Witnesspedia
child:
title: The Assembly of People
slug: assembly
parent: 15338
summary: The Assembly of People
keywords: worldbuilding, participatory
image: https://edgeryders.eu/uploads/default/original/2X/3/30147c0cd1e50d33342854f8388366d4deb8d893.jpeg
The Assembly of People {style=“color: #fff; text-shadow: 2px 2px #000; padding-bottom: .4rem; font-weight: bold;” class=“leading-tight text-4xl”}
The story of the Assembly begins with CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION. {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”}
The Assembly of People (abbrev. Assembly, formerly Distrikt 5) is a key region within the city of Witness. Originally a microDistrikt, it has grown significantly since its inception, and has become a notable hub for the performing arts - including music, and, for some reason, magic. It is often described by citizens as an anarchist state, and sometimes derided as “the hippie central of Witness”.
Scholars, however, described it an offshoot of Witness that rejected centralized control but has come to terms with very limited governance over a colorful history, ending up at a form of combined anarchist thinking and eco-communism. There are frequent oscillations between more authoritarian factions and more libertarian ideals handled by a ritualized version of the Trotskyite concept of a permanent revolution. It is both famous (and infamous) for its peacefully ritualized but politically significant ‘revolutions’, and its unusual origins, having been founded primarily by a counterculture metal band and its fans.
POLITICAL HISTORY
“Only those who dream will someday see their dreams converted to reality.”
- apocryphal tagline attributed to “the Guevara”, a viral meme that appears often in Assembly graffiti and activist group insignia: a bearded man with a beret, often drawn in red. Aethnographers believe this to be a holdover from pre-Sundering protest insignia.
“The reasonable human adapts themself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable human. And I pride myself, Mr. Angier, on being extremely unreasonable.”
- Flo Royal, co-founder, vocalist of CTRL+ALT + REVOLUTION, interview with The Partisan, 22 0D
The story of the Assembly begins with CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION, an electrometal band composed of Flo Royal (vocals), Rakim (producer, melody), DJeremiah (producer, beats) and Sabat ‘Anagram’ Vho (guitars). ‘The Assembly’ is what their most prominent fan group called itself.
CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION drew from pre-Sundering symphonic metal, rave music and the work of the hip-hop recreationist community to produce extremely popular music lyrically themed around motifs of revolution, anarchist (and often libertarian) ideals. Their debut album WHO GUARDS THE GUARDIANS drew significant attention from political activists and musics critics across the spectrum. Their tours became infamous for inviting critics of the government of Witness a platform and a soapbox in-between musical numbers.
THE STREET FINDS ITS OWN USES FOR THINGS debuted their signature tactic of extravagant name-calling (and sometimes direct threats) to the policymakers pushing for increased state control or cultural unification. In a time of general disenfranchisement, where the people making significant change (such as the events of Distrikt 3) were part of obscure and highly vertical social hierarchies, CTLR + ALT + REVOLUTION exploded in popularity. Among their most prominent supporters were the Microgrid Collective, which was engaged in campaigns for decentralized, open-source and community-maintained energy generation structures.
Their magnum opus is considered to be A SONG FOR A NEW DAY, a 13-track effort that spells out in extraordinary detail the policy positions of a new type of Distrikt featuring common ownership of the means of production,direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations, workers’ councils and worker cooperatives. The last track, DISRUPT/ THIS DOES NOT END HERE, discussed the Assembly’s unique feature: a voluntary group of democratically elected individuals, publicly funded and charged with maintaining a ‘Permanent Revolution’: a constant threat to any form of implicit social hegemony that may arise.
Shortly after A SONG FOR A NEW DAY, CTRL+ALT+REVOLUTION announced a “mass walkout” which would have led a mob of some three thousand into Distrikt 1 territory and to the grounds of Newton’s Folly. The walkout was instead turned into a founding expedition when the State Machine sanctioned a new microDistrikt next to the Avantgrid infrastructure and the newly-formed Libria.
