Hellish economics, and how to create a middle class using megacorp monopoly tactics

October 23, 2026  |  24 min read

cracks knuckles Alright, so. The fucking economics of literal Hell, am I right?

A bit of background: my exomemories involve what more or less amounted to a version of hell where I'm from. Died 1952, went to my world's apparent version of the Bad Place, and had to build a life there for myself somehow.

It wasn't just Christian hell, though, and there definitely wasn't just Christians, there, so philosophically, religiously - what does that mean? No clue. Let's debate it some time else. Anyway, most denizens just called it "underground," since that seemed universal enough to agree on, and because, I mean, there was a literal rock ceiling like a mile up. Seemed apt.

Soul contracts were a thing underground - like, the whole "sell your soul to a demon" thing. This was colloquially termed "selling your soul," but whether it actually constituted a legitimate transfer of ownership rather than just a binding connection that still carried a name from a bygone historical era of feudal social-caste society was up for debate.

In terms of mechanics: A person could sign a contract addressed in another person's name, and that would constitute a soul contract in which the person signing was the contractee and the person it was addressed to (who still would have to sign it to complete the address) was the contract holder. In "selling your soul" terms, the signer is the one "selling their soul" and the signature holder is the "soul owner," but - it should be noted that no physical obtaining of souls happened. Nothing changed hands, and a person's soul would stay with them, it would just create a connection of sorts that would physically enforce whatever terms were written into the contract.

This all comes together, however, where the "economic system" in my hell, when I died, was nonexistent and more akin to feudalism, because of course it ended up imbalanced. Under that system, that's likely where the "selling one's soul" terminology came from, because functionally-to-metaphorically, that's what signing with a major power was. You were selling your eternal allegiance, basically - oftentimes forced to sign over your whole agency in exchange for protection or some such. There was almost zero upward mobility, and aside from the day to day threats, there were also term days - colloquial for when legions would come down and kill people. (Weirdly enough, that was sometimes less dramatic than it sounds, because there were a LOT of people underground and it was a big place, and sometimes you could actually go the whole day without seeing a soldier depending on where you were. Still very bad, don't get me wrong, but maybe different than you'd think.) The majority of people who died on term days were people who'd died in the past year, even within the past six months, before they could get a handle on how to live there and how to get protection. Basically - the only way to get protection, whether from term days or even just other underground denizens, was to sign on with a bigger power in exchange for protection.

When you've got an economy that can involve what amounts to weird-invisible-magic-enforced human and labor trafficking, uhhh. The concept of "money can be exchanged for goods and services" kind of disintegrates a little bit, because why pay someone when you can just force them into doing shit anyway? Why pay for extra labor when you can just bargain with some other big bad overlord who can force their contractees into doing things for you? This imbalances things economically a massive amount because the entire thing stagnates and fiat money ("value-enforced" money - like how paper money is treated as worth more than the paper it's printed on as it has an authority backing its value, usually governments) basically doesn't have any meaning. Things are only broadly worth what their usefulness is (commodity money), and anything else would have to have a backing authority to enforce it as having value and insist that people mutually treat it as “this is worth XYZ amount.” Because that enforcement by overlords was sketchy as fuck, many transactions end up just as commodity trades with no centralized economy or market, and honestly almost exclusively between impoverished individuals because non-overlords basically had no bargaining power with overlords. The rest of transactions were large-scale bargaining between the major players.

So my underground, when I died in the 50s, was like... it was really archaic, honestly. Nobody had figured out how to make electronics work with the weird Hell Physics that goes on down there, and there basically just wasn't an economy. You died, you were immediately forced into a contract for protection, and that was the end of it. New overlords were exceptionally rare, and one reason why a former friend of mine - who barreled into the scene in the 1930s and started taking down established overlords repeatedly, despite being a total newcomer - made such an impression when he came around.

