Also, don't worry. Even though the America First Party lasts awhile Z-Thought doesn't have legs so it won't stick around too far beyond the 2020s!
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"Power Without Knowledge...": President Haig and the Era of Bad Feelings
- Thread starter Born in the USSA
- Start date
Finished a short story set in this universe for the SLP Alternate Antarcticas anthology! Fingers crossed it gets picked up!
Thanks so much! It's kept me busy and I haven't been able to do as much with this in the meantime. Anybody with new setting questions? I had an idea for a deeper dive into Zoranist theology but it isn't ready for primetime yet and answering questions helps me process.
@JJ3872 I see you've been working through the TL! Feel free to let me know what you think/ask any setting questions when you wrap up, I always enjoy reader engagement and it really helps my process!
City on a Hill! Seventh Party System
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They're going well, thank you for asking! Quick trip this weekend and then a work conference all of the week after next, lots of irons in the fire and running around as per usual. When I get a free moment I've got some updates for this TL and I should probably finish the one planned for my syllabus thread and I could probably crank out an addendum for King in Yellow. My vignette for this TL is still being considered for the SLP Antarctica anthology, so I'll be sure to let you all know how it goes 🤔 Any new lore questions come to mind?
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It's good to hear that you're doing well Born! Nice to hear that progress on your projects is coming along nicely! Without further adieu, on to the lore questions!
1. With the recent amount of strikes in the entertainment industry, that makes me curious, what's the entertainment industry like in the ARC?
2. I can't really recall if South America was covered much in this story, so until we get an update that covers it in more detail, what's the continent like by the present day?
3. Are self-driving cars still a thing in this universe, and if so, how do they differ from Tesla's terrors of the street?
4. This isn't really a lore question, but have you ever considered creating a Discord server focused on discussing and worldbuilding for these projects of yours? I'd honestly be down to join it. Could be fun. And it would make asking lore questions like a lot easier, that's for sure.
Alright, that's all for now, until next time Born!
1. With the recent amount of strikes in the entertainment industry, that makes me curious, what's the entertainment industry like in the ARC?
2. I can't really recall if South America was covered much in this story, so until we get an update that covers it in more detail, what's the continent like by the present day?
3. Are self-driving cars still a thing in this universe, and if so, how do they differ from Tesla's terrors of the street?
4. This isn't really a lore question, but have you ever considered creating a Discord server focused on discussing and worldbuilding for these projects of yours? I'd honestly be down to join it. Could be fun. And it would make asking lore questions like a lot easier, that's for sure.
Alright, that's all for now, until next time Born!
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Entertainment is like any other industry* in a Cosmicist system, with a blend of government-owned producers, cooperatives, and independent creators. The focus on cooperatives and indie stuff combined with the mandate for full unionization** gives writers, actors and technical staff a lot of leverage. Generally things like noncompetes are a nonstarter, so even if a particular actor or director was primarily associated with a specific cooperative as an owner-creator there are plenty of procedures in place for them to transfer to a competitor or freelance for a smaller outfit either short or long-term.
The state-owned stuff primarily focuses on providing a support role to other studios given the advantage of sheer scale (computing power for special effects, access to military equipment and otherwise restricted shooting locations, a large infrastructure of generally skilled support staff), though the state does hold certain IP in trust as discussed in the Separate Spheres update. In that capacity they take the stewardship of canon seriously and have a more involved hand in actually writing (or at least checking) scripts and things, in contrast to their usual policy of just denying usage of their assets only to those works deemed actively and maliciously counterrevolutionary and otherwise helping out where they're requested.
I think South America was discussed in a random side snippet, though I can't remember 🤔 Since the Soviets have managed to recover from a brief economic downturn they're back to high Cold War levels of support for friendly regimes in Latin America, though any hint of Posadism is stamped down on hard. One major change— the aftereffects of a much more expansive Falkland's War has moved Argentina firmly into the Soviet sphere*** and there's tons of lingering tension with its neighbors.
