More book stuff - industry

I'm still pondering the scenario in which my book will take place.

I'm reading wikipedia's version of social contract here. Reading about these concepts of general will and sovereignity remind me that even captialism is limited by what the masses will accept. Either corporations will succeed in dumbing down the masses a la Idiocracy, or that book about a world where everyone is implanted with a brain scrambler that keeps them stupid (anyone know the book? I'll add it later if I find it and if I don't forget). The former case doesn't really demonstrate malicious intent by either government or industry, and the latter case is primarily government as the agent, but the concepts could be used.

So that led me down the track of labor unions as a check against the power of corporations. I admit I'm just not a fan of unions. They're effective as a check against a company's power to use and abuse its employees, but it does not promote productivity and if anything from the stories I've heard, often deters productivity. I also don't know and don't want to know that much about unions, so they couldn't figure very prominently in my scenario.

My next thought was a benevolent mogul of some kind, in the vein of Rockefeller, or Carnegie, or Gates (modern version) who either intentionally or unintentionally crushes a middle-poor family (my Krug) through his actions.

Now granted this whole scenario is entirely plausible without using the world of Jennifer Government, and without any new sci-fi technology, but all that just adds to the fun, I wouldn't want to leave it out.

If I went this direction, I think, rather than making a straightforward sci-fi novel, I'd want more of a cyberpunk feel to it, the narrator would be someone like Hiro Protagonist. But then that would leave the Adam Krug convention. I wonder if I could write in more than one type of central character/narrator/events-happen-to-er?

I need to read another Nabokov, I made the mistake of looking up Krug's name, since I couldn't remember it off the top of my head, and Amazon being the wise servant it is, suggested other Nabokov books, which I can't read right now, but want to.

I'll have to hurry and finish Nemesis