The Great Divide: DecoSec and Subversion
In the wake of the tumultuous 20th century, the new millennium held immense promise in many circles. Futurists dreamed of a world transformed and made better by technology, and that desire would form the core of two movements that would otherwise be tagentially related at best and mutually opposed at worst. The first, and by far the most mainstream, was the DecoSec movement that would, with the shattering of the tripartisan status quo, find its most natural home in the New Federalist Party.
With a following primarily among tech industrialists, architects and artists, Deco Secundis was an aspirational sort of futurism, focused on using markets and technology to solve problems and make a better world, with a focus on an integration of technology into life and work, with a goal of creating spaces balanced between industrial productivity, aesthetically pleasing design and proximity to nature. One of the best examples of this ethic was Macondo Technologies, by this point only a respectably sized computer company just beginning it's proliferation into the software side of things through their Buendia search engine. It would be another decade before Macondo would be regarded as an unassailable giant, and the company's DecoSec aesthetic ironically lives on in the dieselpunk sensibilities of the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths.
A far different reaction to the promise of technology would begin to bubble up in the wake of the Second Levant War, particularly on Libertalia.us, a loosely-connected network of lightly moderated message boards. Conspiracy was rampant as people turned to Libertalia to complain about censorship, share links to stolen content, work chaos magic, insult one another and revel in the anonymity of the internet. Then something happened. In the wake of the official declaration of war in Syria and Iraq a board member going by the name "Saint Toad" began posting videos telling people to wake up and denounce spooks.
The audio was always dubbed by a computer, even though the subject would always move their head and hands as if they were speaking animatedly. The most recognizable thing was the mask. It was always the same, skin a pale white, glasses, dark hair and sideburns. It wasn't long before viewers figured it out. It was a mask of Max Stirner inspired by the famous doodle. In the rough and tumble world of Libertalia it was no surprise that St. Toad's rants about egoism found a ready audience. Stirner's work quickly became a frequent topic of discussion, blending with half-baked occultism and the hatred of content moderators and gatekeepers of all kinds. And somewhere along the way the Subversive Party was born.
Something between a Union of Egoists and a mob playing at a political party (or was it vice versa?), the Subversives had no centralized structure, congregating and dispersing effortlessly whenever two people had Stirner masks and wanted to bust spooks. It evolved its own symbols organically and communicated through memes. Teal was popular for the movement, along with frog symbolism, but there was no rhyme or reason to it and it could be discarded at any time. DDOS attacks on censors, doxxing of abusive police and corrupt officials, hacking and theft of any intellectual property imaginable, everything was on the table, and the lack of any sort of organization made cracking down on anything besides the occasional sloppy lone wolf a nightmare for the DHS and the FBI.
2004 would be the first election to feature a Subversive "candidate", with write-in St. Toad garnering a few thousand votes. At the time little more than a footnote to Powell's successful bid for reelection, it would be a shape of things to come, with the St. Toad character quickly growing in popularity as a write-in protest vote, with the mix of organic voluntary participation and disdain for government censorship and intellectual property laws making Subversives by some metrics the world's first pirate party. If one assumes that something with no leaders, infrastructure or official members could be considered a party at all 🤔
With a following primarily among tech industrialists, architects and artists, Deco Secundis was an aspirational sort of futurism, focused on using markets and technology to solve problems and make a better world, with a focus on an integration of technology into life and work, with a goal of creating spaces balanced between industrial productivity, aesthetically pleasing design and proximity to nature. One of the best examples of this ethic was Macondo Technologies, by this point only a respectably sized computer company just beginning it's proliferation into the software side of things through their Buendia search engine. It would be another decade before Macondo would be regarded as an unassailable giant, and the company's DecoSec aesthetic ironically lives on in the dieselpunk sensibilities of the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths.
A far different reaction to the promise of technology would begin to bubble up in the wake of the Second Levant War, particularly on Libertalia.us, a loosely-connected network of lightly moderated message boards. Conspiracy was rampant as people turned to Libertalia to complain about censorship, share links to stolen content, work chaos magic, insult one another and revel in the anonymity of the internet. Then something happened. In the wake of the official declaration of war in Syria and Iraq a board member going by the name "Saint Toad" began posting videos telling people to wake up and denounce spooks.
The audio was always dubbed by a computer, even though the subject would always move their head and hands as if they were speaking animatedly. The most recognizable thing was the mask. It was always the same, skin a pale white, glasses, dark hair and sideburns. It wasn't long before viewers figured it out. It was a mask of Max Stirner inspired by the famous doodle. In the rough and tumble world of Libertalia it was no surprise that St. Toad's rants about egoism found a ready audience. Stirner's work quickly became a frequent topic of discussion, blending with half-baked occultism and the hatred of content moderators and gatekeepers of all kinds. And somewhere along the way the Subversive Party was born.
Something between a Union of Egoists and a mob playing at a political party (or was it vice versa?), the Subversives had no centralized structure, congregating and dispersing effortlessly whenever two people had Stirner masks and wanted to bust spooks. It evolved its own symbols organically and communicated through memes. Teal was popular for the movement, along with frog symbolism, but there was no rhyme or reason to it and it could be discarded at any time. DDOS attacks on censors, doxxing of abusive police and corrupt officials, hacking and theft of any intellectual property imaginable, everything was on the table, and the lack of any sort of organization made cracking down on anything besides the occasional sloppy lone wolf a nightmare for the DHS and the FBI.
2004 would be the first election to feature a Subversive "candidate", with write-in St. Toad garnering a few thousand votes. At the time little more than a footnote to Powell's successful bid for reelection, it would be a shape of things to come, with the St. Toad character quickly growing in popularity as a write-in protest vote, with the mix of organic voluntary participation and disdain for government censorship and intellectual property laws making Subversives by some metrics the world's first pirate party. If one assumes that something with no leaders, infrastructure or official members could be considered a party at all 🤔
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