There's some work on the concept but they're nowhere near ready yet. The general consensus is that a focus on new varieties of drones is the better path to transporting cargo and people should be left to drive themselves around. Macondo is the leading edge in drone development, something that will later come in handy (and still later backfire horribly) in Antarctica.
I haven't considered a Discord, my fear is that I won't have time to properly focus on it 😅
No worries! I love lore questions 😂
*Aside from those industries that are always completely nationalized, like medicine, energy, mass transit, education and certain heavy manufacturing.
**Which of course excludes most politicians and all soldiers and police.
***In the same vein as Turkey, i.e. their ideology hasn't really changed, they're just joined at the hip to the Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics.
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I know I originally had the USSR change its name to the Union of Soviet States and I've gone back and forth a few times but I want to keep the English acronym, so now I'm sticking with Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics (bonus points for maintaining the Cyrillic acronym as well 😂)
Writing on the Wall: What the Hell is a Hypercorp Anyway?
As with most of the worst innovations of global capital in the last two centuries much of the development of the hypercorp model that even today dominates the decaying economies of the Arctic Council states* can be traced to the pioneering work of Macondo Technologies in the middle twenty-first century. Having risen up from a small startup to a major economic engine in the span of a generation on the back of strategic acquisitions, simultaneous vertical and horizontal integration and a ruthless drive to increase efficiency perhaps this is unsurprising. The name of the game was modularity.
In its refined form as first demonstrated by Macondo, the hypercorp model best resembled a hypertrophied example of what we would recognize as the gig economy. Anything that could be automated would be, but that wasn't efficient enough in the face of diminishing returns, necessitating ever more extreme ways of cutting costs. In a "perfect" hypercorp, the only truly secure personnel would be the owners (naturally) and a cadre of absolutely essential upper management. Most middle managers could be safely replaced with AI of one stripe or another, and any employee deemed "nonessential", at any level, would be temporary contractors. Any piece of the company below the upper echelon, from the equipment to the staff, could be replaced at a moment's notice to remove troublesome elements or shift company priorities, often through a purely automated process of resource acquisition and employee discipline and termination. As the cthulhucene accelerated there were always people in a worse position and therefore more desperate for any scrap of material security, after all.
It should be stressed that even at the height of its power Macondo never reached such a pure state, even with an entire continent of people that were tantamount to its property. Given the rapidly shifting Antarctic ecology and restive labor pool a reliable class of compradors, enforcers and other chain dogs had to be kept around in a status much closer to what we'd recognize as "actual employees", for example. And thanks to those cowards in the rapidly splintering UN even penal laborers had to be paid something, no matter how much the stockholders howled about "subsidizing criminals" and even if the majority of compensation came in the form of scrip that just fed back into the moloch machine.
The fatal flaw with gig workers, however, is that when they become the majority of the labor force and all know they can be replaced at any time it becomes impossible to suppress the coalescence of precarian class consciousness spreading through sheer osmosis, just as Sutter had predicted. In fact it was this knowledge that essentially everyone** could be replaced at any time that saw so many of the middling ranks of the managers, researchers and security staff swing their sails when they saw the writing on the wall. Better a brief political reeducation with a sincere promise of job security at the end than being cast out to the masses and facing penal labor of their own or a bullet to the head.
While the Mark I hypercorp model survives north of the equator, the period of Cosmicist consolidation in the wake of the Antarctic Revolution would see the pioneering of a new concept, which for the sake of simplicity we'll refer to as the Mark II*** hypercorp. While the majority of civilian business ventures**** in the Cosmicist sphere are cooperatives with a permanent pool of fully employed owner-producers, the Mark II's fill a crucial economic niche, but one where modularity based on a lack of choice has been replaced with a kind based on an abundance of choice. For example, lets look at the Antarctic military industrial complex, where the interconnection of the hypercorps is clearest:
*Most nakedly in the NAU and PEU and much more insidiously in the USSR and BARD.
