"Power Without Knowledge...": President Haig and the Era of Bad Feelings

[Born in the USSA]

It looked nice enough I had to share it! The new establishment ca. 2020, from left to right:

• Citizens Party (bison)- geoanarchism, pacifism, democratic socialism, syndicalism (factions)
• Equal Rights Party (moose)- social liberalism, left populism
• New Federalist Party (tree)- radical centrism, reformist populism, moderation (faction)
• Freedom Party (rattlesnake)- fiscal conservatism, neoliberalism, corporate personhood
• America First Party (lion)- social conservatism, right populism

And on the outside looking in:

• Manifest Destiny!* (turtle)- political devolution, regional cooperation, indigenous self-determination, contradictory flavors of ethnonationalism and secessionism (factions)
• Subversive Party (frog)- egoism, pirate politics, situationism, anti-spooks

*No relation to @Napoleon53

 

[Born in the USSA]

Have the official flag of the Antarctic Treaty System TTL! I used the 1978 flag proposal as the basis given the fact its the only one that predates the timeline's POD and added an albatross and the stylized Southern Cross from the Japanese Antarctic Expedition of 1912 (selected TTL to commemorate the first nonwhite expedition to the continent). The System would maintain the flag well into the twenty-first century as runaway ice shelf collapse drastically deglaciated the continent. With a flooding world in drastic need of new resources, the treaty governing the continent would be amended to remove road blocks to resource extraction, with the continent becoming in effect a vast open air penal colony administered by Macondo Technologies on behalf of the signatory nations, the Antarctic Economic Territories. It would be this imported labor pool, united with defecting corporate security and the large pool of international scientists still operating on the continent that would overthrow the Antarctic Territory System and purge the company from the continent, eventually ushering in the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealth. Naturally this has not endeared them to the northern centers of power, given the sudden threat of an expansionist ideology combined with the sudden severe shock of resource shortages 🤔 Given continued use of the original treaty flag under the AET occupation the albatross is considered an extremely negative symbol in the modern ARC.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The ecology of Antarctica has always been shaped by the harshness of the southern continent, but this would prove to be a double-edged sword as the Cthulhucene reached its tipping point, with millions of years of adaptation to a frozen desert suddenly leaving the flora and fauna indigenous to the frozen wastes unable to adapt quickly enough to the apocalyptic change that gripped the continent once the glaciers began to melt.

Having established themselves as the stewards of their hard won homeland in the wake of this chaos, the ARC would set about reconstructing a stable biosphere to meet the new conditions. This had a pragmatic dimension, serving as a way to make the newly exposed land more habitable while also allowing a large scale dry run for the space program's terraforming ambitions. The process also had a moral dimension born out of the Cosmicist desire for ecological sustainability, even if nature might need a helping hand from time to time.

While traditionally cold-tolerant species of plants and animals would be imported wholesale from the far north, more exotic experiments would be conducted using the DNA of the native Antarctic species to engineer new creatures capable of filling newly developed ecological niches. While this would have some limited success, the blend of natural and artificial species would form a mostly stable and fairly robust ecological web throughout the continent. Despite the impressive success of the program, turning a ravaged and damaged landscape into a cold-weather biome would rely far more on the ground level work of a far more humble set of engineered organisms.

The research that would eventually produce the impressive suite of fungal technologies pioneered by the ARC had its roots in the so called "gray lung" plague of the early twenty-first century. An extremely transmissible and resilient respiratory fungal infection, gray lung would bring the world to its knees when it began to spread from the British Isles at the start of 2020. In the process of developing antifungal treatments powerful enough to destroy the organism but targeted enough not to damage lungs and other tissues, whole new avenues of research were opened up to explore the capabilities and limits of fungal biology.

It was this research, liberated from Macondo Technology archives in the wake of the Antarctic Revolution, which would prove the basis for the greening of the continent. From large scale carbon sequestration to mycelium cultivated for soil engineering and the reconditioning of polluted industrial sites to the more mundane fields of food waste recycling, mushroom leathers and mycological building materials, the ARC is serving as a world pioneer of sustainable development and environmental reconditioning, providing valuable insights for the regime's plans for offworld colonization in the process.

*** As weird as it sounds for the book I plan to write I had the idea for a 2020 world in the grips of a widespread respiratory infection back in the earliest form of this timeline concept in 2015 so I saw no reason to change those plans going forward***

 

[Born in the USSA]

This is the biggest version it would let me upload Some notes on the names- given the lack of an indigenous Antarctic population*, the inhabitants of the continent have turned to literature set in Antarctica for things like place names. In terms of Commonwealths, New Nantucket is a reference to Arthur Gordon Pym, Caprona is the Land that Time Forgot, Dakkar is a reference to Captain Nemo, Star City is taken from The Republic of the Southern Cross, Riallaro is from The Archipelago of Exiles, New Swabia owes more to the conspiracy lore than the historical claim, Leng is obviously from Lovecraft, Xanadu is a reference to Coleridge as author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Protonga, the not included cluster of space platforms and naval bases built over the remains of Easter Island, takes its new name from Stanislaw Szukalski.

*One proven conclusively by scientists outside the Zoranists anyway...

 

[Born in the USSA]

The Democrats had wandered in the wilderness for nearly thirty years, spending one Reform and three Republican presidencies tarred as feckless big government socialists. But every political slander falls flat eventually, and with the public newly divided over the fallout of the Second Levant War, the recurring problem of government surveillance and the historically inept DHS response to Hurricane Wilma's scouring of the East Coast, the party knew that this would be their year. The rapidly deteriorating economic meltdown would add even more urgency to what many felt would be a change election.

Beginning with a historically divided field, the Democratic primary season would see the old guard routed and Illinois Senator Carol Mosely Braun would quickly seize the nomination, while Vice President Shelby would gain the Republican nomination. The Reform primaries were another matter, with serious bad blood between the Buchanan and Nader wings of the party creating enough breathing space to get Ron Paul the nomination in the wake of an intensely bitter convention.

