The October Campaign (draft)

[Snaut]

And for a change here's something from the future of the timeline. Instead of covering the intervening time in more detail my plan is to go on to the end of the Lightning War and then do a timeskip to 1989. It seems like a neat date because it's exactly 50 years after the point of divergence, far enough to see major divergences but not far enough to make the world entirely unrecognizable. Also 1989 can arguably be considered the beginning of the "modern" period of OTL, so skipping to '89 is almost like bringing the timeline to the present day, right? I don't entirely rule out speculation on what this timeline may be like in 2023, but even if I do, it will only be after the 80s are decently covered. I haven't got the details of 1989 entirely fleshed out at this point, and a few notable events occur in the mid and late 80s that will make this map obsolete. But it shows more or less what the world is like in the early 80s, in the final years of the period called the War of the Worlds which can be considered roughly analogous to OTL's Cold War, but slightly less intense.

I also have a little teaser from 1989. It could be expanded upon in time, but as I won't be getting into 1989 before finishing the main body of the timeline, I suppose I can as well post it as it is for now and perhaps expand it later. Anyone interested?

 

[Snaut]

In other news now that increasingly large drafts exist on my hard drive I am gradually realizing that some revisions would be in order. Not revisions of the plot itself, everything that was actually written here remains canon (except perhaps parts of the last map of course), but cleaning up. The "scrapbook" style of writing timelines is certainly better in this respect, you don't need to worry about repeating yourself later or the level of detail of each post, even if I like it less. The next iteration will be the last, as revising stuff ad infinitum is pointless, but I consider one more iteration preferable so ... stay tuned I guess.

 

[Snaut]

Oh well, since I already have it, why shouldn't I post it? Here are a few words from two particularly influential individuals from 1989. I realize that dropping easter eggs is not the same as replicating somebody's style but this was still fun to write. I'm fairly certain that the first of these two is living out his dream without being prevented from freely expounding his ideas by iron curtains and censorship, or feeling slowed down by the need to invent plots for stories which he would use as means of presenting them in OTL. IDK about the second one of the pair but in OTL he processed reality in such an unusual way that this version of him doesn't seem that weird to me.

Two Sermons​

"Two Sermons" by Stefan Żechowski (1939)

"...yes, I was quite concerned that after the Costarican fiasco people would simply stop turning up, and seeing the size of the crowd at this year's opening speech at the Lwów High Castle was a huge relief. And I can now reveal that the Tenth World Futurological Congress will be held in San Francisco! A bit more expensive, yes, but fortunately our benefactors agree that we really can't risk having two out of three Congresses in a row interrupted by riots, and have agreed to help pay our guests' travel expenses. This really is wonderful news, you see, because it would be a great shame if what I will immodestly call the most significant global event dedicated to the promotion of the understanding of modern science were to become a local, parochial affair of a continent which has seen better days. Yes, it's time to look this unpleasant fact in the eye. With the vital Channel Entente decisively severed the Trilateral Consensus cannot continue, and the lack of a meaningful reaction to the Vienna Declaration and resuscitation of the Warsaw Pact has shown beyond all doubt that the entire European Understanding itself is history.

Yet all those changes are the result of economic rearrangements which were ultimately driven by the ever-accelerating advancement of technology. They say we are heading for a Second Transformation on the scale of what we had in the sixties; I say we are heading for a Constant Transformation the like of which we have never seen before. Mankind truly cannot afford to not understand it, or we shall lose control over our fate, like a man losing his balance and falling from a high building. We might not notice our world crossing the point of no return, and if someone looking from a window on the tenth floor were to ask him how he feels, he might reply "so far, so good". But the coming crash would already be inevitable. We are a predatory race, and if we lose control over the world we have made, we will succumb to our own worst instincts.

And this is why I hope that one day our Congresses will be announced and printed, transmitted, televised and optonized as widely as today's great sport events. We are still a long way from that, I fear. I will not lose sleep over petty insults of course. But it is vexing to hear that the most viral response to our Congress has come from that crazy American - or should I say Atlantean? - preacher who chose to take issue with my name, of all things! A bold move considering what his own name is.