**Outside the managers and the upper echelons of the security apparatus, of course.
***Purely for convenience here. Both types are simply referred to as "hypercorps", with their national/political affiliation being the mark of whether you're being exploited to death or actually getting a pretty good deal.
****Most nationalized industries, especially medicine and education, are far more traditional in structure, owned by the state but with the overwhelming majority of their workforces being fully unionized permanent employees.
In its refined form as first demonstrated by Macondo, the hypercorp model best resembled a hypertrophied example of what we would recognize as the gig economy. Anything that could be automated would be, but that wasn't efficient enough in the face of diminishing returns, necessitating ever more extreme ways of cutting costs. In a "perfect" hypercorp, the only truly secure personnel would be the owners (naturally) and a cadre of absolutely essential upper management. Most middle managers could be safely replaced with AI of one stripe or another, and any employee deemed "nonessential", at any level, would be temporary contractors. Any piece of the company below the upper echelon, from the equipment to the staff, could be replaced at a moment's notice to remove troublesome elements or shift company priorities, often through a purely automated process of resource acquisition and employee discipline and termination. As the cthulhucene accelerated there were always people in a worse position and therefore more desperate for any scrap of material security, after all.
It should be stressed that even at the height of its power Macondo never reached such a pure state, even with an entire continent of people that were tantamount to its property. Given the rapidly shifting Antarctic ecology and restive labor pool a reliable class of compradors, enforcers and other chain dogs had to be kept around in a status much closer to what we'd recognize as "actual employees", for example. And thanks to those cowards in the rapidly splintering UN even penal laborers had to be paid something, no matter how much the stockholders howled about "subsidizing criminals" and even if the majority of compensation came in the form of scrip that just fed back into the moloch machine.
The fatal flaw with gig workers, however, is that when they become the majority of the labor force and all know they can be replaced at any time it becomes impossible to suppress the coalescence of precarian class consciousness spreading through sheer osmosis, just as Sutter had predicted. In fact it was this knowledge that essentially everyone** could be replaced at any time that saw so many of the middling ranks of the managers, researchers and security staff swing their sails when they saw the writing on the wall. Better a brief political reeducation with a sincere promise of job security at the end than being cast out to the masses and facing penal labor of their own or a bullet to the head.
While the Mark I hypercorp model survives north of the equator, the period of Cosmicist consolidation in the wake of the Antarctic Revolution would see the pioneering of a new concept, which for the sake of simplicity we'll refer to as the Mark II*** hypercorp. While the majority of civilian business ventures**** in the Cosmicist sphere are cooperatives with a permanent pool of fully employed owner-producers, the Mark II's fill a crucial economic niche, but one where modularity based on a lack of choice has been replaced with a kind based on an abundance of choice. For example, lets look at the Antarctic military industrial complex, where the interconnection of the hypercorps is clearest:
- Because the ARC government oversees the production of interchangeable standard parts in its pursuit of Internal Completion and the broader semicircular economy, most manufacturing of the common building blocks of modern technology and infrastructure flows through Promethean Standard Systems, a state-owned hypercorp with a relatively large permanent staff directing human resources and production.
- Those line roles that cannot be automated are filled by temporary contractors who, all basic needs met by the state and often with either membership in a cooperative or a personal creative endeavor bringing in steady money, pick up a few hours a week as their needs dictate, with the sheer size and average education of the Antarctic labor pool ensuring adequate staff to reach production goals dictated by market demand.
- PSS parts are then purchased at a discounted rate by a private defense hypercorp contracted by the government, itself a cooperative owned and operated by a permanent staff of researchers, managers, and other crucial employees. Combining PSS parts with proprietary ones produced either by the permanent staff, another specialized hypercorp, or a fabricator, a vehicle, weapons system, or dragoon armor is then assembled by a combination of automated factory systems, with necessary human roles filled by carefully vetted contractors.
- Now finished, the shipment is tested and examined by PSS inspectors of the proper security clearance before being delivered by entirely automated systems to the military base, warehouse or research campus it was requisitioned for.
*Most nakedly in the NAU and PEU and much more insidiously in the USSR and BARD.
