Witnesspedia
child:
title: Avantgrid
slug: avantgrid
parent: 15338
summary: Avantgrid is a large archipelago Distrikt between Assembly and Libria.
keywords: worldbuilding, participatory
image: https://edgeryders.eu/uploads/default/original/2X/2/2e816405dae308c27128ecfda6e6260cd34fee0c.jpeg
Avantgrid {style=“color: #fff; text-shadow: 2px 2px #000; padding-bottom: .4rem; font-weight: bold;” class=“leading-tight text-4xl”}
Avantgrid is a large archipelago Distrikt between Assembly and Libria. {style="color: #fff; width: 80%; padding-top: 1rem; border-top: 1px solid white; background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4); " class=“text-2xl mt-4 mx-auto leading-normal”}
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” - Marcus Aurelius
Avantgrid is a large archipelago Distrikt between Assembly and Libria. Originally a zone of Libria, built to cater to an exclusive, high-income clientele, it fractured in 15 0D after the collapse of a geoengineering company left the ownership of the archipelago in dispute.
Avantgrid is the only Distrikt in Witness that is not connected to the Harvest grid. In contrast to the mostly urban other Distrikts of Witness, Avantgrid is a largely rural Distrikt which even contains patches of uninhabited wilderness. Of the 1.1 million inhabitants of Avantgrid, 150.000 live in Akur, its only urban zone. There are 149 islands in the archipelago; outside of Akur, boundaries are being made and remade all the time, and new islands are under construction by various parties within Avantgrid.
While modern-day Avantgrid is very welcoming of new inhabitants, the strict energy frugality brought about by voluntary disconnection from Harvest means that the lifestyle dissuades many from relocating to one of its islands.
Some political pundits of Hygge, Libria, and the Covenant routinely warn that the seemingly calm exterior of Avantgrid hides a festering underbelly of radical extremists that aim to shut down the Harvest Division by force if necessary. Since the islands are largely self-governing cantons, it is understood that the ability of the Avantgrid Confederation to do anything about ideological radicalization is limited. This has created conflict with Libria, and attempts have been made to convince the State Machine to relinquish the archipelago back into Librian control.
POLITICAL HISTORY
Avantgrid was originally a zone of Libria, constructed as a get-away location for the elites who had tired of living in the urban sprawl. Originally called Seastead II, it was constructed at great expense by the Kleindestine Company - specialists in geo- and eco-engineering, using dredging techniques that had been thought lost to the Sundering.
Astrid Kleindestine, the hugely charismastic CEO of Kleindestine, bet almost everything the company had and pitched Seastead II to the rising nouveau riche class within Libria, appealing to largely libertarian sensibilities. The general thrust of the advertising campaign - possibly the largest Witness has ever seen - stressed that both state and corporate surveillance (the latter being of the Librian kind) infringed on fundamental liberties. The Millionaire Migration made headline in its day, as aethnographers of all stripes worried that Libria would be left with a collapsed economy made of only the working poor and the ultra-rich. The fact that Kleindestine had somehow negotiated the non-intervention of the State Machine was interpreted as a libertarian dream by some and a worrying precedent by many.
However, as the project entered its habitable stages and went into its last phase of construction, the Great Wave of 015D hit Witness, severing the powerlines that connected the 135 completed islands to the Harvest grid. A surge of insurance claims in the wake of the tsunami also brought down the unstable banks that had issued bonds to the Kleindestine Company, and in the following year of financial turmoil and cutthroat seizure of assets, the company collapsed and ownership of the Seastead archipelago became contested.
A brief period of armed conflict followed between the subcontracted gangs of corporations who laid claim to the islands of Seastead, and the legal ambiguity prevented the Night Watchmen from acting with any mandate. By 017D the only major presence left was that of the smuggling routes of the Seaside Senators and the Hoshizaki BioMonastery, a Hygge-Covenant joint operation that licensed intellectual property from the Assembly and was using vast tracts of potentially arable land on Avantgrid to provide food supplies to both Distrikts.
The New Beginning
Taking advantage of this uncertainty, a second migration from Libria started moving to the islands on the outskirts of Seastead, seeking freedom from authority while getting away from the claustrophobic downtown sprawls.
Unlike the original high-income inhabitants, most of this wave were middle-income migrants tired of the increasing cost of living and the steady corporate ownership of private spaces. Many of them hiked and peddled over in improvised skiffs; the lack of access to the Harvest grid meant that they could bring with them only very low-energy devices and machines.