Currency existed by technical definition, but it was not reliably worth anything, so the majority of transactions were commodity. I have object, you have object, we both want each other's objects, we trade. And while a paper IOU "trade note" of sorts was easier to hand to a person than large trade-able objects, it was a gamble since people couldn't always reliably trust that they'd be able to use it later on to trade elsewhere for the value it was supposed to be worth. If someone else doesn't honor that, who do you go to? That depended on whether any overlords associated with the people involved in the transaction actually enforced whether or not their contractees had to honor trade notes (and IIRC sometimes an overlord would only enforce any of that between their own contractees and no one else - closed, small, highly-volatile economies were easier to control). And you just... you couldn't buy anything from overlords with it. Nope. That was a farce. Currency, in a way, was ironically a poor-man's thing.

Now - when I died, I woke up in hell with a fully-functional electronic CRT television screen for a head. (If that sounds new and weird and you want to hear more about it, see here!) There were some differences, as you can imagine, given it was my head and not just a static CRT, but even so. To my knowledge, I was the first person to land underground with functional electronics. A lot of people - most people, actually - underground at the time had never even seen a television set before, and that caught a lot of attention, whether good or bad, but - hey, at least it got some of the "right" people interested, eventually. I guess.

Anyway, the technology at the time underground was basically - like - the streetlamps were still often enough gas lamps and even simple things like incandescent bulbs were finicky, to say the least, to give you an idea of where the technological landscape was at the time. In 1952.

I ended up really just... having some realizations about my head, how it worked, and I used that to figure out some of how the underlying electrical physics worked, and suddenly more complex electricity was... just working for me. It hadn't worked for anyone else. And just like that, I suddenly held what seemed to become one of the most coveted pieces of information in all of underground, and I used that to bargain for... essentially everything. I bargained safety from an overlord without having to sign a contract in exchange for fixing up lightbulbs. I started making contracts myself, using that as a bargaining chip, and doing my best to be very, very, VERY careful who I gave that information to, and what stipulations went along with it, carefully written so they couldn't take it and sell it to anyone else.

It went like that for a little while. And that seemed to work, but while it got me case by case protection, it was volatile and that wasn't really what felt secure long-term, so I started trying to think about larger-scale plans. I could make products and barter them for other items I wanted on a case by case basis, but it would sure as fuck be easier to just use something representative, y'know? Especially if I had someone trading on my behalf who didn't have an item that the other person wanted physically on hand at the time.

Generally, though, as I'd explained, "trade note" usage was unreliable. Within one overlord's territory, a person would, for example, make a bargain for an item and offer some form of note that is supposed to represent the equivalent value of the item. The person selling the item is taking a chance on being able to turn around and use that note to bargain from someone else, who could decide that the note was worthless - and then, at that point, you had a few options, but none ideal. You could go to the overlord of the person who originally gave you the note, but whether they would do anything was up to them and might require more bargaining with the overlord themself. You could go to the overlord of the person you're trying to convince to accept the note, if that's a different overlord - but again, up to the overlord if they wanted to do anything. Some people would get notes "signed," more or less, by their overlord as a form of "insurance" on the bargain, but again - you guessed it! Even if signed notes were more consistently backed up, it was still sometimes up to the overlord whether they'd ACTUALLY back the value the note was supposed to have across the board, and saying "I'm only going to enforce it if you make a trade that benefits me too" was only one of the potential outcomes of that.

That wouldn't work for me, so: enter the idea of universal store credit.

If that reminds you of the annoying pseudo-gift-card thingies you get at a chain store instead of a refund: You Are Not Wrong! That was basically it! Except here's the thing: that store credit, unlike pretty much anything else at the time, had a concrete value and could be used to purchase anything you wanted from me, or any of my at-the-time representatives on my behalf, at any time, and again - that had a specific set value that did not change and had a much higher chance of being reliably respected. You could trade to me, get a $20 credit, and be able to trade that credit to someone else, with both of you knowing exactly how much it would get and from who. And some of these products I was making were becoming fucking popular. I was the only one who was making anything seriously electronic, and definitely at larger scale: light bulbs and wiring systems, basic computers, eventually TVs (...believe it or not, that one took a minute, because you kinda needed a broadcast infrastructure to provide content for the TVs as well or they're just fancy heavy glass boxes). And even - yeah, radios, actually. Those were kind of on the scene already, but it was still not up-to-date.

