(made it into a wiki)
Overview
Floating city based on the UN float-lab design. The name is a riff off Taleb. World hardness is between a 3 and 4 on Moh’s scale of science fiction hardness. This looseness serves to:
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Make it easier for multiple authors to postulate ideal conditions under which a theoretical economic system or society may flourish, without having to run into conflicts over materials sciences and fundamental engineering problems.
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Allow a more extensible universe that ages less (truly hard science fiction stories age extremely rapidly and, unless Clarke-level expertise is brought to bear, are generally bad at predicting social patterns).
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Allow the UN’s float-lab design to actually work, in the same way that some handwavium is required to make generation ships realistic.
Extremistan is one of a set of cities floating on the sea, occasionally coming into contact with landmasses (reason: isolation; experimental society). Its energy source is assumed to be enough to run its infrastructure without major interruptions, but it appears to be partially ravaged by climate change. At the very center is a Tower of Babel that broadcasts white noise outside its borders so as to prevent communications from coming into or out of the city.
A State Machine similar to the one depicted in this story - which uses behavorial big data to infer the morals and attitudes of a society towards its body of laws, and thus continously updates the Constitution, thus creating a near perfect responsive democracy has, by consent, turned Extremistan into a ground-up experiment in T.M. Scalon’s Contractualism: a morality, and thus a social structure, where rational autonomous agents agree to make binding agreements from a point of view that respects each other’s moral importance.
Unfortunately, this has completely failed, and the reason that the State Machine gives is that humans are not rational agents. As a result of this failure (called Breakpoint or the Zero-Day Fracture in the city’s history), the State Machine has partitioned the city into Distrikts, with each Distrikt implementing a social contract that fits a large echo chamber. Running through each Distrikt is the Migrant Train. People whose morals and attitudes do not align with that of the majority in their Distrikt are asked to leave and are recommended a Distrikt that will fit their lives better.
Extremistan has Five Distrikts Major and numerous Distrikts Minor.
The Five Distrikts Major:
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Libria: ultra-libertarian state, closer to the French libertine. Individuals have great power, and society is an analogue of Renaissance Italy+France taken forward. A well-paid Government and Aristocrat class is in constant flux, elected among those the public recognizes as being of extraordinary merit. The assizes (travelling courts) are relied on for upholding law and making judgement in situations where Coasian bargaining has failed; it is impossible to hide the effects of gross power imbalances between people.
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Terminus: Classical Roman-Greek-style republic where the hero is voted on every four years from a public social media poll. Sees themselves as the superior civilization among all those “less enlightened”. Believers of choice, one man, one vote, likes of think of itself as a pure meritocracy, and an extremely capitalist society; the Market and the Common Vote are basically their god. Despite being pretty hard-hit by climate change, almost everything is matter of short-term commercial interest and long-term political power plays.
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The Covenant: Abrahamic religious fusion where there are clear different sects but some consensus on God and a Pope-like leader who appoints a Champion blessed and anointed by God. Usually a female who confirms her vows with a line lifted from Joan d’ Arc: “Asked if she knew she was in God’s grace, she answered, ‘If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.’” Strict low-grade xenophobia and insistence on purity, but in a hypocritical way; they will often fraternize with others as if to maintain a charade of token acceptance. Also a kind of razorback Southern American politeness, good Samaritanism towards their own kind, and a certain if-god-wills attitude to life. Education is almost completely controlled by churches, as was in missionary societies.
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The Assembly: an implementation of communism, with a specific role for a tamed Trotskyite “permanent revolution”. Personal property exists; private property does not. A version of the State Machine allocates work and essentials according to the requirements of everyone, with a class of Administrators (who cannot vote) Workers (who can vote on decisions and) and Revolutionaries (who are charged with constantly being on the lookout for power imbalances and the emergence of a bourgeois. Citizens are rotated between the three classes; every citizen must, in their time, perform all three functions.
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Medium: cosmopolitan, collectivist core that maintain the State Machine, with programmers putting up ‘policy’ and being voted in by the public. Welfare state where people are largely apathetic and there’s a longrunning sense of weariness with the world, and they go about the drudge work that keeps everyone fed. Outliers are punished or removed from public view, both on low and high ends; the ideal life is the average life, and outliers threaten satisfaction with the average. A wrapper AI called Kautilya, written around the State Machine, churns out a half-nonsensical mythology calculated to make citizens feel as if they have ‘purpose’ – lifted from Sri Lankan myth. Citizens are given “precepts” to follow that are some neo-buddhist kumbaya combined with some socially-reinforced hierarchies that sound innocuous. People are expected to stick to 'optimality’. The nail that sticks out gets hammered. Often slandered as “Mediocristan” by the others.
Nevertheless, Medium forms the melting pot city connecting these different Distrikts Major and Minor. A strong but minority political effort is the Contractualists, who are trying incorporate all the other utopias to merge society back into the ‘functional democracy’ that existed before the famous Zero-Day Fracture and rioting that made the State Machine split society apart.
The Distrikts Minor
The Distrikts Minor are the real testbeds. Smaller than the Districts Major, but with a train connection to Medium, they are a constant series of A/B tests being conducted by a State Machine desperately searching for a new form of social contract. As such, Distrikts Minor are constantly being created, reshuffled and deleted, providing both a trickle of new ideas into the mainstream (a play on the general nature and acceptance of new economic theories) as well as ripe space for new stories and ideas on the edge.
The Fullists, the Futilists:
Every society has its fair share of Fullists and Futilists, who generally embody the following two extreme attitudes towards change:
In 2020, Marc Andreessen, who should need no introduction, weighed in with characteristic optimism:
We virtually never resist technology change that provides us with better products and services even when it costs jobs. Nor should we. This is how we build a better world, improve our quality of life, better provide for our kids, and solve fundamental problems … It is hard to believe that the result will not be a widespread global unleashing of creativity, productivity, and human potential … In arguing this with an economist friend, his response was, “But most people are like horses; they have only their manual labor to offer…” I don’t believe that, and I don’t want to live in a world in which that’s the case. I think people everywhere have far more potential.
Many others are far more pessimistic. One one flank, I give you this misanthropic Hacker News comment on Andreessen’s long-term utopian vision:
Look at the future this guy has concocted in his head: The main fields of human endeavor will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, and adventure. …it’s like he’s never met anyone who didn’t attend a top tier university. Here’s reality: The main fields of human endeavor will be copulating, hustling, consuming low-brow entertainment, eating, and the occasional lunatic running amok.
(The Futilists actually started out calling themselves the Factualists, and think of themselves as being real about stuff).
The Migrant Train
The Migrant Train is an extraordinary tough construct, a self-sustaining Snowpiercer-like that travels through these Distrikts, occasionally recalibrating its route to account for new or missing Minor Distrikts. The State Machine typically draws recruits for new social experiments from among the migrants. There is a class of citizens who have either changed their minds so often that they prefer the train, or have become stuck through paralysis by analysis: they’re called the Eternal Migrants, and the more physical of them become Praetors under the supervision of the State Machine, protecting passengers and their charges. The State Machine exerts a “first principle monopoly on violence” in every society they come across - not every society is happy with the State Machine’s power, and the train bears scars where weapons have struck it in the past.