It is much worse to see how effective those followers of his have been at spreading their faith across Europe as if we were ignorant savages. Could it be that Europe truly has become decadent and incapable of conceiving anything better on its own? My younger self may have felt perplexed that the decline of Catholicism would not be accompanied by progress towards a saner scientific worldview, but that we would keep going around in circles. And he would have scarcely believed that going around in circles might be the preferable option, the other being to be dragged back a thousand years by the Zermatists' demented neo-pagan nonsense. If there was anybody who should have been censored more strongly before the sixties, it was their insane founder - no, he should not have been censored, but simply put in the asylum where he so obviously belonged! Attempting to communicate with such irrationality in any meaningful way may be worse than pointless, it may be quite impossible! But what of the National Technocrats, you may ask? I may sympathize somewhat with the ... way of thinking which gave birth to it, but the emerging movement itself is a great disappointment. With what feels like a fetishization of science, and with their silly abbreviated name and stylized feedback loops the EnTeks seem almost like the Zermats with their fancy axes or the Ubiks with their silly pink crosses. Is it any surprise that I declined their request to officially endorse them? I will not be their Grand Old Man, no matter how much they would like to see me as such, and if they don't grow up, I will have nothing to say to them either..."

- Stanisław Lem, philosopher, futurologist and chairman of the World Futurological Congresses​

"...My reports from Europe are sometimes met with the reply that, despite our hugely successful missionary work over there, it is America that really matters. And in America we are - still - a minority. I am also reminded that even in Europe our rationalistic "competition" is still going strong. But those strangely-named little men in their high castles are a dead end. For without a soul, what is Man but a particularly effective calculator? And what value will he have when intellectronics replicates what is, to them, our only notable faculty? Once that Replication happens their worldview will bring about what one of their colleagues has already proclaimed to be a time of contempt for Mankind. And they do not merely justify the coming invalidation of Man. Their fascination with technology in fact threatens to accelerate its arrival.

It is we who are the way forward, in the present and future, in this world and in the better ones. For ours is not the ossified Catholic church, nor the Orthodox which has allowed itself to become a tool of the Russian government, nor one of those ephemeral Protestant movements which die together with their founders. Ours is a vast, active, living, intelligent system, and one day we will activate the American soul as well. On the day when circumstances will awake us from our American dream of prosperity we Ubiks will be waiting, not just to promise eternal life, but to deliver it!"

- Philip K. Dick, head of the Ubiquitous Church​

 

[Snaut]

Since it's been established that this is the draft thread I am less afraid of having fun, or of doing potentially "naughty" things like having people born a few years after the point of divergence still appear (or, to be more precise, have almost identical siblings), or go down a broadly similar path as in OTL.

"1. The consequences of the Ansibular Revolution will be a disaster for the human race. In the past the mechanisms of societal control and exploitation were devised and executed by humans, and thus limited by the computational capabilities of the human brain. But the present technological revolution will change this forever. So much has been said of the details new methods of surveilliance and control provided by technology that I do not feel the need to elaborate here.

2. The present peace and prosperity is ironically contributing to our enslavement. The sum of all the electronic systems which surround us, originally dubbed the Necrosphere by the European futurists seeking a designation that would underline its difference from the natural Biosphere before it became rebranded as the more marketable Neosphere, could never have grown so quickly in unstable times. I am not an advocate of war, or of the totalitarian governments which inhibit progress. But it cannot be denied that, if Europe or America had been subjected to a Second Great War rather than the isolated incidents of violence, or if more of the world had been subjected to communism, the Necrosphere would have had grown more slowly. The human and material resources which would have been squandered in war, or by the waste of communist rule, would not have been integrated into the Neosphere, perhaps preventing its growth from outstripping society's ability to deal with it.

3. The concept of machines (or organic but artificial human creations) becoming more powerful than their human creators and breaking free from their control has been a staple of science fiction for decades. But since no artificial creation can even tie its shoelaces, less still even imagine a rebellion, we think that the technological world cannot pose such a threat. Industrial accidents or bombs can poison or blow up parts of the world, but only as a result of improper handling or maintenance. We therefore regard the Necrosphere - I insist on using the original term - as a valuable means of progress. Modern advancements in electronics have allowed the corporation - hitherto a valuable means of providing wealth - to merge the creativity of the human brain with the raw processing power and instant communication of computers to an unseen extent. This has allowed the corporation to combine the strengths of the Biosphere and Necrosphere to create something entirely new.

