The difference is that corporations don't have to deal with any externalities, while a whole planned society does.
And again I don't know if people here ever actually worked for the state.
The state works different on a very fundamental level.
If you think that corporate offices are intrigant cesspools you have never worked in the bureaucracy.
Political considerations influencing fundamental decisions, people mainly being concerned with covering their ass, trying to integrate the ideas of newly elected politicians etc.
Corporations might have more efficient and detailed planning than Gosplan but how they got there is important. Just because something has a similar end result you can't just compare it. How they reached that end result is important.
Frankly, I find most dystopia's boring because it's like...you can't come up with a way to make the world better so you default to making things worse? Case in point, there was a thread on AH.com which was literally 'how do you make WW2 worse' or some such.
The most devastating war in human history, that killed coming up on 100 million people, and your first thought is 'imma make it worse'?
Maybe I'm just too much of an idealist at heart. *shrug*
Depends on the dystopia tbh.
For All Time is boring. Its literally just "the most over the top bad thing always happens".
An interesting dystopia manages to make everthing worse while not ignoring the better side of human nature. A World of Laughter, A World of Tears is really good in that regard imho.
Dystopia's mostly happen because internal or external pressure forces people into surpremely hard positions. Genuine sociopaths like Beria, Stalin, Hitler and Himmler are rare and mostly the product of specific circumstances themselves.
In an interesting dystopia flawed people make flawed decisions in hard situations. Hard situations where the reader probably would make bad choices too. If you really want to watch the world burn, said hard choices create a sociopathic leadership that takes over later.
