i just read about Morning Star of Lingao, and I couldn’t help thinking of Witness.
Lingao is a huge Chinese web novel, collectively written on forums by 500+ authors. The plot is about a small group reconstructing industrial civilisation from the ground up, with an obsessive focus on the technical details. According to a Wired article:
The writing of it became a phenomenon across Chinese internet forums in the 2010s: Its open source ethos and collaborative methods deeply appealed to China’s burgeoning tech community. Beyond regular meetups among core contributors, Lingao’s creation fostered the formation of China’s “keyboard politics”—online communities where users engage in fierce debates about governance, policy, and national direction under the protection of pseudonyms. These conversations became staging grounds for political arguments that couldn’t happen elsewhere, where amateur policy wonks, military enthusiasts, and armchair strategists honed their worldviews.
It’s several million words, plus an archipelago of fanfic. I’m not sure I’m ready to dive into reading the thing itself. But cool to see that something Witness-adjacent has succeeded on such a huge scale.