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…”