Should I rename the first stage of the Volksgeist Imperium instead of Feudalism? I originally settled on the latter as kind of a callback to Marxist historiography and because depending on how you define the original term "pseudo-feudelism" can be used to describe a bunch of geographically disparate societies outside of Europe/Japan (the two that meet the classical definition best). I've been thinking that Feudalism as a term is too narrow and Imperium would fit better, since the main focus on the period in Cosmicist thought is as the origin of centralized states and hierarchical hereditary class relations. What do you all think?
"Power Without Knowledge...": President Haig and the Era of Bad Feelings
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Also for the curious the novel version of the TL's US still has fifty states and neither DC nor Puerto Rico are the last one. The Dakotas are divided east-west instead of north-south into Dakota and Sioux and Oklahoma/the Texas panhandle were reformed into Sequoyah and Jefferson. It has no bearing at all on the plot or the timeline in any way, I just thought it was fun.
Wait. If the Texas panhandle is its own state, then there has to be one less state somewhere else to balance it out so it still sums up to 50, right? So, what state is missing? Wyoming? Arizona or New Mexico? Or where?
The number of the Dakotas is the same, Kansas and Nebraska are one state (Frémont) and Oklahoma is basically two states, still adds up to 50. Jefferson carved out of the Texas panhandle was an actual statehood proposal in the 1910s, combining it with western Oklahoma was my own invention. I wanted one midwestern battleground state for the present day section to take place in and decided to make up the difference in the local neighborhood.
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I feel like not splitting Kansas and Nebraska in particular from each other would have a larger effect than what is being described in this timeline, since the partition of the Unorganized Territory into Kansas and Nebraska territories (the latter of which, it's worth remembering, originally also contained all of Louisiana north of OTL Nebraska and west of the Missouri river) was directly tied with the issue of the expansion of slavery, and the transition from the Missouri Compromise to Popular Sovereignty over that issue, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act was written with Popular Sovereignty in mind, resulting in Bleeding Kansas, and directly contributing to the fall of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republicans. I worry that this partition never happening might mess too much with the American history around the Civil War to give us a timeline with so few divergences from OTL before the 1970s.
Also Frémont, as a Radical Republican abolitionist, more tied to California than the Great Plains, might not be the first choice for the namesake of such a territory and later state anyway? But that is really the least of my problems with this idea.
EDIT: And also he was alive when Kansas was admitted into the Union in OTL, so there's also the question of if it's appropriate to name a state after a person that was alive at the time
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Like I said, the earlier POD is for the novel only and purely a contrivance so Sutter won't have to drive all around the Midwest to have his little adventure since I can pull enough locations and ripped from the headlines events from the two of them to make the story work. The TL version still diverges in the primary season for the 1980 election. In the earlier divergence Frémont gets caught up in Bleeding Kansas, it spills north and he dies a martyr's death, hence the name change and the reconsolidation of the two territories (a character will even point out how little sense it makes). I actually picked it because my original name choice (Ogallala) doesn't make sense for the period, two of his expeditions went through the area, and my dad absolutely despises him so I thought it would be funny. I don't care that it's far and away the least likely thing about the story version of the TL, there's a reason I didn't start the timeline with it. It's happening 😂 I like Philip K. Dick, characters noticing plotholes in their lived reality is half the point, Sutter will spend most of his story having really weird dreams and hallucinations. Is the ARC a product of madness or brilliance?
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Have a consolidated post about the sordid history of Macondo I put together for the Create Your Own Company thread! I'll expand it into an actual wiki-style article for the relevant interlude in the book proper.
Here's the big bad for my Power Without Knowledge TL! The thread serves as worldbuilding for a novel I plan to write but that won't take place when they're doing the really evil shit.
Macondo Technologies began life as a modest computer startup founded by a group of Afrikaner emigres fleeing the South African race war in the 90s. While they began focused purely on hardware, a good working relationship with President Perot's new Department of Technology allowed them to expand their offerings, eventually developing the Buendia search engine in a bid to compete with Netscape. Buendia began Macondo's ascendancy as the company sought to pursue a model where consumers using Macondo computers would be essentially required to use Buendia, seeing ads for products sold in their online marketplace at the same time. While originally largely a hosting service for independent vendors, the rate of the company's growth eventually enabled it to cut out the middle man in most instances, providing a Macondo-brand generic version of several common staples and sundries and even opening its own subsidiary ebook publishing house.
