Witnesspedia
child:
title: The Dandelion Republic
slug: dandelion
parent: 15338
summary: The Dandelion Republic (formerly Lille-Hygge) is a microDistrikt
keywords: worldbuilding, participatory
image: https://edgeryders.eu/uploads/default/original/2X/7/7652edd3b02e8d76b305cbe85bc1c77f7c24afc5.jpeg
The Dandelion Republic (microDistrikt) {style=“color: #fff; text-shadow: 2px 2px #000; padding-bottom: .4rem; font-weight: bold;” class=“leading-tight text-4xl”}
The Dandelion Republic (formerly Lille-Hygge) is a microDistrikt. {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”}
“From now, until the end of days, we shall be as the dandelion: adaptable, resilient, and driven by the winds of our ambitions to take root in whichever soil receives us.”
- Lynn Jirō, poet, one of the seven hundred thousand co-founders of the Dandelion Republic
The Dandelion Republic (formerly Lille-Hygge) is a microDistrikt forked out of Hygge and into unclaimed Avantgrid space. During the Great Reset, the key question was how best to go about ensuring the fairest possible society; while Hygge settled on a model inspired by social democracies, the Dandelion Republic is an exploration of the other possibility: a data-heavy implementation of Communism, where goods are moved around almost entirely by fiat, and with the State Machine presiding over it all. “More Big Mother than Big Brother”, as the saying goes in the DR.
Close to a million citizens inhabit the DR, each carefully monitored by the State Machine. Every possible piece of data - from rationing history to movement patterns to message logs - are collected and used by the State Machine to better optimize the functioning of the DR. This is an extraordinarily compute-intensive task, and for this reason the DR maintains tight border control - there is an upper bound to the number of people it will allow inside at any given moment.
DR is thus embraced some as the greatest experimental policy experiment in Witness’s history; others see it as a vain attempt to overcome the Kleinman Paradox by aiming for a perfect predictive system. Citizens of DR willingly carry out the State Machine’s orders, while outsiders, such as the Hygian architect Patrick Ayademi, have reviled it as a ‘Panopticon of sheep’. Some conspiracy theorists argue that the State Machine is so all-powerful in the DR that it has somehow managed to factor in the people themselves as processing nodes that help it arrive at decisions - akin to training an ant colony to solve sums - but this is often dismissed by the aethnographers of our times.
Control arguments aside, the Dandelion Republic has repeatedly shown itself to be very capable of tackling externalities: its divers, marines and sailors have mapped out a significant portion of the world around Witness, and it trails only marginally behind Libria in the sophistication of its seafaring technology. Dandelion scientists, bent on increasing the State Machine’s computer capacity, have created the ternary transistor and associated mathematics; provided their citizens with a high-speed, wireless information interchange network, using a highly resilient peer-to-peer architecture that can extend State Machine services to everyone; and have now established brief contact with Byzantium, one of the oldest cities of Project Viking.
POLITICAL HISTORY
The Dandelion Republic began as a fork from Hygge. Informally titled Little Hygge, it gained very real presence when 700,000 citizens signed a petition supporting a planned economy. Taking core ideas from pre-Sundering Marxism, the central argument of Proposition 113 was that enough compute power existed within the State Machine to observe exchanges and citizens well enough to overcome the traditional inefficiencies of a highly centralized system. Thus, it reasoned, most goods and services could be moved around entirely by fiat, and those willing to submit to reasonable wealth caps would be able to build a society that was more equitable to all.
Many saw this as a logical way to prevent the kind of class divisions that had plagued Denton’s administration and society. Famously, the Social Reconstruction and Historical Analysis Project, a group comprised of aethnographers and Hyggian politicians, drew from their historical simulations and the work of a pre-Sundering philosopher named James C. Scott, and led repeated, public counterarguments to this proposal. The debates and the political hold-up angered many who merely wanted a return to stability. CIVICSMOD programmers Gregor Samsidel, Janet Samsidel-Chiang, Erwin Lugoda, Peter Kleinman and Antonia Rybakov, in conference with the State Machine, proposed a split. This was then sanctioned and a cluster of unclaimed Avantgrid islands allocated for the new microDistrikt.
Of the 700,000 who signed, most relocated to the new region as co-founders (note that DR refers to ‘seven hundred thousand founders’, but this is apocryphal). Led primarily by Aethnographer Tomas Dieters, they drew from Denton’s original contractualist bent to formulate and sign a social contract that would apply for all citizens of the new area. This contract calls for each citizen to co-operate with each other and the State Machine to:
a) ensure sufficient housing, food, drink for everyone
b) create public spaces and services equally to serve everyone
c) build an economic model that ensured that every citizen would have meaningful work and make a contribution to society
d) co-operate on looming externalities, whether physical (ie: climate change or resource scarcity) or cultural
e) to take no more than their just share in rewards from any of the activities above, and to institute and uphold a body of laws that are human-readable and apply equally to all
This contract, rather fittingly, is titled What We Owe to Each Other, and is the State Machine’s overall mandate for governing the Dandelion Republic.Because of the ever-mutating nature of fairness and morality, the State Machine conducts mass polls every year to better understand what the citizens of the Dandelion Republic consider to be fair; these polls have become semi-famous for their philosophical problems, especially those that involve Trolley Problems.
