Since the settlement of Utopia Beta, the government has been different than on Earth. Corporations have always had the power and there was an extreme two-tier society. While the privileged in the southern hemisphere lived on estates, the workers had to work in the mines, do lower jobs and live in slums with no prospect of improvement. Only soldiers formed a tiny middle class.
The hacker Nick Chen aka F4zzer had enough of it. After he was forcibly recruited, thrown into prison, and then forced to work for the military, he founded a workers’ rebellion. He moved to the private sector and built a state-of-the-art computer to attack the military. He armed his people, obtained vehicles and rations, and sabotaged companies like the Securo Group. During one of his early attacks, he raided an arms shipment and his people almost killed Carter Sanders and Kelly Richards, who were there as guards.
At some point, Leena Whittaker discovered his hacks at Securo and threatened to stay out of it. She forced him to engage in a month-long fight and was finally able to arrest him, giving his rebellion a hard blow but not dissolving it. The scandal surrounding the murder of Magnus Sanders made the resistance stronger again.
In the following year, Ronson Glades, as a politician and the Whisperer, further incited resistance to ultimately provoke a civil war and bring Syntech to power. The Commander and the Ghost Unit ended his machinations. The Sanders Act and Zoe Sanders restructured Syntech and ended the uprisings by dramatically improving the lives of the working class and substantially changing the planet for the better.