The corporate society has been an enduring wellspring of stories over the last century. Inspired by the factory production line, Aldous Huxley predicted a future where humans were born and bred only to fulfil a corporate function in Brave New World. The cyberpunk vision of William Gibson's Neuromancer charted a future where government had collapsed entirely, and society was ruled by a few super-powerful corporations.

In the midst of a global economic crisis that has shed light on the darker workings of the capitalist system, these days corporate society seems less like SF fantasy and more like a living reality. Whether it's the revelation of the "super-cluster" of 147 companies who have grasped control of 40% of the world's entire wealth, or the barely-reported $16tn loans made by the US Federal Reserve to banks and business soon after the 2008 financial crash, multinational corporations seem to wield incredible and unaccountable power over our democratic society.

But if corporations are tightening their grip upon society, could it be as a panic response to a much greater loss of control over the foundations of their power? In his new book We Are All Weird, marketing guru and dot.com millionaire Seth Godin argues that the power of corporations rests on their ability to sell mass-produced products, to a mass audience, through the medium of mass advertising. But now the era of mass is coming to an end, and the era of weird is beginning.

In a characteristically ear-catching co-option of the phrase invented by Dwight D Eisenhower and popularised by Noam Chomsky, Seth Godin claims that the "TV-industrial-complex", on which the power of the corporations rests, is dead. The mass media which has been used to sell mass products to the mass market no longer captures a mass audience. Instead, digital technology, the internet and social media have shattered the media and its audience into tens of thousands of specialised niches. Godin's argument is built on his belief that people do not naturally conform to the ideal of normality sold to us by the advertising industry, and free of its coercive influence millions of us will choose our own weird ways of living and working instead.

The hundreds of corporations that dominate our society from Nestlé and Ford to Wal-Mart and BP certainly aren't about to disappear overnight. But they to keep pace with high speed creative economy of the 21st century may be changing far more quickly than most of us realise. Professor Fred Turner, cultural historian at Stanford University, describes this new corporate paradigm as commons-based peer production. Forget the stiff suits and oppressive hierarchical power structures of last century, the corporation of tomorrow should be less like a feudal state and more like a rock festival. Yes, you heard me, a rock festival. Well, kind of. Every year a substantial proportion of Google employees, including founders Sergei and Larry, troop off to the Burning Man festival held in the Black Rock desert of Nevada, there to practice exactly they kind of collaborative creativity that powers the new breed of corporation. While not every workplace can be expected to replicate the funky young things at Google, the ones that will succeed in the weird new creative economy, Professor Turner argues, are those that liberate and harness our natural creativity, rather than bashing it to smithereens with the blunt weapon wielded by human resource managers.

The ultimate sacrifice to the weird new creative economy described by Seth Godin may be the concept of a job at all, at least as we currently understand it. For the last century or more corporations have valued and rewarded conformity. Train and educate yourself to conform to the right corporate job specification and a job for life with a nice salary will be yours. But in the chaotic new economy emerging from the financial crisis many people are finding, to their immense cost, that the jobs they worked so hard to have already been eliminated as business models are transformed overnight by new technology. Its not just a job for life that is a thing of the past, but a job at all in an economy where over one third of the workforce are freelance, in what many are describing as the industrial revolution of our time.

The scale of the revolution makes it hardly surprising that people are coming out on to the streets in protest. The irony of the Occupy protests, the first open source political movement of the 21st century, is that those leading it are among the people in the world best adapted to our new economy. Occupy has exploited the revolutionary power of the internet and social media described by Godin, and fulfils all of the criteria of commons based peer production defined by Turner. Occupy embodies exactly the skills of innovation and creativity that corporations are desperate to harness. Like the leaders of the counterculture in the 60s, and the environmental movement in the 80s, many of today's Occupy protestors are likely to find themselves absorbed into the very structures they're seeking to change. Do not be surprised if those protesting for the 99% today are among the 1% of tomorrow.

No doubt the corporate society will continue as a powerful meme in our cultural life. But how we depict it is changing already. In the stories of Jason Stoddard, far from oppressing the people, corporate society ushers in an age of post-scarcity where our greatest dreams are fulfilled. The novels of Cory Doctorow offer sophisticated critiques of corporate power, but also depict how it we will evolve new power structures to replace them. If corporate society is really is an inevitable reality, perhaps the real question is whether that reality will be better or worse?