Those who violate the contract, or those whose ideas of fairness seem severely out of harmony with the whole, are asked to board the Migrant Train for a Distrikt more to their liking - a form of automated ostracism.
ECONOMY
The Dandelion Republic has historically objected to aethnographers who attempt to understand its economy by conventional measures. Dieters, in drafting DR’s social contract, famously noted the flaws of previous planned economies in aiming for ‘exuberance, plenty and wealth’ - which he felt skewed the metrics of analysis, which in turn led to failed decisions.
The economy of the Dandelion Republic optimizes for zero long-term unemployment, and to enable sufficient goods and services available for all inhabitants. Unnecessary destruction of resources is eliminated, since duplication, overproduction and competition are prevented.
To underpin this, the State Machine operates the Dandelion Time Bank, which awards time credits to citizens according to work done. Work can be voluntary (such as tidying up a space) or based on a selection of daily ‘quests’ provided by the Bank; all work is credited, including traditionally unpaid labor, community services and care work.
These credits can then be used as a currency. The value of items and services are pegged to the amount of time credits used for their creation. A minimum number of time credits are available to all every day and there is a rolloff, past which there are steeply diminishing returns on work done - thus, there is a cap on the amount of time credits anyone can hold at any given time, and leisure is baked into the currency system. To catch what it cannot monitor, the Bank maintains a peer exchange where citizens can also gift time credits to each other. This allows public donation for those whose work is difficult to quantify by the number of hours spent on it, or those who refuse to charge for their work. Any donations past the cap are added to the pool of time credits shared out to citizens the next day; thus, outporings of public generosity lead to better outcomes for all.
Trade with other Distrikts is handled by the Bank on behalf of the DR. Typically, currencies from other Distrikts are converted to goods and services that are then brought in on the cargo compartments of the Migrant Train. The DR has a thriving technology community that specializes in public-interest software and hardware: these are often monetized by the Bank for sale to other regions. A money-time exchange is being currently trialed.
THE ARTS
Special attention has to be given to the DR’s arts and culture, as the DR themselves do. The reigning school of thought within the DR is the aethnographer Eschaton’s thesis that the State and the art it produces are intertwined: art, according to Eschaton, acts as propaganda whether meant to or not: it either preserves social order by agreeing with the aesthetic sensibilities of the State or nudges society towards new orders by rebelling against said aesthetic sensibilities.
Thus the DR spends significant compute on incentivizing works that broadly act to illustrate or expand on themes within the social contract of the DR. These incentives present themselves far outside poetry and paintings - architecture, being viewed as a physical representation of ideas, sees a great deal of investment and oversight.
While public donations are widely touted, much of the support, network-building and equipment come from the Dieters Cultural Seed Fund, which uses State Machine data and insights to fund what it calls “new expressions of our Republic”:
“It is inevitable that there will be a movement in search for a new “expression” of this Republic. Our project is unique in its nature and social contract; it also provides new perspectives on society and humanity. In a society based on the premises of “just and sufficient” arts will reflect that too. To capture the honest essence and core of our beliefs is no easy task, but it will be all the more noble for that. This “search for the essential” within ourselves also lets us understand the currents of society in a way that we can discuss, debate, and come to a consensus on; a map of society not just visible to the State Machine and its data scientists, but to all.” - Tomas Dieters, curator, founder of the Dieters Cultural Seed Fund
However, art is subjective, and herein lies the tension - there is also a significant cabal loosely known as the post-expressionists who see it as their duty, right or calling to interrogate and deconstruct. Much of the funding for post-expressionists come from outside the DR.
In recent times, as the DR becomes more independent, the expressionists have evolved into something that other districts criticize as a propaganda machine. Poets such as Lynn Jirō are increasingly seen as ambassadors of the DR’s ambition to become a full Distrikt in its own right. Within the DR, noted post-expressionists and critics of expressionism are sometimes insulted as ‘parasites’ - being within the system, supported by the system, and yet speaking out against it.
TOPOLOGY
Much of the Dandelion Republic is a work-in-progress, but due to the surveillance requirements inherent to the system, the DR’s population is arranged in tightly knit clusters across two islands titled Root and Stem. Root houses the majority of the industry, the better to keep potential pollutants away from residential areas. Stem contains agriculture, public parks, provision hubs and public housing (there is no private housing in DR). Bridges and ferries stitch the two together. Expansion is ongoing into a third and fourth island, titled Flower and Seed respectively: Flower is meant to be a separate region for scientific experimentation and education, and Seed is a rapidly expanding naval hub.
NOTABLE PEOPLE
Even in a Distrikt where everyone is equal, exceptional efforts resonate. Tomas Dieters, primary compiler of the social contract, is one of the highest authorities recognized in the DR; the Dieters Cultural Seed Fund is named in his honor. Dieters also enjoys a rare status as a guest policymaker in neighboring Hygge, out of respect for his skills.
R. Cahn, Governor-Servant of the Dandelion Bank, has been a steady pioneer and refiner of the DR’s system of exchange. While the State Machine maintains the in-Distrikt exchange and the price of goods, Cahn oversees the infrastructure (both physical and otherwise) in implementing and maintaining an equal quality of service for all.