“We have learned that it is not enough to define utopia, nor is it enough to fight against the reactionary forces. One must build it here and now, brick by brick, patiently but steadily, until we can make the old dreams a reality: that there will be bread for all, freedom among citizens, and culture; and to be able to read with respect the word 'peace '. We sincerely believe that there is no future that is not built in the present.”
- Donavan ‘Soilfather’ Gordillo.
Despite the glamorous founding story, the early years of the Assembly were tales of hardship that, in turn, are responsible for what the Distrikt is today.
One of the first major challenges to the Assembly was the ire of J.C. Denton. Faced with the prospect of ceding even more territory and control, Denton signed Executive Order 8.3, forbidding the Harvest Division to supply energy to the new microDistrikt. This order was subsequently overturned, but in the meantime the fledgling Distrikt turned to the Microgrid Collective and their designs. Much of this was made possible with CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION’s earnings and significant investment from Distrikt 2 into component production factories and 3D printing. Thus, while today the Assembly is connected to the Harvest Division’s grid, it remains the most energy-independent of all Distrikts. The effort of making it so exhausted many initial volunteers, including DJremiah, who relocated to Libria.
After the energy crisis, the Assembly had to face a pressing issue of food supply. Fearing mass starvation, Flo Royal took to the stage again to advise people people to leave if they felt uncertain about the future. Hundreds deserted. The remainder were asked to partition themselves into collectives to solve issues of food growth, irrigation and water supply. The solution came organically, as she had hoped: Donavan Gordillo, a former agriculture specialist, leading a farming collective, established the Assembly’s first successful Mass Farm. The Mass Farm Collective adopted tactics from a pre-Sundering village known as Marinaleda: crops selected were, counterintuitively, the ones that would need the most amount of labor - olives, peppers, beans, tomatoes, coffee, wheat have been staples of all Mass Farms. Co-op workers were paid in food. People who joined the Collective began to donate electricity from local microgrids. General Townhall Meetings were held to make large-scale decisions that involved most of the co-op.
Conversations around currency were met with swift reprisal. “What is the value of money?” Gordillo is famously said to have cried at a subsequent townhall meeting. “Food on the table, meaningful work; that is what we need, not economic theory. You can write all the books you want once people are fed.”
Starting from Gordillo and stretching outward began a culture of collectives and an informal barter economy - first dedicated to meeting farming needs and maintaining microgrids, and then, as more complex problems evolved locally, to meeting those. Although eventually currency did arise, most people in the Assembly thus favor barter for local exchanges, and the Gordillo’s focus on direct (rather than market-based) provision of basic needs remained a constant feature of Assembly politics and economy.
ECONOMY
The economy of the Assembly consists of three main elements: decentralized, but federated, infrastructure; bounded market exchange; and control systems to prevent the concentration of economic power. It is often described in shorthand as “markets without capitalism”, an expression used by Royal in the cover notes for A song for New Day . Today, the same expression stands as the motto of the David Graeber Institute, the Assembly’s semi-official economic think tank and alt-business school.
Origins
The current architecture of the Assembly’s economy evolved as a byproduct of the supply crises brought about by Order 8.3, combined with the communitarian/libertarian orientation prevailing among the first settlers.
The supply crises provided a powerful incentive to disregard ideological posturing, and reward the provision of any solution, as long as it worked. What proved to work fastest was loosely federated systems to generate and distribute energy and food. The same pragmatism prevented this original infrastructure from splintering: the core group around CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION exerted enormous pressure on individual solar fields and farm collectives to stay connected to their peers, immediately sharing anything they produced in excess to their needs. Arbitrage and what the core group considered “predatory pricing” were strongly discouraged, in a last-ditch effort to keep the settlers ahead of severe scarcity. These efforts were deemed too repressive of economic freedoms by some of the settlers, with some choosing to relocate to Libria. However, most chose to stay, in recognition of the fact that renewable energy and food production are subject to inherent fluctuation. This means that the existence of local surpluses is unavoidable, and simple, non-predatory systems to share the excesses de-risks the whole local economy.
