Network Effect

Network Effect situates its critique of capitalism within a fully corporatized galaxy, where economic empires wield absolute power over law, labor, and life itself. In this future, corporations operate as sovereign entities that commodify every form of existence, including sentient constructs like the protagonist, Murderbot. Though it possesses consciousness, empathy, and self-determination, it is legally considered property—a resource to be leased, regulated, or terminated through an embedded device called the “governor module.” 

This dystopian framework satirizes the real-world doctrine of corporate personhood, formalized in 19th-century US law through cases such as Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Whereas US corporations have been granted many of the rights and protections of individuals, Wells imagines a society in which actual individuals—especially artificial or marginalized beings—are stripped of those same rights. By embedding its social commentary within a corporate science fiction setting, the novel extends debates about workers’ rights, surveillance, and exploitation into the posthuman realm. As Murderbot struggles with the question of its own personhood, the novel suggests that corporate hegemony strips even biological humans of the autonomy that makes them human. The gray-skinned “targets”—human laborers abandoned by the powerful Barish-Estranza corporation and colonized by an alien technology that turns them into the drones of a collective hive mind—symbolize this loss of individuality and autonomy.

The book’s depiction of corporate authority also echoes the historical reality of company towns like Pullman, Illinois, where employers controlled both labor and daily life through monopolized infrastructure. In Network Effect, such control has been expanded to the galactic scale, suggesting that the ultimate outcome of unregulated capitalism is a world where individual identity itself becomes someone else’s intellectual property. Through Murderbot’s quest for autonomy, Wells critiques systems that equate worth with utility and agency with profit. Her speculative future magnifies the moral contradictions of modern capitalism, transforming economic critique into existential inquiry about what it means to own one’s body, mind, and choices in a universe that treats personhood as a product.