4. The very fact that the powers provided by modern ansibular technologies can be used at all is disturbing enough. Even more concerningly, that power does not lie with politicians accountable to their societies. Innovation and production of electronics takes place in great corporations, some fully private, and others being in various levels of association with states - but not necessarily under proper control. Their official owners - America's Billionnaires, Europe's Magnates, Asia's Chakravartins - are relatively unimportant individuals. They may think of themselves as supermen or even gods and try to pose as such but despite their wealth they remain biologically ordinary human beings. The decisions they make are sometimes highly consequential, but these godlike powers are not truly their own. These decisionmakers remain embedded into the complex bureaucratic mechanisms which constitute the companies they work for. Their agency is very limited, for the social and legal consequences which threaten anyone who might attempt it discourage all thought of sabotage. The companies profit from their administrators' delusions of grandeur obscuring their true nature which I will now expose.

5. Those companies, empowered by the new processing powers at their disposal, are in themselves the truly godlike beings of our world. As composite intelligences they lack consciousness: their human employees and directors are only individually conscious, and the individual machines they use have no consciousness at all. As an inevitable consequence of their lack of mind the composite entities lack human-like motives, being geared towards increasing their market share rather than anything of inherent value through the sum of human decisions and mechanical computations beyond the control of any single individual, including the administrator with all his godlike delusions. These corporations are quite different from the popular image of a divine pantheon, and more akin to the Blind Idiot God Azathoth, one of the antagonists of the fantasy worlds of H. P. Lovecraft. I find this comparison particularly fitting because Lovecraft's fantasy worlds were materialistic, and his so-called Elder Gods were only referred to as such by protagonists unable to comprehend the sources of their abilities to control space and time. From this point onwards I will refer to the emerging phenomenon of the multinational technological supercompany, powerful but mindless, as BIG (Blind Idiot God) Tech.

6. BIG tech does not only posess great computing power and resources, but also a quasi-godlike influence on our minds. It is not just a matter of the common man's admiration for wealth and status which BIG tech certainly provides to those whom it ingests into its mixed bio-mechanical structure. Our legal systems, unprepared for the new reality created by rapid technological advancement, are unable to keep pace with that which they are to regulate. Given the great lobbying power of BIG tech it may be argued that it subverts states instead of serving them. Those who care for the rule of law therefore become, in a way, the cultists of those emergent gods, doing their unconscious bidding to create legal systems, more and more divorced from sane human values. How - if - the human psyche will react to the accelerating change of not just its surroudings but also societal moral values which the technological revolution drives is an open question which we are likely to learn the answer sooner rather than later.

7. We are farther hampered by the varied origins of BIG tech. Centuries of economic debate have put the public and private sectors at odds with each other, leading to the unhelpful simplification that if one of these is bad, the second must therefore be good. But BIG Tech emerges in, and is nurtured by, both sectors. The American BIG Tech companies have emerged in the private sector, as have the Indian Tigers. The American and Indian economies are large enough for this to happen, but it is not the only means of what we could call theogenesis. But the Europeans, conscious of their limited resources, have used state power to nurture their companies in the desired direction. AnCible, the oldest of the BIG tech pantheon and the archetypal company which gave the ansibular communications technology suite its name, is of course a French state company, the Japanese Twins are paralell state-driven enterprises which were directed in a similar direction after seeing the success of the French model, and Poland's LEOptonika is the result of a close imitation of the French model from the beginning. Britain's traditionally more liberalized economy, now becoming tied to that of America by the Atlantic framework, was too small for the more independent British Foxes to grow to large size before the economic disruption of the Divorce - and the buying up of their assets by American companies - came. The Foxes are now extinct, unless Singapore Logistics can be considered one thanks to the secondary growth of its telecommunications sector in support of its shipyards. This shows that while BIG tech is of course not invincible, individual instances of theocide or theophagia only serve the interests of the remainder of the pantheon by eliminating competition. China's HongCom seems to lie in the middle, as will lie whatever results of the ongoing state-supervised merger taking place in Germany at this very moment. The Soviet system of central planning combined with the severe consequences of the economic crisis and withdrawal from China and the Middle East currently make conditions in Russia inimical to the emergence of true BIG Tech, but it is impossible to speculate on the future evolution of the Soviet system. In brief, the supposed opposition between the public and the private is an outdated concept which will only hinder us in the coming struggle for control over the world.

8. Having described the origins and nature of our antagonists it is time to consider what should be done. Should it be a full "pantheocide"? Or can we hope to retake control of those gods of our own creation? No simple answer is possible without first considering..."

-taken from BIG Tech and its Future, an anonymous manifesto published on the Neosphere circa 1988 following the widely publicized Privatization of Suez.