**Outside the managers and the upper echelons of the security apparatus, of course.
***Purely for convenience here. Both types are simply referred to as "hypercorps", with their national/political affiliation being the mark of whether you're being exploited to death or actually getting a pretty good deal.
****Most nationalized industries, especially medicine and education, are far more traditional in structure, owned by the state but with the overwhelming majority of their workforces being fully unionized permanent employees.
All hypercorps are cooperatives but not vice versa, since the distinction comes down to a ratio of permanent owner-producers to the amount of human labor theoretically required to produce total product volume. There's an official metric used for purposes of taxation but in the public consciousness the line is a bit blurrier. Here's a few examples for further clarity:
- A grocery store (A) that employs some contractors and gets some of its produce from an automated vertical farm is a co-op, because most of its staff is permanent with an equal ownership share of the enterprise and a collective ownership of the vertical farm. Its other suppliers are also co-ops, selling their wares to grocery stores A through C and restaurants D through F.
- A recreational drone company that uses fabricators and robots to produce its wares at mass scale is a hypercorp, since most of the actual physical labor is automated and it produces enough that the theoretical amount of human labor required far outweighs the permanent staff.
- A nuclear power plant is a state industry, government owned/directed and union operated.
- A movie reviewer with a subscription tier is self-employed, unless they do it with friends and become a co-op. If they sell merchandise online, it's more likely to be produced by another co-op focused on that sort of specialized small-batch merchandise rather than a hypercorp that makes clothes or knickknacks or whatever for a large chain.
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Walks in like nothing has happened
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, etc. etc. Sorry for the wait. I forgot about this post. Then I remembered it out of the blue for some reason. In the time since this was first posted, I do in fact have some questions I want answered!
1. What's the holiday season like in Cosmicist countries? How are traditional celebrations like Christmas treated in said countries? Is Santa still a thing in them?
2. Due to some recent events of much importance, tragedy, and controversy, what's the Middle East like? Who are the major players in it? What spheres of influence are most influential in the area?
3. Do you have any new flags that we can see?
That's all for this year @Born in the USSA, take care, and good luck on your future projects!
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, etc. etc. Sorry for the wait. I forgot about this post. Then I remembered it out of the blue for some reason. In the time since this was first posted, I do in fact have some questions I want answered!
1. What's the holiday season like in Cosmicist countries? How are traditional celebrations like Christmas treated in said countries? Is Santa still a thing in them?
2. Due to some recent events of much importance, tragedy, and controversy, what's the Middle East like? Who are the major players in it? What spheres of influence are most influential in the area?
3. Do you have any new flags that we can see?
That's all for this year @Born in the USSA, take care, and good luck on your future projects!
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Sometimes I think you have a conception of political systems a bit too scholastic or ideological, but overall you often really put down the work to build systems significantly different from the one we live in, with a good thought for details. Not many in this website can do this. I was curious if you worked with something like this IRL.
Nope, not even a little 😂 My pet peeve with AH ideologies a lot of the time (aside from the fact there aren't enough!) is when they don't go deep enough with their concept. Any proper ideology should have a mass appeal and a theory each of history, government and political economy to be properly fleshed out IMO. Cosmicism arose in response to neoliberalism, so the ARC economy is not structured to pursue profit at all costs (though profit is generated as a byproduct), but rather to simultaneously
- create an avenue for individual self discovery and expression
- satisfy the constitutional guarantee to fulfilling work, and
- build and maintain a sense of social solidarity,
For example, the fact that PSS produced most of the technology used to rebuild the other Continental Commonwealths in the wake of their revolutions has created a scenario where they've adopted its model and standards in their new states, so parts are completely interchangeable basically anywhere in the Cosmintern. That helps both with Cosmicist economic integration and the broader push for the semicircular economy while spiting the northerners trying to worm their way into the market at the same time, since everything is at a different gauge from what they each use, so to speak.
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Posted a random poll just for fun, it literally has no bearing on anything, I was just curious what people would choose.
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