Despite a fairly unsuccessful foray into VR/AR in the 2020s the company would remain fairly strong on the back of Buendia and its fully integrated marketplace, though it eventually ran into the problem of how to maintain its margins in the face of changing labor conditions as the century wore on. This would culminate in the so-called "Factory System" and the Hochsprung disaster. At its core the Factory System was fairly simple and completely bloodchilling: create a fleet of specially-designed ships, equipped with the minimum possible contingent of crew and overseers and the latest in additive manufacturing technology and just... send them out to find workers. By the late 2040s climate change was ravaging coastlines everywhere and there were plenty of displaced people looking for any way to feed their families.
And so it went for a decade, with the Macondo Factory ships pulling in to port, taking on desperate souls and working them until the costs of materials, interference from the local governments or other factors led them to kick them all back onto the shore, pull up anchor and find the new cheapest source of labor. The South Pacific proved a fertile hunting ground, with plenty of tiny island nations on a knife's edge from completely sinking underwater and grasping for any chance to earn their way off. Unfortunately by that point the reputation of the fleet preceded it, and when the flagship MTS Hochsprung pulled into its newest port it was met with an angry mob. Overseers were drowned, printers were unlocked and made to churn out weapons, and the newly rechristened Kanaloa began its brief vibrant life as a revolutionary pirate republic.
By the time it was sunk by the US Navy some months later the Kanaloa had sunk or commandeered most of the Factory fleet and the Cosmicist Manifesto that had inspired it had become a worldwide bestseller. Macondo was undaunted despite a shaky few quarters, eventually managing to weasel its way into signatory status in the Antarctic Treaty System and spearheading the transition of the ATS into the Antarctic Economic Territories, all the better to exploit the new resources exposed as all that ice continued to melt. Macondo would be the defacto administrator of the new arrangement, generously staffing its factories, mines and laboratories with prisoners transported from all over the world.
The germ of Cosmicism couldn't be contained despite the company's best efforts, with its seemingly invincible hold over the AET toppled in the Antarctic Revolution after some forty years, enabled by the fact that many researchers and administrators of the Antarctic medical facilities and secret weapons projects had seen the writing on the wall and joined up with the rebels to avoid being executed for a long history of clandestine human experimentation. A brief period of Cosmicist consolidation would reforge the continent into the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths, finally making Macondo too toxic to do business south of the equator and ushering in another Burgundy Scare, a Second Cold War and a Third Space Race.
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So, and I know this isn't a typical question and may not be in your range of writing skill, but I would be interested in seeing stuff like little mini-vignettes which detail ordinary life in places all around the PWK-verse. Like, a day in the life of a worker in the ARC, or the lifestyle of the typical Macondo CEO. Slice of life stuff and the like, you get me? But yeah, keep up the great work man! And congrats on the new job too!
I appreciate the interest 😂 I probably won't have the time to do vignettes but there will be plenty of glimpses at daily life in the book proper, the first chapter of Antarktos opens in a coffee shop/automat and the current Macondo CEO (c. 2020) will get a good look in the third chapter of Alienation. The present portions will be mostly focused on "political" issues (not just electoral ones but also things like protests) but the future ones will have a much broader look at the social color in Antarctica. It's partially because it's interesting to flesh out an entirely unknown society but also rather neatly illustrates the different relationship with the social fabric that 21st century America and 22nd century Antarctica have.
I had a random idea out of the blue for a modern day (~2013) media update that for once won't focus on western pop culture. Who's up to see an avant garde product of the Soviet sphere?
Media Matters: No Truce With the Furies
Ask the average Warsaw Pact cinephile and you'd be told that the turn toward dense and unconventional Western films that began with the release of Dune was nothing but a pale imitation of the trends that had been coursing through Soviet cinema for decades by that point. Whether you lent any credence to this "imitation rather than parallelism" theory was ultimately rendered moot by the shaky finances that paralyzed the Eastern Bloc in the wake of the so-called Soviet Restoration. If the USS couldn't spare money to continue the First Space Race, after all, there was hardly any slack in the budget for large artistic projects.
The start of the 21st Century would prove kinder on the USS and the Warsaw Pact than the end of the 20th had been, with the Atlanticist Western Bloc spreading itself thin with the War on Terror and Chinese expansion into Tibet creating serious strain among the nations of the Asia-Pacific region, all of that even without the lingering pains of the 2008 recession. Having focused on internal development over foreign adventurism following the wild success of the Crises of '91, money once again began to flow into vanity projects, from the Second Space Race to the cultural sphere, the latter best symbolized by 2013's No Truce With the Furies.