 

[Snaut]

Another piece set in 1989, featuring another sibling of an OTL individual born just after the PoD whose upbringing was sufficiently similar for him to have similar inclinations to his OTL counterpart.

Per Aspera ad Asteroida​

"...Yours was the only reply which did not seem rather patronizing to me. I appreciate you didn't assume that, just because I am from across the pond, my thinking is so irrevocably shaped by the Sixties Shock that I cringe at the very phrase "government funding". You're right, I quite get it that your gradual abandonment of functional finances is not a violent divorce, that the Dulles Doctrine gives the politicians in Washington a better outlook. And you nearly convinced me with the argument that each financial paradigm has a finite lifespan, that economic and technological changes must inevitably lead to changes, and that there's no reason to assume that each subsequent paradigm will be more liberal than the last. Since the level of government influence over the economy over time may indeed resemble a sine curve, and the subtraction of a constant value during the Shocked Sixties happened only in Europe, the attitude in America may in time return to a sufficient level to save Ares. Trust me, I care about it just as much as you, and I really want to believe.

But I still can't, and I will tell you one more reason why. Now, I wasn't inside yet during the Shock. But I was already very interested. I followed all the available press releases almost religiously. I remember the tone of those releases very well and got filled in on more details later, once I was already in. And the way the shriveling of NASA's own deep space projects is being covered reminds me of what I already saw over here in London back then.

It's why I just don't share your hopes that you - or should I say we, now that we're in the whole Atlantic framework together - can stall for time. The politicians may say that the budget cuts are temporary and that they won't let Ares die, but you will see that those will be mere words. You'll keep cutting the deep space projects, and Ares itself, one by one, to preserve the bare bones of Ares in a sort of hibernation until the money starts flowing in again. But how do you know it will? Once everyone gets used to Ares being frozen, the next step will be to dismantle it altogether, so that the next Mars project will start from scratch.

Ares can't be saved, I fear. If your big economic paradigm shift doesn't come well before the end of the century Ares is done for. We must focus on saving deep space as such. And that's where the asteroids come in. You were open-minded enough not to dismiss my pessimism at the outset, so hear me out. I think that we really did get the companies interested. They weren't quite big enough, and the eighties came just a bit too close on the heels of the sixties, but there's a reason our mining projects didn't get quite shut down. This may be the upside of not having the world pool its resources in one huge international project. Many options can be tried out if the space programmes are manifold. Time was not kind to us - but now the world is almost a decade ahead, and your resource companies are bigger. The failure to get ours to continue on their own doesn't mean we can't try again, especially with some more generous funding which, as you say, Washington may still provide. And you could use our experience. Unlike you Americans our governmental projects have been talking to companies for much longer. We know how to pitch this.

NASA's first priority right now must be to keep the asteroid mining projects alive at all costs. Ares shouldn't be dropped, but if the sad choice between parts of Ares and the asteroid probe must be made then you can't afford to be squeamish. And contact with the corporates must be made at once to get them interested in following up on those probes with mining expeditions. Mankind may stop landing on other planets for the forseeable future, but we don't need to be driven out of deep space entirely.

And perhaps the politicians concerned about international competition can still be reached. Yes, the space military project angle is dead. The division of the EU and Russia's problems have left NASA so far ahead in this field, and with so little in the way of active competition, that there's no way to scare them. Unless the Russians suddenly do a one-eighty and resume the space race in earnest there's no point even trying. But, if our companies start thinking about mining the asteroids, we could emphasize that others could as well. I have no idea what the French have been thinking over the past few years. They have surely been thinking rather than doing, because the eighties were almost as bad for them as for ourselves. But at the time when we, ah, definitively parted ways they also remembered this project. They're bigger than us, the Warsaw Pact's assets are for all intents and purposes those of a second France, and if they can get the Japanese back on board, why, that will be an awful lot to contend with. I think we can discount the Russians, but who is to say that new player's can't join in this new, changed space race? Just look at how the Chinese have grown. Just how long do you think they will be satisfied with the Earth and atmosphere? And who is to say that if they start reaching farther the Indians won't try to follow just not to be behind? If we wait, we may find a host of competitors nipping at our heels. But if we start now, Atlantis may get enough of a head start to rule the stars just as Britain once ruled the waves..."

-leaked correspondence from Simon Baxter, one of the junior British representatives of the Transatlantic Deep Space Co-ordination Board, in 1989 during the Ares cancellation affair