Settling on economics over cultural issues as the surest path to victory, the Mosely Braun campaign would lay the economic crisis squarely at the feet of the Republicans and the Perot-Paul Reformers, arguing persuasively that the bubbles that had led to the collapse were a result of reckless and ideologically-minded deregulation. Not to be left out, Buchanan would also be singled out as the face of the most hawkish elements of the political class, the guiding spirit that seemed determined to have the US astride the world like a Colossus, raining destruction down without somehow surrendering moral clarity, bankrupting the country in the process.

These arguments would prove persuasive in the long run, with Nader even endorsing Mosely Braun, leading to significant defections from the left wing of the Reform Party even as many Republican voters simply dropped out of the political process altogether or split their ticket at the ballot box. And just like that, America had elected a black woman to the presidency, with the Democrats cresting on a wave election to gain a better hand in the Legislature at the same time in coalition with Left-Reform.

The fatal flaw with political momentum is that if you don't use it, you lose it, so President Mosely-Braun immediately set out to shepherd economic relief through the Congress, even as Ron Paul and many Republicans decried the bailouts. Cognizant that she had at most two years to make concrete improvements in people's lives or risk losing her governing majority, she would move on to an even more expansive program even as the ink was drying: this would be the birth of the American Health Service Act.

The AHSA was a compromise from the start, with the calls of firebrand progressives for universal government-provided health insurance quickly tempered with the knowledge that with the slimmest of majorities (in concert with the Nader Reform faction), the party could not afford moderate defections, secure in the knowledge that the Republicans and the rest of the Reform Party would take a hardline stance on the issue.

In the end, after months of haggling and back and forth negotiations with hospital associations, insurance companies, medical unions and every manner of special interest group and lobbying concern, the AHSA would be signed into law. The law would prevent the denial of coverage based on preexisting conditions and expand Medicaid eligibility while simultaneously requiring individuals to get insurance and enforcing minimum standards on the coverage of the plans being offered. By far the largest change, however, would be the public option- operating under the theory that basic healthcare was a human right, the progressives made their support conditional on the AHSA including a basic health plan provided directly through the government and administered by the Department of Health and Human Services.

It wasn't perfect by any means, with the public option plans covering only specific classes of vital procedures, and with Medicaid expansion contingent on the approval of the states on an individual basis. But it was a start, the beginning of a change in American thinking that would see health care as a right for all citizens rather than an elective choice. And, despite all the back and forth and negotiations that had diluted the universal Medicare fever dreams of the nation's progressives, the conservatives in power in the other parties predictably couldn't accept half a loaf, with opposition to the AHSA forming the core of a new wave of attacks on the Democratic Party and sending Ron Paul to the forefront of the culture wars.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I know I promised early 2000s worldbuilding but instead have the major factions of the Antarctic Revolution! Clockwise from top left:

1. Fifth International- An intersectional alliance of the various socialist movements that rose up discretely in the individual Territories
2. Sons of Liberty- A loose confederation of conservative, centrist and nationalist movements in the Territories
3. Loyalists- AET bureaucrats, Macondo security forces and collaborators
4. Common Ground*- The alliance between the underground Cosmicist International and the Zoranist Movement

The start of the conflict would look far different from the end result, with the Fifth International and the Sons of Liberty widely seen as the dominant forces in the alliance against Macondo Technologies and its legions of corporate soldiers and collaborators. In contrast, the Cosmicist Common Ground was very much seen as a lesser partner, though this was in part due to a drastic underestimation of their popular support and militant ferocity. As the conflict wound down those Macondo affiliates that had not already fled threw themselves onto the mercy of the Free Antarctic Coalition, with the tense alliance between the Fifth International and the Sons of Liberty a victim of the Coalition's success. The Fifth International naturally favored an internationalist government and the nationalization of Macondo and Antarctic Economic Territory assets on the continent, while the Sons were adamant that they would accept nothing more imposing than a loose coalition made up of the newly independent Territories, with the auctioning off of seized assets to follow. As the two titans of the Coalition squared off to squabble over their spoils, members of the Common Ground were discretely building support among the margins of both factions and with the common citizens still suffering in the wake of the conflict.

A continental referendum was arranged to settle questions raised by the fallout of the Revolution and this discrete coalition building and hidden wellspring of popular support would propel the Cosmicist parties into power, a position reinforced by their ability to acquire the lion's share of the Macondo scientific and administrative personnel. Under the doctrine of vanguard pluralism the resulting government was made a single party federation of commonwealths and the ARC was born. Each of the member commonwealths is balanced internally against the smaller cultural regions that evolved naturally as a result of AET-era settlement patterns and barriers to internal migration. These commonwealths exist in a federal structure that sets broad policy on the continent and supervises ecological rehabilitation, defense, and the space colonization program. Although the ARC is a one party state, the party has broad internal diversity and a fully engaged and enfranchised populace, with dissenters free to run for political office as independents without penalties or reprisals. Most former Fifth International and Sons of Liberty partisans have acclimated well to the Cosmicist political consensus, all things considered, though there are still persistent rumors of rogue factions on the fringes of the ARC political system.

*Aside from the fact that "Popular Front" is seen as a leftist term, and therefore unsuitable for Cosmicism, the term "Common Ground" for diverse Cosmicist alliances also simultaneously emphasizes the ideology's focus on ecology and the short-circuiting of traditional political divides.

 

[Born in the USSA]

As the Soviet Union began to decline in the 1980s, many academics and political commentators began to talk of the upcoming "end of history", with the collapse of communism and the ultimate triumph of American free market capitalism. Ideology has a powerful blinding effect, and the fervor of these predictions would be matched in a matter of years with the horror of a resurging Soviet state. Neoconservatives would see the failure of communism to collapse as a severe sign that the United States was not doing enough to strangle their rival into extinction. Without constant and sustained pressure on all fronts, they argued, the Cold War would be a continuous conflict between equals and that simply wouldn't do.