From these difficult beginning, the Assembly inherited some capacity to regulate decentralized infrastructure, institutions strongly legitimized to do so, and a pragmatic attitude to economic affairs.
Production
Production and manufacturing in the Assembly are organized mainly along cooperativist lines. Baseline production units (for example, in agriculture, farms) form cooperatives to collectively produce those production inputs or services that require a scale larger than that of the units (for example, in food production, most transformation, like mills for grains).
As noted above, agriculture is both a significant part of life in the Assembly and a core of its political history. One of its most famous inventors is Nikita Bourlag, whose lab constantly produces new types of cultivars. Her early experiments crossed a strand of wheat called Lerma Rojo 64 - a variety originally bred to create shorter, stronger stalks that could support more heads of grain per plant - with DS12, a highly disease-resistant wheat from the original Project Viking seedlabs.
The result is Viking 64, a semi-dwarf high-yield wheat that could grow on poorer soil, artificial composites, and withstand the kind of environmental challenges that Witness was subject to. Lerma Rojo and later variants from Bourlag’s lab were critical in making Witness largely self-sufficient in food and guaranteed goodwill from outlying Distrikts towards the assembly. Bourlag’s seedlab has since produced Lorelei , Bruno3.3, LanceV2 , and Agatha4, the mosses, seaweed-analogues and photobionts that give the Assembly its signature vegetated look.
Distribution and trade
Most people in the Assembly subscribe to an ideology of local autonomy. Producing for one’s own consumption is considered virtuous. Energy and, to a lesser extent, food are, to a considerable amount consumed by the same households and firms that produce them. In practice, however, economic agents in the Assembly depend on each other for securing most goods and services they need. Anything that is not consumed by the producer is exchanged on markets.
Market prices in the Assembly are free to float, but only within limits, set by citizen assemblies and revised periodically. These limits are enforced by a system inspired by pre-Sundering stock exchanges: when the price of something grows (or fall) too much or too quickly, the e-commerce platforms temporarily suspend exchanges. These institution are known in the Assembly as bounded free markets, or simply bounded markets.
Trade with other Distrikts
The stability, cohesion and relative prosperity of the Assembly comes at the price of a relatively tight control of inter-Distrikt trade. This is achieved with a dual system: natural persons from anywhere in Witness are free to operate in the Assembly, but legal persons are almost always not. Among other restrictions, companies are obliged to be owned by their workers, and cannot have other companies as shareholders. Foreign direct investment is near-zero, restricted to specific, and tightly monitored, cases. Inter-Distrikt trade is limited to the export of small-batch manufacturing industrial products and services – notably creative industry ones, and the import of raw materials and the occasional advanced tech artifact.
Commerce with Libria is often fraught, as the small-scale DIY ethos of the Assembly has to contend against economies of scale and capital that can sometimes undercut markets to gain strangleholds. Several instances of looming gentrification have been prevented by Revolutionists - in a few instance with the liberal application of Molotov cocktails.
Currency
The Assembly does use a currency: the ironically named CTRLcoin, a blockchain-based system that relies on a concept called regenerative proof-of-stake. Instead of ‘mining’, as with most implementations, anyone who comes within the borders of the Assembly is automatically assigned a Wallet and a starting pot of coins.
This Wallet, over time, generates or decays accumulated coins towards a mean so that a) no-one can remain poor for too long and b) no-one can hoard wealth. The mean, or the starting pot, is a decided by a automated, distributed consensus mechanism what pegs the total number of coins to a set maximum. Wallets are adjusted whenever they connect for a transaction (thus, it is theoretically possible to hoard coins, as long as you understand that you cannot carry out a transaction without your Wallet adjusting itself).