Anyway. Now you've got a semi-more-standardized currency. Kinda. Sorta. Arguably. Debatably. Sure, it's only "legally" valid when dealing with a singular company, but that was more than what was there before, and my company was selling a lot of general-utility things, honestly. Need a lamp? You'd buy one from my company. Wanted an appliance? Those electronics would still come from my company. So on. NO overlord was making economical trades with non-overlords, like, that was basically unheard of. There were, of course, people who wouldn't accept my company credit for things, or wouldn't accept it if they didn't have any new electronics they wanted, but honestly? That, in combination with established commodity trades and other deals, was still enough to get the company more off the ground. And I started expanding, leaning on the contracts I already had and still using information (and now a lot more products, services, and utilities, including investing in and developing more electricity generation and infrastructure along with new computer and communications systems) as bargaining chips with bigger overlords - and even non-overlords who had info or something I needed, or who wanted to experiment on their own with tools. (But be careful, tool usage often came with stipulations on what could be done with the resulting discoveries! ...I was still building a monopoly, alright? Yes, the rules and deals and such could be pretty rigid.)

And! Was I kind of "poaching" from other overlords by essentially doing "flat" (non-binding) negotiations (sales) with other overlords' contractees? Maybe, sure, but it's hell and they were fuckers anyway. Aaaaaaaaand I may or may not have also been sort of... strong-arming and VERY quickly pulling newly-deceased tech specialists or anybody who started inventing anything into contracts if I could. (Some inventors already had contracts with other overlords, but, uh. I will admit I mmmmmight have developed a habit of bullying them out of business or trying to "nerf" them in some form or another anyway, or even bargaining their contracts off the other overlords.)

And then I got to a point where I was able to start offering some of my own protections to people, and that was the point at which I really started doing something that no overlord had pretty much ever done: paying wages!

Reason being: I could hire anybody like that. Anyone. Already have a contract? No problem. Don't have a contract at all? Come work for me and you don't HAVE to have one. You can pay me in exchange for protection, and I've already got trust built up with a wider customer base! Worried it won't be honored? You can ask anyone! A credit is a credit, and it's going to be worth exactly what the credit says, trust me! (Starting to sound familiar? lmfao. That fucking slogan has just kept cropping up in relation to my company over and over, that's why I kept it even though I debated rebranding many times.)

The credit was referred to as cash money by that point, with my company as the one that backed the value. Instead of enforcing the value as in you have to act like the note is worth this much, we gave the money a default value in the form of what physical products or how much protection (or fractional value of) that you could buy with it.

More people arrived underground. More people started working for me. More people started accepting cash for more things. Overlords started getting pissed. There was a period where overlords were practically hunting new people down, wanting to just lean on the power they'd had for decades or centuries, but more and more people were bargaining protection - and sometimes from people who weren't overlords! As people were starting to rely on bought protection enough that they were forming contracts with non-overlords between themselves, it wasn't incredibly common but some people even managed to BREAK their contracts with overlords because the terms were so old and outdated that they couldn't be realistically enforced, if I remember correctly. And the whole time, my company was building more and more subsidiaries, there were more broadcast stations applying for airtime rights, visual media was starting to crop up, visual news was taking off like wildfire, hardware was selling like mad, we had a whole enormous enterprise/commercial-products rush when I started offering products and services for people starting or running businesses - and I met Cora around that time, and he was phenomenal at kickstarting the video-entertainment industry.

Customers also started requesting things. More businesses picked up. People were relying on overlords for everything in their lives a bit less and more for basic protections, not every single aspect of their survival. The economy started actually growing. Contract-brokers - people who negotiated contracts between non-overlords - even became a thing, albeit quietly, since overlords generally didn't like people doing that.