Equally blinded by their ideological agendas they were also completely wrong. Twenty years into its restructuring the Union of Soviet States was beginning to show its limits even as the United States began drawing back from Soviet containment to pivot to the new danger of a growing Regressive movement. In many respects the twenty-first century was marked with a return to great power politics of national interest rather than a two-sided ideological affair. As such I've divided this snapshot of the world early in the century into segments.

With the Regressive movement largely suppressed in the US, domestic unrest has been directed primarily against the Moseley Braun administration even as the nation remains involved around the world countering Regressive insurgencies. Canada is caught in a delicate balance on the edge of the US orbit even as indigenous groups are beginning to adopt almost Regressive rhetoric in their protests against the nation's extractive industries. Mexico and Central America have had recurring bouts of violence, a consequence of the booming drug trade.

South America is the most "conventional" in terms of political tensions, with the US and the Soviets supporting friendly regimes there. The Brazilian military dictatorship lasted into the nineties TTL but has liberalized considerably since then, forming the largest economy in South America and the center of opposition to the Bolivarian Socialist Republic of Venezuela and its web of communist insurgencies. Thankfully Posadism has been largely snuffed out in the wake of Heaven's Gate, so nuclear terrorism is not a factor in the conflict.

The Paneuropean Community has been steadily expanding, suffering some growing pains along the way, but the lack of any analogue to the Euro has helped the alliance remain more financially stable, while the federal military operated by the bloc has been deployed to North Africa as part of a counterinsurgency effort against Regressive cells in the area. Domestically there have been growing calls in Germany to leave the PEC, as the nation feels unheard and underrepresented in the bloc. In the face of gradually eroding public support and still smarting over the loss of territory during the restructuring, the USS under Premier Zyuganov has begun bullying the members of the Warsaw Pact to gain concessions, and has begun a boondoggle plan to build derricks in the North Sea to stake out territorial claims in the region.

Africa is as complex and diverse as OTL, with the end to the South African race war having cooled down the tensions between US and Soviet allies in the south of the continent considerably. North Africa is in the grips of Regressive insurgencies as previously mentioned, while the failure of Samuel Doe's 1980 coup in Liberia would provide enough of a shock to the system for the government there to begin to liberalize. Things aren't perfect by any stretch, but a truth and reconciliation commission and a more inclusive political process in the years since has had knock-on effects throughout West Africa, and by the 2010s the region is stable and well-developed. This stability will come in very handy down the line and be directly tied to the swift end to an Ebola scare later in the decade.

Early hopes in the wake of the end of communism in China would prove short lived as the newly reconstituted Republic of China would quickly begin to ossify under the authority of a clique of oligarchs in a trend most clearly seen with the election of Lai Changxing to the presidency. Under his leadership the country has begun taking aggressive steps against its neighbors, fighting a proxy war with India over Tibet, waging a counterinsurgency campaign in Xinjiang and using economic tools and military bluster in an attempt to gain leverage over the Pacific Rim. With Japan in the grips of economic doldrums and Indonesia suffering an escalating Regressive insurgency, the largest obstacles in the region to China's machinations would be Vietnam and Australia. Although ideologically opposed to one another going back to the Haig years, the two have been able to find increasing common ground with one another in opposition to Beijing and the growing Regressive violence on their borders.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Although Macondo Technologies had begun life as a small computer startup in the eighties, it had moved from strength to strength to become arguably the most influential corporation in the world in a matter of decades, using an excellent working relationship with the Department of Technology and a robust pipeline of foreign talent to expand and develop the company's hardware even as it made the determined push into software. While Macondo would rival Atari in the realm of personal computers, it would be the development of the Buendia family of programs that would catapult them to the bleeding edge.

Originally nothing more than an easy and intuitive search engine built to compete with Google, Buendia would be rebranded into an umbrella over a variety of important properties, from the initial search engine to an online marketplace to a digital media and publishing arm. By the time regulators were finally taking a seriously look at the company it was too late, with their vertical integration model giving it unprecedented influence in the American economy. And as the company set about cementing its control, automation would become key to maintaining profit margins. And that meant fleets of drones and self-driving cars.

As the century wore on and Macondo expanded into Antarctica (in spite of occasional setbacks elsewhere) the company would continue its reliance on drones, using them as the core of the surveillance network used to supervise and patrol the vast pools of convict labor and free-born squatters* that made up the lion's share of the population. As such it would be no surprise that drones would play a massive role in the Antarctic Revolution. Looking for an effective way to disperse crowds, the AET security teams would make use of "stoop drones", small drones with targeted explosives that could dive bomb and assassinate individual ringleaders in the crowd. Looking for a way to seize aerial supremacy the Common Ground would counter the fantastically effective stoop drones with a drone of their own design.

Developed illicitly in Macondo's own fabricators by researchers who either saw the writing on the wall about the longevity of the regime or harbored secret Cosmicist sympathies to begin with, Project Nightspore was nothing short of a nonlethal terror weapon. The great contradiction of the ideology was that true believers knew in their bones that every day without action was another step closer to a dead and blasted world, but at the same time they felt the need to save and provide for everyone they could, even former enemies. Hence the focus on a nonlethal deterrent, even a horrendous one.

Nightspore drones were a class of devices, rather than a specific model, from hexapedal machines small enough to operate in buildings to aerial ones large enough to destroy aircraft as the conflict bore on, though they all had things in common. Hallmarks of the Nightspore designs included vantablack coloration, chemical deterrents, infrasound generation, and variable light emission. The devices were designed to be disconcerting, appearing functionally two-dimensional from certain angles, all the while emitting sounds that caused paranoia and physical discomfort and lights that could blind drones or induce vomiting, burning sensations and seizures in humans. Initially few in number, the larger Nightspores would prove so devastating to enemy morale that their use could turn the tide of a battle, frequently allowing Cosmicist partisans to capture useful resources and personnel that could be used to manufacture more of the devices. Rumors that the principles honed in the Nightspore project are still being used to develop new generations of terror craft have neither been confirmed nor denied by the ARC government.