Many of these new inhabitants had participated in the Marches against the rule of Denton. They were folk already used to hardiness and building from almost nothing, and their time in the rapidly-growing Libria had instilled a general desire for a more frugal and sustainable way of life.
Some among them wished for an even more extreme version of sustainability. The “eco-pragmatists”. as they called themselves, theorized that increasingly complex and energy-heavy systems - both in terms of technology and in terms of social structures - would only lead to the second coming of the arrogance that brought about the Sundering. A frugal vision of Witness, built on the principles of cyclical economy and strict accounting for energy consumption, lent itself quite naturally to the conditions that many of the second wave had to endure in Avantgrid. The eco-pragmatist theory - that accounting for energy should not be more controversial than accounting for money - found fertile roots.
The Dirk-Leo Correspondence
One prominent eco-pragmatist migrant to Seastead was Octavia Dirk. Formerly one of the 12 delegates on the Libria Committee that had fallen to the plots of Megan Rilke and Karunasalam Balraj, Dirk resurfaced among the second wave. In a highly publicized series of message-board letters between her and the Benedictine monk Alban Leo of the Covenant, she had laid out the tenets of a society with eco-pragmatist ideals that aligned with the Benedictine/Hyborean faith. She posited that because currency brought about its own implicit social contracts, tying value of a currency to the inverse of energy consumption would be a clever way to preserve liberty while living within the means of the environment.
This exchange came to a point when Dirk put this question to Leo:
“As we know, the quality of manufacture by your order is of indisputable quality - “ora et labora” indeed! As an act of faith and devotion, you build your goods to last as long as possible - a display of frugality and conservation of energy. But tell me this, esteemed Father Alban - if God and his creation are infinite, why do you care not to waste? Surely there is always more to be had of His infinite creation?”
- Octavia Dirk, open letters to Alban Leo
Leo, after prolonged meditation, came to the controversial conclusion that God and the universe are not infinite, but finite. Indeed, he rejected infinity as entirely fictitious - a mathematical construct. A theatrical orator, published an essay named “God Has No God” that was deemed unforgivably blasphemous.
“On the morning of the seventh day, God woke up and noticed that the density of distributed matter had decreased ever so slightly. Matter is finite, and so is god! Infinity, what self-deception it had been! God’s god, infinity, was dead. With the feeling of one who has indulged too much, God looked at the product of six days of frenzied creation. The damage had been done, the false testament to infinity had been written into the fabric of creation. Endless blue skies, deep ocean trenches; even the fabric of the universe itself lied, seeming infinite through a parlor trick of expansion and contraction like the surface of a balloon at a birthday party. And God wept, knowing that it was inevitable that the life that sprung from this creation would eventually have to go mad with infinity-fever before seeing the truth.”
- Alban Leo OSB, God Has No God
Following the liberalization in the wake of Cottica’s popularity, Leo was not immediately prosecuted for this essay. It and other communiques used Leo’s idea of a non-infinite creation to argue that all resources be treated as finite, and became the basis for “Advent Grid: Cyclical Life and Devotion”, a fringe text that gained a cult-like following in both Libria and the Covenant among those who feared a second Sundering. Leo began suggesting that those interested in his work travel to Seastead II and take it upon themselves to live differently; thus, a third wave of newly minted eco-pragmatists flocked to join Dirk at Seastead II with the explicit intention of turning it into a Distrikt.
This period, although short, was an extremely violent part of Witness history, as the corporations of Libria fought to prevent the fracture. This has created a deep gulf of suspicion and distrust between the people of Avantgrid and Libria ever since.
At a point, a large enough number of eco-pragmatists had gathered on the islands of Seastead, and the State Machine concluded that the logical action was to cut this zone off from Libria and pronounce it a new Distrikt with an eco-pragmatist governance model. Avantgrid was the first Distrikt that was formed through a conscious effort of a group to force the State Machine to fracture by assembling a group of like-minded people with an agenda.
In 20 0D Leonine himself relocated to join Dirk, protected on the way out by a private militia belonging to Cindy Lupin - the heir to a corporate empire in Libria and an enthusiast of the newly popular eco-pragmatism - and worked for a while in the Hoshizaki BioMonastery to further his knowledge of hydroponics and seed-crops. During his time, and using the authority as a potential leader of the newly minted district, there he was able to convince the BioMonastery that the bulk of its labor force should be local, so that the populace could learn critical skills.
