There is a specific reason I went for internet-anglophone here, and that’s to do with ease of search and communication - especially if this project is open to the web as a whole. As someone whose native language is not English, and in fact comes from a former British colony, it sucks, but there is utility to this because of the corpus of ideas attached to these syllables in what is still a lingua franca. I could call Medium “Madhyama” (මධ්යම) and that would just make it require more to communicate what this is about. I expect names of places, references and landmarks within these communities to change anyway depending on whose imagination is contributing there.
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Good ideas, @joriam. On a general level, this is precisely how this world is supposed to work. The “Major” and “Minor” refer not to narrative importance, but as a loose marker of how mainstream the ideas there are. The Major are ideas that are well-trodden, stretched to certain logical extremes. The Minor are less well-known but extremely interesting concepts that we want to explore.
At any point anyone should be free to create a Distrikt and plug it in - say someone proposes a radical new economic theory; we should be free to create a society and test it. We don’t even need to justify it by having cities float along and connect - the assumption is that this floating, partitioned mega-city is similar to Gorgemghast; there are precious few limits to what one can add to this. Now for specifics:
The fact that we propose major districts created by our team and allow other creators to propose minor districts (and this is paired with the fact that 590 words described the majors and only 92 were given to the minors) already points to the fact that we believe our team is more competent in worldbuilding then the outside world. But we shouldn’t. If we believe in open, collaborative, open-source projects (which I think we do!) we should give away and decentralize our narrative power.
To give away and decentralize narrative power requires, as I keep pointing out, some product to give away in the first place. As of now, we have little to nothing, and at the core of this, someone will have to write stuff down, so I do not see much value in a theoretical hivemind as opposed to a practical team taking input and weaving those inputs in until the project has enough mass to gather others willing to sit and write in. TV series and game studios have evolved their structures because they work. Otherwise this turns into every other Early Access game out there on Steam - released too early, tanked, forgotten.
Layer 01 is our anchor and our broadest. We don’t give it too much detail, just the essentials. We tell people that those few rules can’t be broken if they want to tap into our world.
Layer 02 and 03 are open.
This is, in a weird way, less freeing than the original spec I had in mind. In my view we should sketch out the history of the founding, the Districts Major (and there could be more or less or different, according to what gives us a fair diverse sheaf of economies to start with), and open the entire thing. As Alberto pointed out, resolution does not matter. So if someone comes along and wants to do a pre-history? Absolutely. If someone sees the article for, say, Terminus, and thinks we don’t talk enough about race issues within? Come right in, write. My gut instinct is that this increase the quality of the core as well. I am thinking of how projects on Github work. Problems - and spaces left intentionally empty for other people to plug in their ideas - are a great way of bringing in contributors.
And speaking of increasing quality: I really like your idea of the red flower-like design. It adds visual texture to the skyline, adds a new set of stories at the center. It also sets up some nice tensions, which are critical for stories to unfold. We can make it so that the Migrant train runs on the black infrastructure, because less radius - less fuel wasted - more efficient.
I can already imagine an economist-philosopher sitting by the docks, trainside, by the light of a dying sun, with a fat and angry-looking orange cat next to her. She has grey hair and a left hand that looks badly scarred. For the last so many years she’s been advising the Migrant Train Committee on the yearly train-route optimization, which at its basic level is a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem with some political tension thrown in. She’s been using the number of connected districts - and the radius of the train-circle -as a measure of how diverse this floating megacity is, but she’s also wondering whether size is a reliable indicator of diversity, given recent events; distrikts have seceded in the past, and she is deep in thought about whether there is an optimal arrangement of distrikts that enables even to most polarized of them to connect to the superstructure without fighting too much. Every so often she looks up as the train passes by and pets the cat absent-mindedly.
The cat, of course, does not care.
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HAIKU!
Does my world still grow?
Business models rise, then fall?
The cat does not care.
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My pet theory is that Nature evolved humans purely as a way of providing cats the attention they need in life 
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I am reading this with much delight so far. So far, two novels come to mind as tangential to your explorations @yudhanjaya. One is The Scar by China Mieville, set in the floating city of Armada. It is, like Extremistan, divided into districts. The similarities more or less end there, but I remember enjoying the setting of Armada.
The second novel that comes to mind is Inverted World by Christopher Priest. In that story, the city in which it takes place travels the surface of the planet on railway tracks that are laid down and picked up again as the city moves. It has a rather fantastic twist related to reality-distortion, which I will not spoil here but it could inspire interesting mechanisms for Extremistan.
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I am currently approaching this world through the eyes of someone who may want to use it for a project. By chance, before we started the world-building project, I applied to a Swedish art fund for a LARP project with friends at Blivande. We call it Avantgrid: Joule de vivre! and it would be set on a spectacular post-industrial island in the archipelago of Stockholm.
We would like the “world” that this is set in to be very flexible and open to interpretation while sticking to the core principle. Ideally, we would like factions to emerge for interesting in-game dynamics - energy worshippers, energy smugglers, energy accountants, underground rebellions of those who reject the rules, hackers who find loopholes.
I have brought up the idea with my co-conspirators on this project to perhaps set this game in the world built by Sci-Fi Economics Lab. Of course, we should not adapt Extremistan to that specific purpose but it gives me a chance to look at the world through the lens of someone who might use it and expand on it.
First of all, the proposed world of Extremistan feels like an inviting place for this game. That is a good sign. We could create a new district that was run on this energy-starved economy. That is the alternative that gives us the most freedom. We could also imagine that one of the major districts implemented these rules at some point in the history of Extremistan. Among the districts you have proposed, perhaps The Covenant seems most likely to become swayed by a new interpretation of scripture that demands extreme energy frugality? This also opens up the question of how we wish to handle the timeline of Extremistan - will there be a history and sequence of major events that are more or less consistent and canon (like Star Trek before 2009) , or will we end up with endless timelines (Star Trek after 2009).
