Witnesspedia
child:
title: Hygge
slug: hygge
parent: 15338
summary: Hygge, the first Distrikt
keywords: worldbuilding, participatory
image: https://edgeryders.eu/uploads/default/original/2X/7/7652edd3b02e8d76b305cbe85bc1c77f7c24afc5.jpeg
Hygge, the first Distrikt {style=“color: #fff; text-shadow: 2px 2px #000; padding-bottom: .4rem; font-weight: bold;” class=“leading-tight text-4xl”}
The political history of Hygge begins with the founding of Witness itself. {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”}
Hygge (formerly Distrikt 1; alternatively, Hygge) is the first Distrikt of Witness. Initially meant to be “the nervous system of Witness” and the seat of Denton’s power, this Distrikt went through a tumultous time after the Zero-Day Fracture set in motion a chain of events that would see Distrikts seceding and throwing aside the careful top-down planning engine that Hygge was designed to be.
Today, Hygge is a democratic socialist structure, with a military presence left over from the short but bloody history of the Marches and the Distrikts that broke off. It is still an emblem of power, the seat of many debates for representatives, and boasts perhaps the single largest peacekeeping presence in Witness. Outside of the the Library of St. Benedict in the Covenant, Hygge is the only Distrikt truly critical to the State Machine’s existence, as it houses key hardware, along with CIVICSMOD, a multi-distrikt team that operates the machine.
However, it is also a symbol of what some aethnographers dismiss as the classical ‘broken tower’ - an ancient institution and aesthetic, living long past its usefulness, stranded in a world that has moved on.
Indeed, Hygge itself has fractured at least oncee: the Great Reset of 22 0D led to stor-Hygge (‘Big Hygge’) and a budding microDistrikt, lille-Hygge (‘Little Hygge’), both running very different social contracts. Nor has its naming remained consistent. After Little Hygge established itself as the Dandelion Republic, ‘Big Hygge’, by default, became Hygge, even smaller than it had once been.
The politicians of Hygge maintain, of course, that their way of living makes a lot more sense, and indeed has learned from the mistakes of the past: whether the citizens agree is something learned only by traveling there.
POLITICAL HISTORY
“Look around! Forget these halls and look to the streets, the pylons that come up even as we think these thoughts. The real grievance of our citizens in this post-Sundering world, is not the work, but the insecurity of their existence. Our people are not sure whether they will be healthy; whether they will live to be old and unfit; whether they will be taken care of in their turn, as their grandparents once did and were. They look around as see a world where every square of land is critical, where every resource matters, and ask themselves what happens if they fall into illness, or into bad company, and whether society will recognize any obligation other than to use them and discard them once their time has come. We have called upon them to rebuild the world; we must ensure that they have incentive to do so, not just for their children, but for themselves."
- A Record of a Seabourne Few , J.C. Denton, Manifesto . Now collectively known as the Old Manifesto.
The political history of Hygge begins with the founding of Witness itself. Initially built as an administrative town, Hygge was intended to house Denton and the various committees that would govern Witness, the CIVICSMOD team, and a host of support staff that would maintain this system. As Distrikts began to demand their own space, people from all over Witness who wished to stay true to Denton’s vision were resettled in Hygge; as the Marches turned violent, and as the threat of military action grew (especially with regard to Libria), more refugees began to arrive, and the former Potemkin-like facade turned into an active population hub.
In the beginning, Witness (and thus Hygge) was designed to be a system where good were moved around exclusively by fiat, subject to decisions by many tiers of Committees and Working Groups, with Disruption Labs charged with being cross-domain superconnectors and bringing innovations ‘from the outside to the center’. Denton’s original plans seem to have been to transition to a limited market structure; notes from his Manifesto describe his admiration for pre-Sundering ‘Tiger economies’ - where once the population started growing, selected individuals would be given monopolies on the production of certain critical goods, and competition allowed to come into play a decade or two after the fundamental infrastructure had been set in place.
Ultimately, Denton’s goals seem to have been an economy where the state - with him as the de facto head - controlled the supply of energy, healthcare, law and order, and funds for dealing with climate change externalities. The State Machine was installed and calibrated to impute data gaps and create a hyper-efficient allocation of resources among ‘the First Million’ that would inhabit Witness.