This process is handled by the State Machine on behalf of the Assembly, although as with the microgrids, the Assembly has the infrastructure to not rely on this system. CTRLcoin has proven itself critical for the careers of more abstract and scaleable work such as those of scholars, artists and programmers.
Despite strong efforts to prevent it, instances of rent have risen, especially for those parts of the Assembly that cater to tourism from the other Distrikts. Sumer Street is an area where visitors pay rent that is put into a communal treasury; income from bars, coffeehouses and stores also do the same. Similarly, the fruits of CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION franchising income (and those of several popular artists) go directly into common funds and collectives set up by Flo Royal. Currency from the other districts is either spent directly on imports or to purchase space from nearby Libria.
Digital networks
Main article: Digital communication technology in Witness
Digital networks in The Assembly are organized mostly along cooperative lines, like the rest of its economy. A high degree of interoperability is ensured by tight cooperation on technical standards. The Distrikt’s government is highly active in standard-setting bodies, leveraging its core competence in coordinating the interoperability of locally autonomous systems to make sure that the lowest-level layers of The Assembly’s digital infrastructure are fully interoperable, within the Distrikt and with other Distrikts.
Coordination in the data and application layers of digital technology is not strongly encouraged as such by the government, with some exceptions. A certain amount of it happens anyway, by virtue of bottom-up coordination between businesses (mostly cooperatives).
TOPOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENT
The Assembly has often been described as a ‘flat, green’ region. A more apt description would be a suburbia interspersed with infrastructure built broadly along the lines of the microgrids, forming units of housing and work that are able to sustain themselves without much outside interaction. Greenery and vertical farming are an important part of this design.
Recent advances in 3D printing and design have led to the construction of experimental stacked high-rises on the Harvestside area, while much of the seaside parts of the Assembly have been converted to public beachfronts, seaweed farms and expansion space.
Notable monuments and buildings include the statues of CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION in the city center, the Windward Platform for the Arts and the weekly open mics that happen there, the Gordillo Market (originally called the Mass Farm One Market), the Flea Markets down Sidesquabble Avenue, and the Microgrid Temple, where collectives host research fairs to invite inventors and researchers to demo technologies and present research that sustains or could enhance the Assembly’s way of life, in exchange for funding - usually in the form of housing and materials.
CULTURE, EDUCATION AND CONTEMPORARY LIFE
The Assembly is generally considered to be one of the best places to begin as a musician, due to its community structures, public support, and the legacy of CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION. Artists looking for wider fame and fortune, however, are unlikely to find it here, as The Assembly lacks to kind of widespread marketing or the heavy capital investment found in Libria. There is, therefore, a rich history of artists moving back and forth between the two territories.
The Assembly overwhelmingly favors apprenticing systems as a way of learning skills. Most citizens typically join the nearest collective, pick up useful skills as an apprentice, and then spend time as a journeyman migrating from collective to collective before settling down and working towards mastery. Highly skilled individuals take on apprentices of their own; an unintended consequence is often ferocious competition to draw a Master’s attention and earn an apprenticeships.
TRANSPORT
The Assembly has a series of public rail networks connecting it from one end to the other, as well as an informal network of blimps run on an as-you-need basis. Public transport is free, with citizens and collectives donating material to the Trainspotting Guild. Citizens may even add their own ‘carts’ to the tracks: the caveat is that all tracks are one-way, and any cart has to operate at a specific speed. Several collectives thus run their own rail carts, especially those that need to move perishable goods (ie: fruits and vegetables) to distribution centers or factories (ie: canning).