The porous membranes between an endless number of districts is a very good mechanism for the sort of LARP we imagine because it allows any player to create a character with exactly the set of beliefs and rich back-story they desire by simply making up a new district. This fits our vision well, as we are generally looking for a set-up that allows for a very high degree of experimentation and diversity around the theme. It becomes very easy in-game to explain away your quaint style of clothing or strange technology - you just arrived on the train from a far-away minor district. Indeed, the mechanism of the train itself becomes a great way to explain if new people arrive in the game or leave early.
As for the layers brought up by @Joriam, I am actually not too worried about the initial idea not allowing for enough co-creation. At least not if we allow for a very wide range of looks and feels for these districts. As I imagine the city, it would be the size of a small country. As such, it allows for an almost endless variety of landscapes - at least if the technological level is such that it allows for more or less total control over building floating islands overgrown with forests, fields of crops, and rolling hills. Is that what we are imagining? As you imagine it @yudhanjaya, could this island believably be a scene in a district of Extremistan?
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Something something something CATS something something!
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A fellow Priest fan! Very glad you like it. I loved the Inverted World; I suspect the Mortal Engines took a lot from that city on rails.
My Mieville reading is quite sub-par for what it should be - I gravitated more towards Vandermeer for my taste of the New Weird - but I will definitely read up on Armada, thanks.
I think this would be a perfect fit. @Joriam came up with a flower-like structure that let us arrange distrikts in circles around a single core lake+energy feeder combo (thinking of calling said energy device the Ramos Mechanism). My opening lines for the original pitch hinted that Terminus is “being pretty hard-hit by climate change”; that was intended to illustrate pure market structures’ difficulties when copies with externalities. We could easily do:
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Make one side of Extremistan hit hard by failing infrastructure; something went wrong with power delivery, climate control and maintenance is sucking up more and more energy, and thus there is at least one distrikt there, possibly more, that is energy-starved if docked there
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Add Avantgrid on that end, and @alberto’s proposed Libria-Terminus merger immediately adjacent: that satisfies the requirement of showing L-T having to face this problem, and sets up a very beautiful contrast between a solarpunk future and a cyberpunk one.
What say you? Does this sound reasonable?
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Confirmed historical character: Cottica - pesudoanonymous poet-economist occupying a similar role to Kautilya in Chandragupta Mauraya’s Empire.
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If you haven’t already looked up the music videos from Alberto’s musical past I recommend it.
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…WOW. Wow, wow. This is priceless xD
Oh I’m liking this very much indeed! Excited for the writing proper to start =)
Oh me likes poeteconomists. Reminds of of Asimov’s psychohistory, but it adds a layer of rhetoric to the mix!
As in: economists are not only the ones who can imagine and plan new systems, but also the ones who can inspire and convince others to adopt them. Being a poeteconomist without the poetry bit is like being that person who flips the sheet pages for the playing pianist — yes, you understand a crucial part of the craft, but you’re not doing the actual work.
Maybe we should create a shorter version… poetecos?
I think it does! However, we received word today that we won’t get the funding for the project. We might still develop Avantgrid though. We can apply for funding once more for the same project in 2021, integrating feedback from the review. I invited my collaborators on that project to the session on the 7th.
This also sets up an interesting tension; that the radicals of Avantgrid can blame the corporate Libra-Terminus distrikt for their fate. Scene set for some intense skirmish - perhaps even violent conflict and sabotage of Libra-Terminus technology? How does a conflict between distrikts play out? What does the State Machine in such a case?
I think it could be fun to immagine the Assembly as the economy that does not use money and merchandise system, with the productivity on a sufficient level to satisfy all the needs and a system of distribution based accordingly.
Social property for general needs, distribution centers (in form of small local shops, big distribution centers, online ordering, etc) without “cash registers” for distribution of personal property.
Agreed. The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z Hossein imagined a city where the basics were all free and social capital was used in lieu of currency for extravagant tastes.
And of course, Star Trek is the OG post-currency economy - where the focus has shifted away from material to reputation (you can get all the food you want, but there is a limited number of captain’s chairs).
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We can definitely work in tensions brewing along the border. The State Machine would have a first principle monopoly on violence to contain serious breaches, but there’s plenty of stuff that can be done with mobs, dissents, misinformation, group fighting.
Working on the history. @alberto, I’ve nuked the name of Extremistan and settled on ‘Witness’ for now; I was thinking along the lines of Ken Levine writing Rapture - the city of Bioshock - which was a critique of Ayn Rand objectivism, and after mucking around with syllables Witness needed to be one of the few names not taken that still felt like it resonated with the project itself: come see what we’ve got here. Hooked the history right into your Covenant and its first Mayor and left a few things vague (exact starting date, for example - hard dates). Let me know if I’ve given you enough to go on! @nadia, does the State Machine and Council give rise to the kind of substructure you were thinking of for ethnography? Congrats on your book, The Voiceless, by the way, I hear it’s taught very widely in schools now. @Joriam, feel free to start thinking about arts and cultural expression in the modern-day Witness! @hugi, Avantgrid’s arrival should, I feel, be a historic point here.
PS: J.C. Denton is a Deus Ex (2000) reference. As a Deus Ex stan I want it in 
It’s one of the greatest games of all time, and -cough- takes place in “an unspecified near future, where there is a massive division between the rich and the poor, not only socially, but in some cities physically. A lethal pandemic known as the “Gray Death”, ravages the world’s population, especially within the United States; a synthetic vaccine, “Ambrosia”, manufactured by the company VersaLife, nullifies the effects of the virus but is in critically short supply…”
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