Denton’s plans, however, relied on a tried-and-tested cohort of trained staff loyal to him, to whom he could hand out monopolies without fear. Witness actually set sail with a far more diverse population, and indeed a large part of dissent arose because of this favouritism and because population growth far outstripped Denton’s planned ramp-up times. Denton cronies were seen to be dynasty-building, while the worker population that had joined Witness at launch were given very few options - either to join the police, and gain some power at the behest of bureaucrat, or to be treated as labourers paying for their passage with sweat.
Post-Fracture
Post-Fracture Hygge was called Distrikt 1, and it did not stay in that state for long; both the Assembly and Libria broke away shortly after, leaving Hygge to deal with waves of migrants, a rapidly expanding military presence and very real fears that Denton was subverting state mechanisms into a wartime dictatorship. Both personal and government records show an overemphasis on influencing the affairs of other forming Distrikts and a dismissal of internal issues of Hygge proper (the name here being loosely used, as the Distrikt took years to be officially named).
“No, you don’t understand. He gave me an executive order to send all of his rations to the new espionage crew. Do you get what I’m saying? Denton is so into his shit, he won’t have anything to eat. God have mercy on us.” — Larry Quoia, former Second Secretary of Witness, messaging records
Four weeks after the Fracture, the State Machine would start recommending an ‘early retirement’ for Denton as part of a management plan, which was ignored for several years, even as the AI raised this recommendation in priority. Accounts confirm that Denton would have fits of rage if any of his subordinates mentioned the recommendation. One way or another, Denton’s supporter group was powerful enough that the State Machine accepted their support as part of the implicity social contract of Hygge; even as the mismanagement of Hygge became clear and basic infrastructure started to fail, pro-Denton supporters engaged in conflict with any newly formed anti-Denton faction.
These actions had ripple effects: in the case of Libria, for instance, it led to a solidification of their general anti-statist stance, whereas in the Covenant it created a cottage industry supplying weaponry and armor to loose militias sanctioned by various church orders.
Post-Denton Turmoil and the Great Reset
The years after Denton’s death were marked by more management struggle, a period described in Hygge history as the Letter-opener Wars - ‘letter-opener’ being street slang applied to the many bureaucrats that Denton’s pseudo-dictatorship had generated. Infighting resulted in Denton’s most experienced managers migrating or being banished to other Distrikts, and few chose to return for fear of death threats from the public - which were by now turning against much of the political infrastructure that Denton had set in place. Many of CIVICSMOD migrated to the Library of St. Benedict during this time for their personal safety while adjusting the domains and parameters of the State Machine to account for the new zeitgeist: the rest stayed behind.
The Great Reset campaign, spearheaded by CIVICSMOD programmers Gregor Samsidel, Janet Samsidel-Chiang, Erwin Lugoda, Peter Kleinman and Antonia Rybakov, took years to come to fruition. It began with a rebranding of Distrikt 1 to Hygge - a name carefully chosen to present a particular comfortable aesthetic to the world.
However, the meat of the Reset was nearly stalled by a critical decision: should Hygge have the State Machine running resource allocation by fiat - a hyper-efficient, but still imperfect version of Communism (given all the information problems) - or should it set up a welfare state with actively mutating policies to reduce the amount of suffering and prevent the gross disparities that had motivated protests in the first place?
In this, public opinion was divided. It was the newly-rebooted State Machine itself that proposed a solution: a Distrikt and a microDistrikt (partitioned according to public opinion polls), each running one option. Since much had yet to be proved about the efficacy of both systems, citizens could freely transition between these two regions - and, indeed, share goods and services across borders, to see if some stabilitity could be achieved. As a mover of resources by fiat, the State Machine would, in one territory, have the authority to directly pass suggestions citizens to handle actions that needed performing, optimizing based on skillsets, capabilities, proximity and so on. In the other, its role would remain in the realm of policy suggestions based on data-gathering and simulations.
Thus, the big and little Hygges were born. To prevent the State Machine’s finite computational resources from being taxed beyond measure, lille-Hygge, the smaller microDistrikt, implemented a bounded population on which the State Machine continously refines its information gathering. After Little Hygge established itself and its own identity, ‘Big Hygge’, by default, became Hygge, even smaller than it had once been.