*Some genuinely were climate refugees fleeing south but most were just people born to the convict population. It costs money to send them away and their parent's countries of origin generally didn't want them anyway, so there they stayed.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Like any society, the ARC follows its own particular cycle of holidays and public celebrations. One important distinction, however, is the devolution to the continent's member Commonwealths, each with their own particular ethnoreligious mix and particular festivities. As such, while there is a vast quilt of regional holidays for particular groups, there are really only six observed universally on the continental scale. Because the political system of the ARC holds frequent elections at one level of government or another and values robust civic participation, those elections are considered protected holidays but change from year to year based on their own cycles, and as such are not included in this list.

• New Year's Day- January 1, the start of the calendar year
• Discovery Day- January 27, commemorating the discovery of the continent in 1820 along with all the waves of explorers that mapped and struggled and even died coming to grips with Antarctica.
• May Day- May 1, a memorialization of precarian solidarity inherited from socialism, even as automation has vastly redefined the nature of labor on the continent
• Winter Solstice- June 6 to June ~21 (floating), a celebration of community and resilience in the depths of the antipolar winter and largely focused around gift giving.
• Memorial Days- October 31 to November 6, a time to remember the Revolution and also deceased loved ones, taking place over the course of a week to celebrate the first Rising that precipitated the conflict and thematically similar to the Days of the Dead and Guy Fawkes Day in tone and festivities.
• Summer Solstice- December 5 to December ~21 (floating), far more boisterous than the Christmas of the northern hemisphere, the Antarctic Summer Solstice revels in the highest level of light all year, celebrating the natural and agricultural bounty that has sprung up in Antarctica since the melting of the glaciers with parties and fireworks displays.

A new set of unifying holidays naturally led to the organic growth of new anthropomorphic representatives for them. While Fabian Belligshausen and those that came after him have pride of place on Discovery Day, as the colloquial personification of the Antarctic peoples Ultima is the central focus of the Winter Solstice. The Memorial Days, meanwhile, center around an "unknown soldier" archetype known only as the Red Death, held to be a martyr who led the first Rising and perished at the end of that fateful week with the rest of his comrades in a Macondo gas attack, burned in effigy as a signal fire of defiance. The Summer Solstice is the most interesting, repurposing the Krampus figure of Central Europe in light of the holiday's shifted focus toward the greening of the continent. Clad in a green robe and armed with a flowering birch branch, Krampus is more similar to a muskox rather than a goat and often depicted riding an antipodean bear.

By far the greatest celebration in Antarctica is the quinquennial Festival, meant to be an exaltation of the achievements of the Cosmintern as a whole and therefore open to Cosmicist partisans of all nations. Hosted only in Antarctica and consisting of three events spread throughout the year, the fact that the Spartakiad is divided between two hosts and a member Commonwealth is ineligible to host in the next Festival ensures that no one member is overburdened by their duties as host and every Commonwealth participates in the decennial cycle.

1. Inundation- The Cosmicist Exhibition, a world's fair focused on cultural and technological development. Cosmicist political and social groups from around the world are most active here, and the host Commonwealth puts on a grand show of celebrating regional artisans, composers and other homegrown talent.
2. Growth- The Spartakiad, a demonstration of physical and intellectual prowess. Divided into warm and cold weather events between two host Commonwealths, the Spartakiad is made up of new and classic sports, competitive board games and academic competitions.
3. Harvest- The Flower War, a combination of televised live fire naval and aerial wargames and small squad gladiatorial combat to demonstrate new innovations in experimental military and medical technology at both the tactical and the individual level.

 

[Born in the USSA]

In the most basic sense the levels of government in the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths are rooted in the structure of the Antarctic Economic Territories under Macondo Technologies. The most obvious, of course, is the fact that the eight Regional Commonwealths of the ARC were reconstructed from the eight labor districts established by the company, though equally important is the actual physical requirements of living in the southern continent. Although the climate has stabilized somewhat in recent decades, the simple fact is that for the entire twenty-first century the ecosystem was in drastic and often apocalyptic tumult.

It would be this reality of extreme climate events that would see the interlinked arcology model become the standard across the continent. Although there are of course towns and independent settlements throughout the ARC, the overwhelming majority of the nation's population remains concentrated in the eight megalopolises that form the core of the member Commonwealths. Divided into separate Boroughs based on local identity, each Commonwealth arcology serves as a "laboratory of Eternity", given wide latitude to construct the most effective government possible within the Cosmicist framework.

Despite this wide latitude toward local policy, there are certain commonalities rooted in Sutter's dogma. For example, the Commonwealths favor larger and more representative legislatures, and to prevent individual concentration of power in the executive branch the power of the office is divided between three Kurfursts* to encourage thoughtful decision making. Each Commonwealth has its own judiciary and Supreme Court, though of course their ruling are open to review at the continental level. Political donations are allowed, but transparency is strictly enforced, with the rules written to better incentivize donations by the individual producers and small cooperatives that make up the largest share of the ARC economy while the more lucrative hypercorps** are subjected to closer scrutiny.

At the continental level the ARC government is the product of a nested democracy, with the citizens standing as and voting for local representatives to each Borough legislature, which in turn appoints members to each Regional Commonwealth. It is the legislatures of the eight Commonwealths which appoint members of the ARC legislature in turn. To ensure robust citizen confidence in the government the Kurfürsts of the member Commonwealths are directly elected by their constituents, with the executive organs of the ARC proper governed by this committee of equals. Offset elections between Commonwealths sees regular churn in the makeup of the ARC legislature and executive committee, and social pressure against careerism in politics tends to restrict longstanding members of the institutions to people who are considered unusually skilled or exceptional in their work.