However, despite all of this, the eco-pragmatic governance model did not work out as a single-state solution. Many of the inhabitants had their roots in Libria, and had set up independent zones on their islands. While they absorbed eco-pragmatism as a viable way of living, the general libertarian tendencies of all three waves convinced the State Machine that a unitary state would decay rapidly. A compromise was struck, declaring the new Distrikt a Confederacy of Cantons. A dialectal pronunciation of “Advent Grid” gave the Distrikt the name that stuck - Avantgrid. More extreme eco-pragmatist thought forms the root of thinking for at least two strains of eco-fascism present in Witness.
CURRENT POLITICS
Each Canton of Avantgrid is essentially self-governing.
Citizens can claim and hold as much territory as they require. Any trade happens with barter - either goods, services, or with land and energy; value is mutually decided by both parties. Issues of justice and contracts are deal with at a monthly Canton Agora, which is (given the size of each Canton) a small democracy modeled along old Greek lines. Ostracism - the yearly ability to banish a person from a Canton, based on a popular vote - is in play.
To prevent forces from other Distrikts from seizing control, the State Machine maintains a ‘first-principle right to violence’ in exchange for the unfettered operation of the Hoshizaki BioMonastery and other public-good institutions, such as aethnography schools. In return, any invaders would face joint forces from both Hygge and the Convenant, as well as disconnection of State Machine-controlled services such as the Harvest Division and (later) the Migrant Train.
Almost all Cantons - or at least, most known Cantons - take responsibility for the education of their citizens in energy and material accountability. Cantons also share knowledge openly to advance energy-conserving technology and practices.
ECONOMY
“We live to the rhythms of the sea and the stars, not to those of corporates and bureaucracies.”
- Octavia Dirk
Advantgrid’s economy is the hardest to understand from a single perspective. Its decentralized nature makes it almost impossible to do anything more than observe and perhaps estimate the transactions happening in Akur. Small armies of student theors from all over are routinely sent into Avantgrid to understand an in-your-face example of the limits of knowledge. Few of them go much beyond Akur.
An important part of Avantgrid inter-Canton bargaining is that the buyer and the seller meet on neutral ground or a location agreed to be such, with no more than two seconds. This allows a kind of limited Coasian bargaining to take place. The inhabitants of Avantgrid consider this a point of pride, showing the independence of each Canton, and the unforced and willing nature of each exchange. Akur has a number of so-called “Meeting Islands” which are often used as such neutral trading locations.
In general, the economy is best understood through a cultural prism. The Avantgrid economy is highly cyclical, closer to zero-waste than anything else on Witness; in fact, some Cantons import waste from other Distrikts - especially electronic - to repair, rebuild, and to extract materials. Avantgrid attitudes towards waste have been compared to the water beliefs of the sand-nomads in the pre-Sundering religious text Dune.
One expression of this is the Reuse Fair, an annual event in Akur where people from all over Avantgrid gather to show off and share their developments in energy-saving and waste reclamation. This includes everything from the Industrial-Fixit to the Re-Fashion show, where the oldest and best maintained clothes compete alongside the best new upcycling style.
Two proposals are making the rounds in today’s Avantgrid. The first is the Dirk-Leonine concept of a currency whose value decreases with materials use - although since this would require a complete inventory of all materials and estimation of their value. The second is the idea of a ledger of material and energy spend within Avantgrid, self-reported. Any energy that is spent in production and manufacturing must also be accounted for on the ledger, as well as the means through which this energy was generated.
Both ideas are in vogue among the theors at the Ásgeirsson-Institut, a conclave of aethnographers specializing on theorical economics. The poet-economist Cottica has levied the argument that practically, the compute and energy costs of maintaining such a ledger, be it a centralized solution or a decentralized one, would go completely against Avantgrid’s eco-pragmatist ethos. There is also political opposition to a central ledger as a threat to the self-rule of the Cantons and religious opposition to such open accounting as limiting the possibilities of secret or non-public contributions to the energy frugality of Witness.