This move did not happen without significant dissent. Even among Denton’s supporters, there was unrest at the idea of handing over so much control to the State Machine, an instrument viewed by some as dangerously flawed. While CIVICSMOD upholds promises made to release monthly status reports on the State Machine, many took the Migrant Train to other Distrikts as soon as the option became available.
Present conditions
The Hygge of today is embraced by many as a stable, ordered existence, obsessed with the concept of fairness, but equally criticized for its approach of minimizing negative impacts - sometimes at the cost of positive effects. Proponents of Hygge point out what is known as the Kleinman Paradox - for any decision involving two groups, three mathematical notions of fairness are possible, and the three are incompatible with each other; there can be proportional calibration out positive outcomes within each group, or groups can be balanced for the positive class, or for the negative class.
This mathematical conundrum - and Hygge’s particular tilt towards minimizing suffering - means that Hygge is often devoid of the high-risk high-reward manouevering available in market structures like Libria. Many a scholar has set themselves upon a quest to break this paradox. Several theoretical answers exist - among them is a scenario where the decision system is absolutely perfect, with definite and accurate answers instead of probabilistic modelling - but no such system exists.
ECONOMY
Hygge runs an economic system inspired by the social democracies of the second half of the twentieth century. The economy is mixed: most manufacturing, retail and services is run by for-profit private corporations. State-owned enterprises control the provision of most public services, like social security, banking, and infrastructure. Additionally, some Distrikt-owned companies compete with their private-sector counterparts in several key markets. These companies tend to provide basic, no-frills product and services at a competitive price: Hygge’s policy makers believe this to increase price competition and provide access to those markets to lower-income households.
Targeting of inequality measures
Limiting inequalities is a tenet of Hyggian social contract, and a key economic policy objective. Indicators of economic inequalities such as the Gini coefficient are closely monitored, and feature in almost all political and policy debates. Augurs keep track of an array of indicators of various inequalities, from the ones (energy, clean water) to more exoteric ones (beauty, inspiration). For most, measurements exist at various scales, from Hygge-wide to the neighborhood. The challenge for the incanters involved in Hygge’s policy making is to combine a sustained motivation to engage in productive activities with the presence (and resourcing) of very strong safety nets.
The solution that emerged is a complex web of policies, social norms, and political equilibria. At the micro level, it includes a focus on motivating the working- and middle classes to be more productive by providing opportunities for social mobility. At the same time, politicians leveraged the popularity of the generous welfare system to keep very wealthy individuals in a minority, and prevent them from unduly influencing policy. Wealthy Hyggians often responded by relocating elsewhere on Witness, typically on Libria.
Central banking and management of Distrikt budgets
At the macro level, Hygge is run according to the tenets of Modern Monetary Theory. It maintains full monetary sovereignty, and freely creates its own currency as needed. At the same time, augurs are constantly developing new techniques for making sure that government policies do not overcommit the economy’s capacity. Inflation is closely monitored for signs of economic overheating.
Macroeconomic policy is executed by two powerful institutions: Hyggebanki, the central bank, and the Ministry of Provisioning and Planning for Public Purpose, commonly called Mp4 or Hensigt
Hyggebanki is the only legal issuer of the local currency, the Danegeld; it also functions as the main financial regulator. New Danegelds are created by crediting the Hensigt’s current account at Hyggebanki. Additionally, commercial banks are allowed to create Danegelds by issuing commercial loans, but Hyggebanki imposes a tight monetary discipline onto the banks, with high mandatory reserve coefficients. Hensigt destroys Danegelds by taxing them out of existence.
Hensigt is in charge of managing Hygge’s Distrikt budget. They do this in a way consistent with the theors’ support of Modern Monetary Theory: so, while they do not worry about running deficits between tax revenue and governement expenditure of Danegelds, they do worry about controlling inflation. Macroeconomic policy consists of three main parts:
- Infrastructure provision (water, energy, transport, health care, education…). This is more or less constant over time.
- A Public Service Employment program. Any citizen that wants a job with Hensigt has a right to one. Remuneration of guaranteed jobs is set to be more than sufficient to provide for a fairly basic lifestyle, but noticeably lower than what the private sector pays for a similar job. The PSE works as an automatic stabilizer: when the private sector goes through a recession, it lays off more workers, that are quickly reabsorbed into the PSE. This maintains aggregate demand close to pre-recession levels. As the private sector picks up speed, it hires workers away from the PSE. Unemployment remains more or less constant (and low) across the phases of the business cycle.