In keeping with the concept of vanguard pluralism it is entirely possible to run and win election as an independent politician, although legally the Antarctic Cosmicist Party is the only recognized political faction, and as such Cosmicist partisans are able to benefit from a deep bench of popular and institutional support within the government. A broad consensus on Cosmicist goals and practices is of course a prerequisite for membership in the Party but the actual implementation allows a bit of breathing room, and as a result two large and distinct fractions have evolved under the aegis of the Antarctic Cosmicist Party, each firmly rooting their policies in separate Articles of the Antarctic Basic Law.

• The Steward Fraction favors deepening and preserving distinct Antarctic cultural mores and new ecosystems, opposing expansion in favor of making the existing arcologies more efficient and allowing the newly developed ecosystem to solidify without interference. They oppose allowing climate refugees to seek asylum, viewing them as a dilutive influence on post-Revolutionary culture, and favor using localized and targeted grants to boost the growth of new and distinct culture variants and experimental communities.
• The Populist Fraction, meanwhile, seeks to expand out into the new wilderness before it becomes fully entrenched, hoping to create a compromise between future growth potential and ecological sustainability through architectural and ecological engineering. The Populists are far more likely to believe in the ability of climate refugees to assimilate to the political culture, and favor allowing them in both on humanitarian grounds and to spite the United Nations.

Aside from these two fractions, there are also loose coalitions of independent socialists and conservatives in the ARC government, though they have been thoroughly de-fanged and are forced to offer solutions based around tinkering on the edges of the Cosmicist consensus. The more restive faction of Antarctic Regressives has been driven underground, however, metastasizing into a radical collection of terrorists and ideologues attempting to carve a living out of the wilderness.

*Yes I know the plural is technically Kurfürsten but English is the majority language in the ARC so you get what you get. The fact that the executive committee members are named after prince-electors but Cosmicism despises power concentrated in an individual is a deliberate juxtaposition, meant to represent prestige and draw attention to the fact that there is no single individual at the top of the governing hierarchy in the country.

**The tabletop game Eclipse Phase inspired the hypercorps. Basically, Macondo's whole deal naturally produced a backlash against monopolistic businesses at the same time that advances in automation made individuals and small groups more productive. Hence the hypercorp, essentially a cooperative of a few dozen people able to produce at a large enough scale to have a significant presence in markets across the continent. Though co-ops are the norm in Antarctica the sheer scale of the hypercorps warrants extra scrutiny.

 

[Born in the USSA]

It seems unusual to say, looking back with hindsight from the seven party melange of the shatter and the absolute hash of the 2020 election, but the early years of the Seventh Party System were actually quite hard for the minor parties. In theory the rise of Reform showed that it was possible for an outsider party to enter the halls of power and stay there, and the Reformers were more than willing to change the rules to ostensibly give their fellow underdogs a shot, but the simple fact was that Reform had sucked all the oxygen out of the room as the smallest parties found themselves swept up into the orbit of one Reform faction leader or other.

While Nader's faction and the Greens caught in his wake had had momentum in the early cycles of the new century, it was clear to everyone that the populist axis of the Reform party was tilting away from them, and they spent most of their time voting with the Democrats anyway. In the lead up to the 2012 electoral cycle this essentially winnowed the Reform primary field to a battle of wills between two men: perpetual culture warrior Pat Buchanan and darling of the Libertarians Ron Paul. Somewhat unusually for the Reform Party, the primary did not devolve into a bitter slog, with Buchanan quietly conceding, leaving Paul in a comfortable position to lead his party against the incumbent Mosely-Braun and Republican nominee Rick Santorum. The race was on and it was sure to be a fight to remember.

To hear his incredibly passionate supporters tell it, Ron Paul was the only one who could save the soul of the nation from a government run amok. It was a fairly straightforward argument, the past fifty years had seen the growth of dreaded "entitlements" even as the national-security state bloomed and entrenched itself. Perot's Department of Technology was largely grandfathered in, but the Department of Heartland Security and Mosely-Braun's public option and financial bailout were squarely in the crosshairs. The latter two in particular was painted as a slippery slope to socialism, carefully concealed, and the fiercest opponents of the program in the Ron Paul campaign decried it as "Braun-bagging the death of the American Dream". The name stuck and the Whiskey Rebellion was born.

A protest movement focused on direct action, the Whiskey Rebellion would be marked by intense public pressure on legislators to curtail the growth of so-called government overreach. Claiming Paul as their champion, the Whiskey Rebellion would seize most of the energy of the 2012 election cycle, though it would not ultimately be enough to propel him into the White House. While his anti-interventionist stance had lost him voters to the Republicans still fighting in the Reagan-Haig-Powell tradition, his hardline views against entitlements of any kind similarly lost him all but the most devoted partisans.

It was then that Buchanan was able to enter the fray. While the Whiskey Rebellion had begun firmly centered around fiscal issues, Buchanan had quickly seized the opportunity, using his time campaigning for Paul to gradually harness the energy of the movement. And so, with Mosely-Braun off to the White House a second time fiscal conservatism seemed to have died a slow death among the Reform Party faithful and among those in the other parties for whom Ron Paul's anti-government rhetoric had provided a stepping stone to Buchanan's culture war conservatism.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Here's the flag of the international Regressive movement, inspired by the cover of Industrial Devolution. The base flag is a fairly standard anarcho-primitive one, while the hourglass represents the threat of looming extinction and the paired broken cog and counterclockwise arrow symbolize the goals of anti-industrialism and a return to a hunter-gatherer state of nature, respectively. It's fully acknowledged that a large portion of the global population would not survive such a shift but the hardliners are more than willing to make the trade. Some of those same hardliners consider the Regressive symbol itself to be too modernist and prefer iconography with skulls and stone age spears and axes.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I've been busy with the things but I promise I haven't forgotten about this TL! No promises on the next update but if anyone has any questions about life in the ARC or something feel free to ask! In the meantime here's a couple of things to give some idea to the aesthetic and design philosophy in Antarctica and the Cosmintern more broadly:

 

[Born in the USSA]

The ARC in the wake of the Revolution, like the US before it, suffered something of an inferiority complex in its early years, derided by other more established nations for a supposed lack of distinct cultural heritage or refinement. With the absence of an indigenous population to draw influence from the new government took to appropriating place names and concepts culled from northern fiction about the continent, but alleged inferiority in cultural matters would require more than new names and individual fumblings for national meaning- they would require nothing less than robust government support and enthusiastic citizen participation.