Many companies continued to use unpaid soul-contract labor - when that's a possibility and there's no real rules, it would be hard to eradicate it, but some other companies did start paying wages, too. Of those that did pay, some tried paying shit rates - but then nobody would work for them. The tech industry - which, at its head, was just me and my company overseeing almost every single technological development involving electricity or electronics - was making jobs faster than a lot of people could keep up with, overlord or not. My company started splitting into bigger departments - software, hardware, software security, enterprise-grade products and services, infrastructure products and services, industry and manufacturing technology - fuckin everything. I started making bigger deals with other overlords, some of which reinforced the credit-cash value in their territories too, especially if I could set up shops in THEIR territory in exchange for something. I mean, fuck, that was a wholeass gddamn industrial-technological revolution, I guess.

...I started running a lot of other companies out of business, admittedly. If another company started threatening the monopoly, it could threaten a lot of things - me and my company, yeah, but also the default cash value if they started offering items at wildly different prices than what I was saying those items were worth. If I want a TV set to be worth $250, and some yahoo starts selling almost the exact same at $10, that interrupts the consistent value (and also reduces my sales), so I would move in and do whatever I needed to do to make that not happen. And yes, we can absolutely debate the ethics of seriously fucking some people over just to preserve a cash value. When the options are "shitty sometimes-unethically-enforced cash value but still cash value" and "human trafficking feudalism," it's a weird ethical debate. And not many, if any, other overlords accepted credit in exchange for protection - not to where I would've significantly noticed, at least. Some people still opted to sign on with overlords anyway, because one of the drawbacks of using money to buy protection is that you need to keep money incoming in order to keep your purchased safety, and signing on with an overlord guaranteed that protection theoretically permanently.

But here's the thing: even people who did voluntarily sign with other overlords didn't have to sign on immediately any more. New employee packages at my company included basic forms of protections for a period of time, even for extremely low entry-level jobs. It wasn't... phenomenally comfortable protection, sometimes, just functional. Sometimes it was really fucking crowded safehouses or temporary travel to a different city, or only facilitated through a series of networked deals I'd worked out with other people to get them to agree to leave my company's new employees alone for the first however-long - or sometimes it was even my company brokering a rent contract for safer housing situations for the first year. But, like, point being, people could now start to strategize more and be pickier with who they signed with, instead of panicking and signing the first contract to cross their path at risk of death or worse otherwise. Overlords had to work to get contracts now. (You can imagine how thrilled they all were about that.)

Overlords would still screw people over, absolutely. But that was enough, evidently, for a huge shift. Before, people just had no shot at surviving if they didn't sign with someone pretty quickly, often enough. Now, they could buy basic necessities while they considered options, and for the first time possibly ever, to common historical knowledge, there were people opting to not sign with an overlord at all, or signing for totally different reasons than the traditional protection-for-loyalty arrangements. Sometimes people would sign contracts with me stating that they'd be guaranteed a job so long as certain criteria were fulfilled for a period of time, and the higher in the company you were, the longer the period could be, so some people would have pretty much semi-guaranteed salaries for a period of time. Crucially, though, those were not employment contracts themselves - wages were still paid. My company did not use soul contracts for employment. If you worked for my company, you got paid. I actually would not accept soul contracts for labor employment, point blank, period, end of statement, and had some pretty strict policies about that. I would use contracts as NDAs all the time especially since those contracts were physically binding so the risk of an info leak was even much lower than aboveground industry, and occasionally other purposes case by case (I eventually had a personal assistant who had a custom contract, for example) but not for work itself.