- Public investments. These are new projects, like major infrastructure upgrades. In order to get the green light for one of these, Hygge political leaders need to make sure that they do not create inflation; and that no competing project is more attractive than the one being considered. Obviously, projects have costs that can be measured mostly in Danegelds, but dishomogoenous benefits: this leaves augurs with the difficult job of deciding between, say, adding a layer of resilience to insect protein production and a new art festival. They do this by a bundle of aethnographic methods, some quantitative, some qualitative, collectively know as dialogic evaluation.
Digital technology
Main article: Digital communication technology in Witness
As in many other domains, the founders of Hygge saw the role of digital technology in a way that was similar to that of the Denton era. From it, Hygge inherited the State Machine’s critical hardware, and the CIVICSMOD team operating it.
Present-day Hygge’s digital infrastructure is supposedly centralized, benevolent, and subject to democratic control. The governments claims a monopoly on the identity layer, with government-issue digital identities forming the basis for the provision of sophisticated e-government services. The whole system is tightly integrated: administrative information in all databases is linked together by the unique digital identifiers of each citizen, business, etc. The State Machine processes all these databases to produce allocation decisions and recommendation.
Social media in Hygge are considered to be a public service, and are publicly owned. However, many Hyggeans are also users of foreign-owned social media.
CULTURE
Hygge, depending on who one asks, is either a dream come true or a disaster waiting to crumble under the power of markets. However, those who made the claim that markets alone drive innovation have found in Hygge an uncomfortable counterpoint: Hygge remains one of the greatest contributors of public-interest technologies throughout Witness, driven in part because of the importance in Hygge culture given to inventors and technological pioneers.
Equal importance is given to bureaucrats who handle the complex machinery that turns the State Machine’s suggestions into practicalities, and to a rising class of programmer-politicians who can float new policy ideas as code and prove their virtue by simulation.
However, all is not perfect. Old monopoly connections die hard; some corruption still exists within the ranks of bureaucrats, especially those who lost everything in the Reset.
With their tacit support, black markets operate within Hygge, and street thugs often ‘run corners’ - operating in areas where the State Machine cannot gather information (usually accidental or deliberately created ‘dark zones’), using false IDs and masks designed to confuse facial recognition. An increasing street culture indulged in ‘Faraday caging’ - wrapping their electronic devices in homemade Faraday cages to prevent tracking by the State Machine.
Much of Hygge’s priorities, post-Denton, has been to restore what was lost: this includes not just infrastructure, but goodwill. This recent phase has been referred to as the Smoothing Years .With Hygge well beyond its foundation phase, a new, significant parcel of Hygge’s population is starting to question the decisions made at the beginning of the Smoothing Years, claiming that their society was modelled after “reducing damage, rather than increasing wonder”, thus generating a dull and unmotivated society.
Goro, the Wrecking Ball
So far, a group rallied under the Glorious Manifesto flag has released something unique to Hygge: a smaller AI by the name of Goro. This AI’s only function is to enact seemingly random behaviour suggestions for the populus as a whole. Those suggestions come in many forms, ranging from small reminders to consume more water to commands to stop any activity immediately and go to a certain location for a flash mob.
Most of Hygge’s population ignores Goro, treating it as a joke, but qualitative support has shown citizen support for Goro. Many in CIVICSMOD suspect that Goro is the equivalent of a ‘nudge unit’ that induces aberrant behavior in life in order perform a function similar to what random mutations serve in the process of evolution, disguising its signals beneath pattern of noise; others suspect Goro is purely aesthetic in nature, designed to add a touch of both serendipity and whimsy to Hygge.
Though the majority of the city disregards Goro in most of its suggestions, a few (less than 3% of the total population) follow its suggestions with a semi-religious fervour. commonly called “goroheads” in street slang, they’re generally ignored or mocked; however, some - especially proponents of Hygge-Bushido - believe that it merely is a matter of time before a big event pushes goroheads into a greater light than what they occupy right now.