While the structure of labor and leisure in Antarctica created a large and stimulating space for free expression and experimentation in the arts, with government at all levels offering grants and workshops to foster and develop creative skills and personal passions, the ARC and the member Commonwealths would also develop a far grander plan to foster a collective national mythology for the new nation. Inspired by open source shared universes from Wuxia to the Cthulhu Mythos, under this plan the government would hold the rights to specific shared worlds in trust, funding artists, writers and filmmakers to contribute to them and profit from their unique contributions while the state maintained final oversight on broad-strokes canonicity and international distribution rights.

While Sutter's Demimonde novel would become the basis for a wide ranging New Weird alternate history fantasy setting and the Athame superhero universe would be broadly popular, by far the best regarded and most robust would be a space opera scenario simply called Separate Spheres. Taking place millennia in the future in the wake of a Cosmicist final victory, the setting follows citizens, statesmen and outlaws at all levels of the Gestaltgeist as the newly discovered faster than light engine allows the Terragen Commonwealth to reach out from the solar system and establish a truly united humanity among the stars. The Cosmintern answer to franchises like Star Trek, in the series' backstory after expanding to encompass the entire solar system the Commonwealth had sent out repeated waves of Von Neumann probes and generation ships in accordance to the specific guidelines of the Cosmicist Manifesto, and much of the narrative thrust of Separate Spheres revolved around bridging the cultural gaps that have evolved among the far flung human outposts and bringing them back into communion with the home star and the Gestaltgeist. Other frequent topics included the meaning of existence and the exploration of Cosmicist cultural norms and social mores.

One innovation would be a considerably more focused and realistic approach to technology, with sophisticated 3D printers shackled with many more limitations than the Star Trek replicators, for example, and a greater focus on realistic ship design, weaponry and orbital mechanics outside of the necessary liberties taken with FTL travel. In keeping with this greater emphasis on harder science the vast majority of characters and factions on the show are culturally distinct humans, followed by a much smaller percentage of realistic human subspecies and uplifts enabled by genetic engineering, followed in turn by sapient machines developed through a variety of methods. Sapient extraterrestrials are quite rare in contrast, and show radical deviation from anthropomorphism in form and morality in the rare event they do appear.

With a vast canon of novels, films, and television series and thriving fan participation in expanding the project, Separate Spheres has more than validated the collective mythology program on its own, giving citizens of the Cosmintern a sense of boundless possibility and the oppressed precariat of the north an avenue of escapism even as their governments denounce the project as degenerate propaganda.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The neofederalist/regionalist divide in the small-r reform movement had grown into a chasm in the twenty-first century, and nowhere was that more apparent than on the issue of the Electoral College. Although the three presidential elections after it had produced clear winners there were plenty of people still nervous that a repeat of the obscenely contentious 2000 election would turn into the norm rather than the exception, especially as the three party system seemed to be entrenching itself permanently into the American political landscape*.

2000 had produced a crisis of legitimacy and paved the way for an open-ended counterinsurgency and for many the thought of even one more election going in that direction was too much. The only issue was what to do about it. The most straightforward, of course, was to simply abolish the Electoral College entirely. The powers and authority of the body had degenerated continuously for 200 years so it seemed like common sense to just get rid of it all together. But then again nothing is so misleading as common sense, and the daunting task of a constitutional amendment seemed to take the issue of the table. Compacts between the states seemed like the logical next step.

The favorite choice of the neofederalists was the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or NPVI. Launched in the wake of the 2004 election, the NPVI stated that, in the event the member states made up a majority of the Electoral College, the system would activate automatically, pledging the electors of those states to the winner of the national popular vote. Many neofeds and sensible people saw this as an excellent dodge around the EC, guaranteeing a way to avoid contingent elections without any human involvement after the initial adoption.

Manifest Destiny! had another opinion. Founded as a response to the Department of Heartland Security domestic surveillance policies, the bastion of the regionalist school saw the NPVI as the ultimate nationalization of the political process. Many in the group feared that it would take a potential lever of influence away from the people, and so the group set about making that potential lever a reality, resulting in the Regional Accountability Coalition.

An attempt to carve out a space for ticket fusionism while preventing contingent elections, the RAC relied on passing a boilerplate law in as many states as possible allowing the winner of a given state's electoral votes to essentially gift them to another of the top three presidential candidates. The theory behind the project was that the lesser of the major party candidates would be more likely to give their smattering of votes to an ideological ally rather than an opponent, creating an incentive for the candidates closest aligned on the issues to compromise and make concessions without inviting the potential chicanery of the Congress, avoiding the spoiler effect.

Although the NPVI and the RAC continued to grow through the Mosely-Braun presidency, neither system would have enough participants going into the next presidential cycle, to the belated horror of all involved.

*womp womp

 

[Born in the USSA]

In the process of writing my ARC Basic Law I had to come up with an anthem for the nation so here it is, adapted from an old Georgist song set to the tune of "Marching Through Georgia". I originally had something modern picked out but figured it would sound weird even if it's being used a century from now in-universe.