And now you've got... a literal economy. With a minimum wage and everything. Even if you couldn't use credit across the board absolutely 100% everywhere, it was becoming more common, and the value - while still backed enormously by my company - was starting to take on a common value because people were starting to use it for non-tech purchases at other places. My company still had a huge influence - by that point, I was at a level where I could cut deals or contracts with even other overlords to manage the value of said credit, but when others started buying non-tech things unaffiliated with my company on a much bigger scale, that gave it a default value beyond just my company's reach. And it was, I suppose, easier just in practicality to be able to use representative currency instead of straight-up commodity trading, which could get cumbersome and annoying. (Although it definitely still happened. I feel like that's practically just part of underground culture at this point.)

As far as the minimum wage concept - functionally, the minimum wage ended up accidentally kinda just being whatever my company's lowest pay/benefit package was worth. If a different company paid wages lower than that, they had better offer some really good benefits to compensate, because otherwise people could just leave and get a job with my company and be guaranteed a basic package.

This did also mean that I kind of had to cap some things, too, though. Another company pays higher? Significantly higher? That could upset what I wanted the minimum wage/package value to be, so I might manipulate wages and prices in that area - with my own company's stores directly, but sometimes other shops too, indirectly - to force that company into positions where they literally did not have the resources to offer as much, or flat-out bully them out of business. Sometimes I'd offer to buy up their company in some cases. (I'm not saying that was economically ethical, but it did keep the company on top.)

You also had non-overlords who held contracts now. That caused some big shifts, too - a person can only sign a contract with someone once, but you could accept signatures as many times as you wanted, so a non-overlord already being signed with someone meant they could not sign with an overlord. You could get a sort of "chain-down" effect, though, where if one person accepts a signature from someone else who has already accepted other signatures, you kind of became the "parent holder" of the contracts which that person held. (That also worked in my favor - I could let people who looked like they had good ideas or a lot of promise start to build something themself, sometimes even throwing other overlords off forcing them into signing, and then when things looked suitable I could leap in and bully them into a contract with me and basically suddenly have more-or-less "bought out" their enterprise, in a way.)

Anyway, suddenly being an overlord got a fuckload more competitive, and you actually had people able to DO THINGS without having to bargain their obedience with someone and just hope for lenience. There was money with a common value. Banks popped up. Businesses that didn't operate solely in one territory popped up more and more. People were surviving on their own more, doing things on their own more. Different markets popped up, you had transactions taking place all over between people of all sorts of levels on the soul-contract hierarchy.

And that's how you create a middle class in hell using megacorp monopoly tactics.

Delicate balance, huh. I cannot say my company was ethically flawless, but I also don't feel like I can say it was ethically all bad, either, considering there was a lot of behind-the-scenes things going on that were intentionally done to give individual people more power, ironically, and allowed for the average person to have a lot more agency in their daily lives. And considering people having more freedom and being able to buy things was part of what was keeping me on top, I had a pretty strong interest in maintaining that however I could, y'know? It's also why economics here baffle me so much sometimes, I think. I would see the effects of what would happen if you didn't pay people enough for them to continue buying things from you sometimes very fucking fast, for example, and so much of managing my company was keeping an eye on a ton of different aspects and trying to tweak something here or there to keep things where I wanted them.

(...and sometimes I wonder where some of my "I need to know All The Strings Possible In A Situation so I can pull whatever strings I need to make sure the situation goes well!!" thinking comes from. lmfao. anyway.)

But yeah. There ya go. I think a huge chunk of that was just "right place, right time" sort of luck, but it is definitely interesting regardless, to me. I also think it's worth noting - very little of the "middle class" aspects here were planned. That was... honestly more on accident because a lot of the main goals were... mm, uncomfortable as it may be to admit sometimes, moreso wanting to ensure my own survival, and was Big Panicking All The Time about it, and if I couldn't use souls as currency, I'd have to use something else. Turns out that shift worked for me because it took power from the established overlords and swayed it into something I could work with better, and circumvented the "only able to deal with people who aren't already signed to another overlord and overlords don't do dealings with non-overlords" standards that were in place for so long... among other things. Y'know, it's a process that took decades, and there was a lot of complexity.

Thanks for reading!

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