A product of the Baltic Federation artistic collective ZAUM, No Truce With the Furies was perhaps one of the most technically challenging films ever made, taking the form of a massive gamebook where viewer choice helped navigate the amnesiac central character through a fully realized constructed world and a dizzying array of ideologies, personality quirks and complex scenarios and interactions. While the core case of a lynched mercenary and the cause of your police detective's self-destructive tendencies can be discovered on a "speedrun" of just over five hours, fully exploring the world of the film and the limits of your protagonist's pathologies can run as long as fourteen hours for the completionist viewer, though the end result can still vary wildly depending on which of the film's four ideologies the viewer decides to embrace.
Supporting a film that required some two dozen hours of finished footage was always a bold choice, since it would be practically impossible to show in conventional theaters, though the advent of streaming services in the early 2000s made the film a fortuitous gamble, with international audiences raving at the level of complexity and nuance worked into the finished product. The censors were somewhat less than pleased with the ambiguity of the protagonist's communist focus tree, but by all metrics the film had succeeded in its goal, producing a grand show of disposable affluence, technical sophistication, and mass popular appeal. No Truce With the Furies has resonated so well, in fact, that several ARC-funded media projects have adopted the film's style of ambiguous and responsive storytelling over a century later.
The start of the 21st Century would prove kinder on the USS and the Warsaw Pact than the end of the 20th had been, with the Atlanticist Western Bloc spreading itself thin with the War on Terror and Chinese expansion into Tibet creating serious strain among the nations of the Asia-Pacific region, all of that even without the lingering pains of the 2008 recession. Having focused on internal development over foreign adventurism following the wild success of the Crises of '91, money once again began to flow into vanity projects, from the Second Space Race to the cultural sphere, the latter best symbolized by 2013's No Truce With the Furies.
A product of the Baltic Federation artistic collective ZAUM, No Truce With the Furies was perhaps one of the most technically challenging films ever made, taking the form of a massive gamebook where viewer choice helped navigate the amnesiac central character through a fully realized constructed world and a dizzying array of ideologies, personality quirks and complex scenarios and interactions. While the core case of a lynched mercenary and the cause of your police detective's self-destructive tendencies can be discovered on a "speedrun" of just over five hours, fully exploring the world of the film and the limits of your protagonist's pathologies can run as long as fourteen hours for the completionist viewer, though the end result can still vary wildly depending on which of the film's four ideologies the viewer decides to embrace.
Supporting a film that required some two dozen hours of finished footage was always a bold choice, since it would be practically impossible to show in conventional theaters, though the advent of streaming services in the early 2000s made the film a fortuitous gamble, with international audiences raving at the level of complexity and nuance worked into the finished product. The censors were somewhat less than pleased with the ambiguity of the protagonist's communist focus tree, but by all metrics the film had succeeded in its goal, producing a grand show of disposable affluence, technical sophistication, and mass popular appeal. No Truce With the Furies has resonated so well, in fact, that several ARC-funded media projects have adopted the film's style of ambiguous and responsive storytelling over a century later.
I'm kinda glad the Amazon adaptation of Disco Elysium fell through, honestly, anything other than a vast Bandersnatch-style choose your own adventure wouldn't be able to do the story justice.
Also given the different political history of Power Without Knowledge (no former Soviet states ravaged by neoliberalism, for one thing) the setting is different from the OTL Disco Elysium game, taking place in the vaguely-East Asian Seol City instead of the game's setting of Revachol. In the film it is Seol rather than Insulinde going through a neoliberal "Western" occupation in the wake of a failed communist revolt as a dig at the current state of the Second Republic of China and Kim is your amnesiac alcoholic protagonist rather than Harry.
Kindly replace "Revacholian" with "Seolese":
Kindly replace "Revacholian" with "Seolese":
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I've got an idea for a special "anniversary flag" for the ARC for the latest flag challenge that should be interesting! I'll probably make it tomorrow. It won't replace the actual flag or anything but the centennial of the first Cosmicist state is certainly a special occasion, and it'll definitely telegraph the growing strength of the Maximalist Fraction (commemorating a date nine years after they begin to gain electoral prominence, after all). As per usual with Cosmicist symbolism the Kyriarchs and their chain dogs will certainly see it in an ominous light but that's half the point 😂
Writing on the Wall: The Maximalist Fraction
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Writing on the Wall: Centennial
The Centennial of the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths
Behold! The centennial celebratory flag for the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths in my Power Without Knowledge TL! A century into the first successful Cosmicist experiment has seen the rise of a new force within the Antarctic Cosmicist Party, the Maximalist Fraction, determined to complete the work of transitioning the Cosmicist International into a true world government, expanding the space colonies into self-sustaining territories, and finally shattering the exhausted remnants of the Arctic Council to the north. To the dismay of the Nihilist powers the flag itself is unsubtle about these ambitions, prominently featuring the octopus that serves as the symbol of both the Cosmintern and the Maximalists and blatantly displaying the Cosmicist model of the solar system, complete with an Earth all decked out in burgundy. The ARC motto lends the flag an extra edge of either hopeful promise or implied malice, depending on which alliance you happen to be subject to.