​

The Land (Cosmicist)

​

Sound the call for freedom all and blast it far and wide!
March unto our Destiny for Fate is on our side!
While the voice of Nature thunders o'er the rising tide-
"We claim the land for the People!"

Chorus:
The land, the land, it's we who make the land!
The land, the land, the Commons where we stand!
Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?
We claim the land for the People!

Hark the sound is spreading from the East and from the West-
Why should we beg work and let oppressors take the best?
Make them take their chances in the world like all the rest!
The world was meant for the People!

Chorus

Clear the way for liberty, the world must all be free!
Partisans can't falter from the fight, tho' stern it be!
'Til the flag we love so well shall fly from sea to sea-
A world set free by the People!

Chorus

The army now is marching on, the battle is begun!
We'll fight past System's icy Rim and to the burning Sun!
The Standard now is raised on high until the war is won!
The stars made free for the People!

Chorus

On foreign worlds, in later days, when quiets the battle din-
There among the Coming Race let real work begin!
Kept alive in thought and deed by one vast human kin,
The Struggle for the sake of the People!

Chorus

 

[Born in the USSA]

Having given some more thought to my original Heartland ideas I had the idle thought to combine it with my The King in Yellow scenario, so as of now Heartland in-universe would roughly consist of a combination of these three posts:

*A Note From the Author: I originally set up The King in Yellow to be a single self-contained Timeline in a Week scenario but the idea has grown increasingly more complex the longer I considered it. I planned to create several distinct TLIAW threads of ambiguous canonicity to this one, each relatively self contained but with enough connective tissue to be rewarding to completionist readers. Until it occurred to me that to the best of my knowledge I've never seen an AH shared universe made up of several interlocking but distinct week long timelines! I put it up to a vote and will be centralizing these new timelines in this single thread, and I hope the end result will be a rewarding and entertaining scenario for readers! This will still serve as the first post for The King in Yellow: A President Lovecraft TLIAW but all those that follow will have their own threadmarked anchor post separate from the timeline updates proper for ease of navigation. Hope you all have fun reading!*

- The Yellow Sign, electoral symbol of the Independence Party​

"Even with the benefit of hindsight the life and times of Howard Lovecraft are a study in contrasts. To his enemies the thirtieth president was a veritable king in yellow, a godless tyrant out to drown the nation's proud heritage of faith and rugged individualism under a tide of socialism. To his friends and supporters he was always affectionately known as the Old Man, whose bracingly clear eyed materialism was softened by a keen awareness of the unseen broader forces at play in poverty and other social ills and by a consistent willingness to offer firm support and sound advice. Whatever our picture of the man it is beyond dispute that he shaped the century, bringing the American people through the ravages of the Depression and the Second Clash of Civilizations and making the critical early moves that would come to define the US posture in the Strange Aeon. Whether his contributions were for good or ill I leave to the reader."
- Excerpt from Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: The Lovecraft Presidency in Retrospect, considered the most thorough historical analysis to date in light of newly declassified Comintern documents.

Hi all! Some of you may have seen that I've been puzzling over the concept of a Lovecraft presidency here and there over the last few days, so I decided to finally give it a shot! I've decided to structure the thing as a Timeline In A Week, with this little teaser followed by six updates delivered daily covering most of the twentieth century.

1. The King in Yellow: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
2. The Maker of Moons: The Fall of the Cruel Empire
3. The Mystery of Choice: The First Clash of Civilizations
4. In Search of the Unknown: Israfel Over the White House
5. The Tracer of Lost Persons: The Masque of the Red Death
6. The Tree of Heaven: The Second Clash of Civilizations
7. Police!!!: Life in the Strange Aeon
8. The Slayer of Souls: Seven Minutes in Eternity

I've updated the two general lore posts in the other threads and I'll be linking them below, and of course questions between updates are more than welcome!

For my part I've been tinkering with a New Weird setting on and off just for fun and I approached constructing it in several stages:

1. Setting- I knew pretty early on that I wanted to set it in a midcentury ASB alternate history rather than some sort of recognizably modern masquerade or wholly constructed world. Localizing it in the US sent me down the path of looking at folklore, pseudohistory and esotericism relevant to my location and POD.
2. Metaphysics- Based on that research I came up with an alternate elemental schema tying together Aztec and Norse cosmology combined with alchemy, some Plains directional symbolism and good old Western mysticism to sort of undergird the magic the setting runs on. Starting with the east and rotating counterclockwise I settled on Death, Ice, Earth (in the Aztec "synonymous with life" sense) and Fire, heavily tied to the stages of the alchemic Magnum Opus and creating two opposing axes with Vril as the negentropic motive force for the cycle and ultimate source of magic.
3. Magic system- Based on some research into modern PODs to lead to the rebirth of magic or whatever I settled on a scenario where Crowley parleys The Lesser Key of Solomon (which he published as a grimoire in real life) into a system of industrialized magic fit for the modern age. Under this system, rituals would be automated through a process of prerecorded invocations, with specific incense and ritual materials incorporated into the assembly line machinery itself. The end result would be commercial items stamped with seals far weaker than full-fledged goetic summonings but perfectly adequate to make all sorts of things work better than they strictly should.
4. Bestiary- No fantastical setting is complete without one after all! As with any heavy industry goetia on a grand scale produces environmental contamination, creating magically mutated animals in a process very similar to Shadowrun. In search of something uniquely American and plenty strange I settled on taking fearsome critters and trying to work out how they would look and behave as real, plausible animals. The fact that quite a few would be terrifying in the flesh certainly helps!
5. Splats- For lack of a better term the magical races that spring up as a result of goetic contamination. For these I took the basic White Wolf approach where the groups are differentiated by elemental affinity and worked in a deliberate attempt to subvert the classic fantasy "5 races" structure. Humans, being by far the largest and most versatile group, technically exist outside of the elemental cycle that governs the other races but this is rationalized as an innate human mastery of Vril as exercised through goetia. In the order mentioned above the other races are-
   1. Koreshans- In this world Cyrus Teed really does come back to life as promised, with his "electro-alchemy" evolving into a form of Re-Animator style necromancy. With undead immortality, marble smooth skin and heads like Horus they fill the High Men niche most typically filled by wizards.
   2. Jotun- Combining classic Norse frost giants with the 19th century theory that a race of biblical giants built the Native American mounds, the Jotun fill the Stout niche usually filled by dwarves, being builders and craftsmen, but subvert the usual expectations by being large, being the ancient progenitor race (and none too pleased to wake from their slumber and see what's happened in their absence), and by having access to a powerful magic of their own ("wild" water and ice magic, in their case).
   3. Tzitzimime- In Aztec mythology the Tzitzimime are a race of star demons with snakes for genitals and mouths at their joints, though as female entities they have an inherent connection to the Earth and fertility as well. I decided to keep the mouth joint thing but fold in some medieval ideas about demons that had a similar body plan and replace the genital thing with a classic devil tail that just happens to appear snakelike when it opens its mouth. They also have hooves, horns and wings, but I decided to give them a classic Nightgaunt faceless look to better contrast with their whole joint deal. By default they fill the Cute, Hobbit type niche, being separate from the other races and of considerably less certain origin. They are widely feared for being able to drain life vampirically but they can also use that energy to heal people and make plants grow so it's a mixed bag.
   4. Sphinxes- Representing fire and combining traditional ideas of sphinxes with manticores, they have thumbs and are considerably better groomed though still undeniably leonine. The first generation were humans who pupated but now they can breed true among themselves. Their most formidable weapon is their barbed tail and they have enough motor control to use their tails to write magically potent things using their venom as ink. They fill the Fairy niche (aka the most inherently magical race. It's usually elves) and more potent ones can duplicate this effect by speaking, and specialize in generating passion, frenzy and good old fire balls.

I'm on a short holiday hiatus from my The King in Yellow TL to focus on another project but it idly occurred to me that a synthesis of that timeline with my Weird Fiction ASB setting concepts could produce a really interesting scenario 🤔



Since TKiY diverges in the first decade of the 1800s and my ASB scenario diverges roughly a century later anything in the former during that interval would remain unchanged but as the 20th century unfolds I came up with some geopolitical changes flowing from the spread of industrial goetia:

1. The Populist Party swallows the Democrats whole, becoming one half of a two-party system with the Independence Party. By the time of the World War II analogue the former favors the FBU while the latter supports an alliance with the Comintern.
2. President Lovecraft's paramilitary would be a reborn version of the Knights of the Golden Circle and would be considerably more occult and esoteric. Think yellow quasi-Masonic dress uniforms and featureless white masks while active duty wear would still be an olive drab military uniform/Yellow Sign armband/gas mask combo.
3. The Second Clash of Civilizations would be against the Franco-British Union instead of the Comintern, only inflaming domestic tensions in the aftermath.
4. The Church of Starry Wisdom would be an actual religious organization rather than the name of the Independence Party paramilitary force, with the Church born of a strange synthesis of Theosophy and Xiguandao under the messianic leadership of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

As for ASB changes, in keeping with my commitment for making the mystical consequences unusual I think the rise of magic would see the spread of creatures from things like bestiaries over more conventional fantasy fare (at least in Europe, Africa and the Middle East). In Asia meanwhile the spread of yōkai as incredibly dangerous invasive species could be a consequence of Japanese adventurism in the region for the first half of the century. For now I'm settled on nonhuman races being a firmly North American thing as a consequence of early extremely heavy use of the technology.

I'm also mulling over changes to the in-universe title of Sutter's novel 🤔

 

[Born in the USSA]

My new years resolution (aside from finding a halfway decent job) is to put in the serious work of writing my novel*, and since half of it takes place in the society governed by my theoretical constitution that's what I've settled on finishing first, so I'll post it here when I'm done and in the meantime questions or discussion are welcome! As I work on the writing I'll try and bang out a few updates for this TL along the way.

*For which Power Without Knowledge serves as a worldbuilding exercise

 

[Born in the USSA]

Founded in the wake of the start to the Second Levant War and perhaps emblematic of the ideologically charged and historiographically challenging nature of the times, MortonsFork.us is the premier source for uchronia discussion and fiction output in the world of Power Without Knowledge. With a robust membership, vibrant board culture and well-maintained atmosphere of civility MF.us takes its name from a pun inspired by Aristopia and the otherwise unrelated concept of "Morton's fork" where superficially different choices produce indistinguishable end results*.

Written in 1895 and one of the first works written explicitly as an alternate history, the novel's POD revolves around an early Virginia settler, the fictional Ralph Morton, discovering a large deposit of gold and using it to craft his own utopian planned society, the eponymous Aristopia. Under the leadership of Morton and his successors the colony prospers, with its wealth and enlightened form of government allowing it to grow and thrive. Eventually supporting the American Revolution, the superiority of Aristopian society makes it the gradually more dominant partner until an alternate 1890s where the utopia enjoys defacto or dejure control of the entire continent north of Mexico.

Originally founded as a loose amateur writing community, the high level of detail and the robust amounts of historical research done by the members has produced many well regarded timelines, causing the gradual shift in the business model of the site. Originally free to join MF.us has in recent years adopted a paid membership model, with much of the site's material free to read but actual membership predicated on a modest payment of a few dollars a month. Even with the shift the membership has grown in the intervening years, with 2012 marking the founding of Space Bat Press, an in-house digital publisher managed by the site's steering committee specializing in popularizing the work of the broader membership through the Buendia online marketplace.

*The name of the site is an ironic one, since attitudes toward scenarios with ridiculously high levels of parallelism are the exact same as they are here.

 

[Born in the USSA]