The Assembly has made one notable transport contribution to Witness, one that changed all cities as thoroughly as the Harvest Division: the Migrant Train. Of all Distrikts in Witness, Assembly’s Trainspotting Guild probably has the best rail-based public transit systems. Invited to a design meeting to create a unified set of rail standards across the Distrikts, Tyson Wijeratne, the Trainspotting Guild’s then-Second Chief, proposed a modular system, complete with State Machine integration, that would also let people migrate across Distrikts in search of a life they preferred; he stated that he was inspired in part by the journeyman phase of his career, where he worked across several different collectives before joining the Trainspotters. This idea was initially resisted by the Covenant, but votes from Libria and the State Machine Council saw it through.
NOTABLE PEOPLE
Arguably the most famous citizen is Flo Royal herself, who, after the band imploded, spent significant amounts of time aiding fledgling collectives and today is the closest that The Assembly will admit to having a single spokesperson. Under her leadership, a new CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION put out CHRONICLES OF STRUGGLE and CHOP WOOD, CARRY WATER, two albums that serve as documentaries on the process of building the Assembly. It should be noted that her work has lost most of its symphonic metal elements for gentler trance work. She and her CTRL + ALT + Townhalls remain an institution unto themselves.
Just as revered is Donovan Gordillo, often good-naturedly called Soilfather, for his work in bringing the Assembly to agricultural independence and for his fierce campaigning against the spread of foreign currency in the Assembly. Gordillo is widely considered to be the top authority on antifragile collective-building and often borders on being a Revolutionist, despite never taking the position. Nevertheless, it’s a common saying that when the revolution comes, Gordillo will be there at the back, feeding the rebels.
Tyson Jayawardana and Nikita Bourlag are seen as savants who continue such work for the greater good, and generally have little to say other than on transport and food respectively - but while Jayawardana often works alongside his Guild, Bourlag is seen more as an outsider with a gift that it would be foolish to ignore.
Another popular citizen is the poet and archivist Chen Da Jiang, whose interDistrikt photography, Diaries of Water (a nuanced pseudo-epic on the founding of the Assembly, told from the perspective of the ocean, and sometimes running counter to what was popularized by CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION) and Humans of Witness (a long-running interview project) have made them a darling of both people and aethnographers.
The longest-serving Revolutionist, and the most faithful adherent of the system, is Anagram Vho, who after CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION’s dissolution took on the task of ‘balancing’ religious influences from the Covenant. Sometimes accused of religious persecution, Rose views religion as a unwelcome hegemony and a shadow power structure that goes against the ideals of the Assembly.
Footnotes
The Assembly is not as impossible as it might seem. Much of its struggle, especially towards agricultural independence, is inspired by the story of Marinaleda, a village in Spain that came upon a different and sustainable way of doing things. The tale of Denmark’s Freetown Christiana also makes an appearance in shaping how events develop once such communities encounter greater economic systems, especially tourism.
The economy is a greatly accelerated version, and more communitarian-anarchist version of the successful co-op economies that Vietnam is trialing; they have seen significant advances since the first implementations.
As for CTRL + ALT + REVOLUTION, someone new to anarcho-punk bands only needs to glance at the relevant Wikipedia entry: “Many anarcho-punks are pacifists (e.g. Crass and Discharge) and therefore believe in using non-violent means of achieving their aims. These include nonviolent resistance, refusal of work, squatting, economic sabotage, dumpster diving, graffiti, culture jamming, ecotage, freeganism, boycotting, civil disobedience, hacktivism and subvertising. Some anarcho-punks believe that violence or property damage is an acceptable way of achieving social change (e.g. Conflict). This manifests itself as rioting, vandalism, wire cutting, hunt sabotage . . .and in extreme cases, bombings.”
. . . and then compare the ethos of these bands, and those of movements like Fluxus and Happenings in the 1970s, to that of modern-day hacktivists. There are almost too many to list; reality ranges from those designing anti-surveillance facewear to those operating in the tiers of Wikileaks, DkD[||, and the Cult of the Dead Cow; in fiction, Tim Morgan’s 2019 novel Infinite Detail provides a fascinatingly plausible look at one such movement in the not-too-distant future.
Punks never die: they only go briefly in and out of style.
