Nerd Word of the Week: SantaCon

SantaCon (n.) - A flash mob or mass gathering of persons dressed in Santa Claus costumes, usually for the purpose of performance art or mild civil disobedience. The term is a play on the -Con naming tradition of science fiction conventions. These events are also known as Naughty Santas, Cheapsuit Santas, Santa Rampage or Santarchy. SantaCons regularly occur in major cities during the holiday season, either as a celebration of, or commentary on, Christmas traditions (or simply as an excuse to dress up and act a little nutty). SantaCon participants may distribute gifts to strangers or sing bawdy versions of traditional Christmas carols, while other may simply descend on a retailer, restaurant, or area of town en mass.

Both SantaCon and perversions of the Santa Claus image have a long tradition in speculative fiction. No less a noted novelist than Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk wrote about a Santa Rampage in his book Fugitives and Refugees. William Gibson imagined a supposed Santa battling a sentient, burglar-repelling house in "Cyber-Claus", while both Doctor Who and the Futurama crew have faced off against robotic Santas with rather overzealous definitions of naughty and nice. Of course, Santa isn't always evil. In the pages of the webcomic PvP, Santa fends off the Christmas-crushing ambitions of a superintelligent cat each year, occasionally with the help of the superhero team Jingle Force Five. In the same vein, Santa saved the world from alien invaders in the nonetheless horrible cult B-movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. If you're a good little boy or girl, the real Father Christmas will place the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of this flick in your stocking, rather than the stinking lump of coal that is the uncut original.

I bring it up because: Four years ago tomorrow -- Dec. 18, 2005 -- the Auckland, New Zealand SantaCon supposedly erupted in a violent riot that included looting and property damage. The event was organized -- allegedly -- in the online forums of the skateboard magazine Muckmouth by one Alex Dyer, who claimed it was merely an excuse for drunken revelry that got out of hand. Like all Santa legends, the truth or the Auckland Santarchy has little to do with the public perception of the event. As such, SantaCon (or, at least, Santarchy) is developing a myth of its own, one that's far more often naughty than nice.

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Nerd Word of the Week: Megacorp

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Megacorp (n.) - A business entity that has achieved such a far-reaching level of vertical and horizontal integration that its power rivals that of entire nations, often to the extent of fielding its own military force and enacting its own laws. William Gibson gets credit for coining the parent term megacoporation within his Sprawl Trilogy (which actually includes three novels, Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, and three short stories, "Burning Chrome," "Johnny Mnemonic" and "New Rose Hotel").

The idea of a superpowerful corporation predates Gibson, of course, with such companies appearing as early as Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy and Robert Asprin's The Cold Cash War. The megacorp idea continues to reap fertile returns in contemporary science fiction, including the omninationals from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, the burbclaves of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the planet-spanning corporatocracies of Charles Stross's Glasshouse, the ubiquitous Blue Sun from Joss Whedon's Serenity/Firefly universe, and in the government-supplanting megacorp Buy 'N Large from Disney/Pixar's WALL-E. Megacorps are almost always evil, and almost always at odds with the story's protagonist. Capitalism rarely gets a loving nod from sci-fi authors, even in the pro-software-corporation world of David Louis Edelman's Infoquake and Multireal.

I bring it up because: A mere 47 years ago today, the quintessential real-life megacorp was born. Wal-Mart opened its first location in Rogers, Arkansas on July 2, 1962. Wal-mart has neither a standing army nor its own government (yet), but it does wield such remarkable market influence that it inspired the aforementioned Buy 'N Large. This is ironic because the creator of the Buy 'N Large concept, Disney, is itself a much more cogent example of a megacorp, with its staggering multinational diversification and and extraordinary level of legal autonomy within the confines of its Disney World resort outside Orlando, FL. Only Disney employees can own land within Disney World's boundaries, and Disney sets the building codes, establishes utility standards, runs the fire department, and can exercise eminent domain within those borders. And you thought the line for Space Mountain was scary.

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