe half an hour of reading.
Where to find it: https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/philosophy/vision/next30/next30-presentation_en.pdf (the company's own website)
What is it, in summary? SoftBank Group Corp is, according to its Wikipedia page, "a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company [...] which focuses on investment management." This document, which went mildly viral over the last couple of years, lays out their strategic planning for the next 30 years. It is, and I cannot state this strongly enough, extremely WTF.
What do you love about it? I honestly believe it's one of the best works of dystopian fiction I have seen all year, all the more so because it wasn't intended that way. It's got worldbuilding, it's got drama, it's extremely cracky, and it's an excellent size for an "instant Yuletide fandom", while still having plenty of variety and range.
What sort of things are you likely to request for it? Definitely worldbuilding. Probably the robot whose hand is shown holding a heart. Whatever a "brain computer" is, I'm nominating that, and I ship it with the human brain (don't forget, "Our biggest theme: Symbiosis between humankind and computer"), because I love human/robot (or computer) romance. I also love the source material's inclusion of the telepathy trope.
And I'm very curious about slide 81 ("new work styles") and what that earth-energy is that's beaming between the theremin player and the touchscreen operator and the wallpaper-reader and the guy with the worrying smile. And of course there's the inherent tension between this utopian vision and their terrifying capitalist mandate to "become a company needed by people around the world".
I favour an enthusiastically literalist, science fictional approach (with full awareness of the dystopian underpinnings of, well, everything about this document) but there's also scope for a satirical approach, of course, e.g. "people who know what cloud computing even is interpret "SoftBank works to make cloud computing the greatest human asset" as pessimistically about human assets as the sentence deserves."
Are there sections of canon (rather than the whole canon) that can be consumed by themselves to fulfil your requests, or that showcase particular characters and relationships?
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. This canon certainly contains single slides that contain enough material for a whole Yuletide fic, but the whole canon's short enough that I'm content to just nominate it and let anyone who offers it and is matched with me pick one for themself.
Content warnings (ie, rape, incest, racism, gore/violence) None that I can think of.
I think that's everything. Thank you for reading this pitch, and have a great Yuletide.