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For the curious the Cosmintern prefers the name Janus to Neptune (hence the crossed key and walking stick). The star at the end represents Yuggoth, a hypothetical planet beyond Pluto. They haven't found it yet but it's a subtle hint to the the Cosmintern's full and complete commitment to space exploration and colonization.
Writing on the Wall: Policing in the ARC
The policing regimen implemented in the wake of the Antarctic Revolution was a unique product of the reaction against the dark days of the Macondo regime, where security was handled by a private force that deliberately lived completely separated from its "patrons" and shuffled personnel between divisions with relative frequency. These policies in turn fostered a detached and suitably bloodthirsty security force adequate to terrorize the populace and maintain the quotas required to preserve the company's bottom line.
Following the necessary purges of unreconstructed elements within this system the ARC elected to retain a modified form of the paramilitary model, though steps were taken to preserve an ironclad promise of transparency and accountability to civilian control. Police in the modern ARC are required to have served at least one tour in the Antarctic Armed Forces and remain subject to the same code of military conduct, and as such are one of the few groups in the nation barred from unionizing and eligible for the death penalty in matters such as the violation of the standards of field executions. The Antarctic model of the police power has since been adopted by the other nations of the Cosmintern and is divided into two partitions:
Following the necessary purges of unreconstructed elements within this system the ARC elected to retain a modified form of the paramilitary model, though steps were taken to preserve an ironclad promise of transparency and accountability to civilian control. Police in the modern ARC are required to have served at least one tour in the Antarctic Armed Forces and remain subject to the same code of military conduct, and as such are one of the few groups in the nation barred from unionizing and eligible for the death penalty in matters such as the violation of the standards of field executions. The Antarctic model of the police power has since been adopted by the other nations of the Cosmintern and is divided into two partitions:
- The Regional Militia fulfills the police function within the Regional Commonwealths proper. A force centralized under the control of the civilian government of the RC, the Militia fulfills a role somewhat similar to a hybrid of a local police force, state police force, and National Guard integrated into a single operation. At the local level the members of the Militia are required to maintain permanent residency in their jurisdictions, while a separate central pool of officers investigates crimes whose scope or severity elevate them beyond the capacity of the local force. It is this central pool, in conjunction with relevant local units, which is marshalled in the event of disaster, insurrection or invasion.
- Given the distance between the Antarctic Insular Territories, the police function in the Protonga Regional Commonwealth is instead handled by the Antarctic Coast Guard, a subdivision of the Antarctic Navy, though local peace officers are still required to be permanent residents of the area they are overseeing.
- The Continental Constabulary serves as the federal police force, investigating crimes that cross the boundaries of separate Commonwealths or deal with matters of state security and foreign and domestic espionage, as defined by the Basic Law and certified by a Continental Security Jury. The members of the Constabulary have broad latitude to commandeer Militia units and resources in the field, though they are held to an even stricter standard than the Militia members to better curb abuses of this power. Aside from their traditional security functions, the Constabulary also oversees the training, auditing and investigation of the Regional Militias, ensuring both an equality of enforcement and the prevention of the formation of reactionary bastions within the security forces of the RCs.
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I've been thinking over some details of the map I made for the future history of the TL and I have some notes. Aside from the fact I'm going to rename the Hong Kong Accords into the Belt and Road Directorate (BaRD) and I'll also most likely change the flag, I've also come up with some names for the Nihilist Marches (powers which are neither Cosmicist nor Arctic Council Members), since they'll inevitably throw of the economic yoke of the northerners, fall to Cosmicism first and get absorbed into the Cosmintern:
- America Unida- Bolivarian Commonwealths of America Unida (retains original size).
- Monrovia Pact- United Commonwealth of Nigritia (gains the Congo Basin from the Commonwealths of Azania).
- Arab League- Commonwealth of Greater Arabia (retains original size).
- I'm also considering a portion of the BaRD breaking off in the same timeframe, creating the Central Turanic Commonwealth (divides the BaRD in half, separating Iran from the East Asian section).