CIVICSMOD and the State Machine École
One of Hygge’s most important characteristics is the role that it plays with regard to the State Machine. CIVICSMOD - the a consortium composed of programmers and politicians of all of Witness’ Distrikts - operates primarily from Hygge. The Library of St. Benedict is officially considered the property of this group, and, as such, this confers upon Hygge a significant culture of and access to knowledge about the computer sciences and the pre-Sundering world.
During the Smoothing Years, Hygge’s government made a significant investment in its diplomacy efforts to revert the bad political image it had acquired. One of the most impactful (and arguably effective) actions was the opening of CIVICSMOD to a multi-Distrikt body politics: all Distrikts are invited to send their own delegations to live and work in the State Machine (though still funded by their home Distrikts), and those delegations share the leadership and tasks in the State Machine’s care and maintenance.
By popular vote, this initiative was turned into a school for programming and systems design: as part of Hygge’s new diplomatic stance, positions and scholarships were offered to citizens of other Distrikts, even minor ones. This State Machine École, or Mach-Eco, was created and is still considered the best AI design training institution in all Witness.
TOPOLOGY
“Goro told me the blueprint looked like a flower when you saw it from above, can you believe that? I told it I was more going for a fruit sliced in half. ” — Pat Ayedemi
Seen from above, Hygge is both modern and quaint at the same time: a high-tech state deliberately maintaining an image meant to be warm and welcoming. Wood is highly prized and displayed here, and street lighting comes in the form of solar LED trees - wire and foil that casts a glow over recycled plastic streets. In keeping with its original design - which was to keep Denton’s administration at the center - Hygge spirals around the grounds of Newton’s Follow, turning into markets, entertainment venues, schools, and public services buildings on the way out. One end of it terminates very near to the Library of St. Benedict; this area is commonly known as the Army Quarter, because much of Hygge’s soldier-police officer corps are trained and housed here.
Denton’s architectural legacy still remains. Hygge is built in such a way that in the vast majority of situations, people can walk to whatever they need, rather than relying on any form of external transport. This structure forces the citizens to walk more than the average Witness citizen. For those reasons, Hygge is known for its population’s fitness, but also by its poor accommodation of people with walking disabilities.
During the Smoothing Years, and particularly under the vision of architect Pat Ayedemi, the city started to move away from Denton’s erratic style and actively worked towards its own representation of structures. Heavily inspired by the works of Oscar Niemeyer, an architect of pre-Sundering times, this ‘Hygge-design’ is marked by a particular radius of roundness, according to Mx Ayedemi: “equally pleasant to the eye and unperturbed by the forces of wind and rain.” It is now quite popular, especially among public structures, and has even seen adopted in some parts of the Covenant.
NOTABLE PEOPLE
Hygge is home to, among other things, the aethnographer collective that goes only by the name “Untitled”. They are most famous for their controversial Shopping Cart Theory:
"The shopping cart if the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognise as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right.
“There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their care. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it.
“No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will find you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct. A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it.”
Not everyone agrees with them, and they seem sophisticated enough to elude even the State Machine.
Of course, there is CIVICSMOD, particularly Gregor Samsidel, Janet Samsidel-Chiang, Erwin Lugoda, Peter Kleinman and Antonia Rybakov. While CIVICSMOD prides itself on staying above politics, there is a hierarchy, and these four are right at the top; indeed, the Samsidels have more soft power than most politicians.
Susannah R. Basterfield was a key political figure in the transition between the post-Denton years and the Smoothing Years. Fabled for her capacity for negotiation and diplomacy, she was the first leader capable of harnessing power in Hygge without provoking the discontent of former pro-Denton supporters.
She is known for her special care for language, shepherding renaming schemes for many of Hygge’s processes and positions so that the city could renovate itself. She is believed to have named the Distrikt itself, though some sources disagree.
Known throughout Witness as “the best thief in the Century”, Jonas Kimura is a former top-grade student from the State Machine École who turned to cybercrime. Known for extravagant stunts in many famously guarded places in Witness and other cities, and several of his hacks have threatened inter-Distrikt peace as representatives have rushed to blame each other. His whereabouts and current appearance are unknown.
As the architect responsible for the renovation of Hygge’s rounded appearance during the Smoothing Years, Patrick Ayedemi’s influence extends far beyond Witness itself. Their work is considered a quiet revolution in urban planning, marred by an unsuccessful attempt at forming a cult that removed them from the public spotlight.