Manufacturing
Some Cantons of Avantgrid continue to expand the archipelago by keeping the geoengineering factories up and running. These efforts require importing large quantities of energy from the Harvest grid (using Avantgrid-maintained batteries), and convert waste material reclaimed from other districts into substrate for new livable land. This process is net energy consuming, and arguments have been levied for and against the practice. In general, the energy footprint of creating an island with Harvest energy is seen as a debt that should be repaid by avoiding or preventing an equivalent amount of Harvest energy being spent. This repayment usually involves crediting the Canton for the energy saved by the waste reclamation, and for enabling more people to live the Avantgrid life. It is estimated that if 200 people live out their lives as frugal citizens on an island in Avantgrid instead of as middle-class citizens of neighboring Libria, the energy cost of producing an island is offset.
There are rumors of other methods of ‘repaying the debt’, including groups knocking chunks of other Distrikts off the Harvest grid for a time to help balance the ledgers. This may explain why the debate about island building is generally civil and why few extreme religious sects oppose the project outright.
The State Machine has calculated that the islands of Avantgrid also serve as an effective water break and anchoring system for other cities, as well as available space to requisition for MicroDistrikts; and thus the Harvest Division helps offset some of the energy cost.
CULTURE AND BELIEFS
Most people in Avantgrid lead a life that is frugal, artful, quiet, and close to nature. Doubtless it has more risk and work involved than social nets available elsewhere, but inhabitants generally report high levels of contentment. Technology is usually several generations behind, and tuned to be extremely energy efficient; Avantgrid engineers are masters of the ‘do one thing and do it well’ school of thought - so it is extremely rare to find highly networked general purpose computing machines, for example, unless there is a real utility for such.
Avantgrid has a mix of religious affiliations as it had an influx from both Libria and the Covenant. There are a a significant number of monastaries that have branched off from the Covenant, and look more like Zen-temples made of wood in their Avantgrid incarnations.
Many temples of Nygogi Buddhism also make Avantgrid their home, as the ethos of energy conservation and the metaphysics of karma have wedded to the ideas of energy waste as harmful. The rejection of infinity as a valid concept has also become popular, accepting the ultimately finite nature of all things - even the universe itself.
There is also a radical and sectarian sub-strand in Avantgrid that is willing to use force and violence to sabotage the access to the Harvest grid in other Distrikts. These terrorist cells are very hard to stop within Avantgrid, but have limited effectiveness elsewhere, as various combinations of surveillance are hard to train against. Nevertheless, sleeper cells have been discovered and punished in Hygge and the Assembly.
Some sects in Avantgrid believe that the only way to save Witness is to embed as many of their ranks as possible in other Distrikts, spreading the gospel of energy frugality in secret, hoping to shape policy to nudge Distrikts towards energy-frugal governance model. Many of these believers were responsible for the microGrid Collective and the adoption of the distributed energy model seen in the Assembly.
EDUCATION
The Ásgeirsson-Institut, one of the most prestigious institute of aethnography is located in Avantgrid. Aethnography is especially prized in Avantgrid as augurs travelling between settlements provide a key vector for news, ideas and innovation to migrate, as well as some much-needed new company for those who live on these islands. The Ásgeirsson-Institut specializes in thinking about energy in all facets of life and augurs are tasked with traveling between islands to study this in the hundreds of communities of Avantgrid.
A primary method of study is the energy-audit, in which travelling augurs conduct detailed examinations of how the inhabitants of the different Cantons understand their energy-cycles and the nature of the cyclical economy, help citizens optimize their ways of consumption, and gain insights from day-by-day frugal life; this knowledge then slowly makes its way back to the Intitut itself, and from there to the rest of Witness.
TOPOLOGY
© European Wilderness Society CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
© Mackenzie Bartlett CC BY-SA 4.0
The Avantgrid archipelago is the closest thing to wild nature that Witness has to offer, and many of the islands have sizeable areas of forests, marshes, fields, and undisturbed wildlife. Many of the islands are covered in evergreen pinewood forests and a varied flora, enriched by the pollen that gets carried by the winds across the ocean.
The original purpose of the Seastead II had been as resort islands and private summer getaways, with lush and varied gardens and grounds for relaxing, hiking, and hunting. Many of the islands already had self-supporting ecosystems of predators and prey. Some of these creatures were flown in to Witness from surrounding landmasses, while others were genetically engineered and developed. This has resulted in a surprising and sometimes unmapped fauna populating some of the larger islands of Avantgrid.
