Near-Future/Sci-Fi Settings, Societies, Cultures, Histories

Then I guess the scenario itself is generally plausible?

I'm afraid I couldn't say. There comes a point, while reading your descriptions, that my eyes water over and my mind starts to wander. There's just too much fictional detail for me to process. But I don't notice anything that stands out as preposterous.

... Am I the weird one for thinking that that was as simplified as one could explain it without losing the most essential of information? I apologize nonetheless.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 20th 2022 at 3:26:33 PM

As you yourself likely remember, I too have a habit of writing massive walls of text in order to ensure I get across all relevant context.

But that wasn't a Wall of Text... was it?

On a side note, it depresses me that this thread barely sees any activity. Sure, I could go to AlternateHistory.com's Future History subforum, but it has a blanket ban on any discussion that involves "current politics".

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 21st 2022 at 10:28:00 PM

OK, alternate history brainstorming exercise!

"President Robert Kennedy." The assassination never happened, and he won the election. What are the implications?

I really want to help... but I have absolutely no idea what he's like. This sounds like it needs considerable knowledge about him and other political figures from that time, along with what the country was like and how Lyndon B. Johnson affected it after he took over the presidency.

And so I show my age. No one here remembers RFK? Seriously? Came up out of the Boston Democratic party political machine, was more idealistic than his brother John, served as JFK's Attorney General and went after the Mafia, was a heartfelt convert to civil rights (unlike JFK)? The wikipedia page is a pretty good summary.

Had he survived, he would have been running against Nixon.

FWIW, I'm not US-American to begin with, so even if he's someone that you expect someone from there to know at least a little bit about, I am far less likely to do so.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 25th 2022 at 5:07:16 PM

Another problem is that we seem to be the only two people still contributing to this thread.

That's true. Maybe we'd get more traffic if this thread was added to the Random Questions Thread's pinned post?

Oh hey, this seems like a good thread to post this. I've decided to overhaul the backstory in one of my sci-fi settings, and one major part of said backstory was a Second American Civil War breaking out sometime in the mid-21st century, and I wanted to extrapolate a bit from current trends. I want feedbax. :V (I was gonna post this in the dedicated Second American Civil War thread, but that's been dead for a while and I wasn't sure this laid strictly within the scope of that thread anyway).

Starting at the very near-future: the 2024 US election comes down to a Biden-Trump rematch; Biden narrowly wins re-election, mostly because Trump ignored his advisors and told the media that, if elected, he'd force Congress to amend the constitution and remove term limits so he could be President for Life. He, again, claims the election was stolen from him in the face of the evidence, but a year later he suffers a heart attack and dies, throwing the GOP into disarray. In the short-term, their ambitions of national takeover lie in tatters, but in the long-term they succeed at their goal of kneecapping the federal government via their takeover of the SCOTUS.

Fast-forward twelve years - the combination of a climate crisis causing dust storms in the midwest and flooding in the south, the collapse of the Texas oil industry and state governments turning red states into their personal theocratic fiefdoms - that an increasingly ineffectual federal gov't has been powerless to stop - has lead to a mass exodus from the red states, and they float the idea of secession to give them the power to set up hard borders to stop people from leaving. Fears of civil war have been boiling beneath the surface for a while by now - rich businesses, almost all of whom have relocated to blue states (because that's where the money is), have started hiring private armies to protect themselves, while the people of urban California formed the California Self-Defence Force (C-SDF) to defend themselves in the event of attack from rural areas, which the GOP decries as a 'rebel militia' despite being, on paper, no different from the dozens of right-wing 'militias' in the red states.

In response to the threats of secession, a populist 'Green Democrat' is elected to the white house, who promises to restore the power of the federal gov't to deal with the climate crisis. This just makes the secessionist crowd double-down, and the military fractures. The civil war is short, but deadly - the secessionists initially have the upper hand, as they sweep through the Carolinas, rural Maryland and Virginia mostly unopposed, before marching on Washington DC and taking over the Capitol, forcing the president-elect to flee to New York. The mutineers are bogged down in DC and Baltimore, however, as they must deal with local resistance movements organizing guerrilla attacks. The loyalist military - both state and federal - waffles on firing back at them, leaving hastily-organized resistance cells and foreign volunteers to do most of the work, while the mutineers receive reinforcements from sympathizers elsewhere in the country and abroad, until eventually the fault lines stabilize.

Meanwhile, in the west, a minor insurrection attempt leads to the C-SDF unexpectedly joining forces with the corporate armies to root out any southern secessionist sympathies in California... and eventually Nevada, Oregon, Washington and New Mexico. They decide the federal gov't has run its course and they need to scrap it all and start from scratch, and since California has now become the richest state in the country by a long way thanks to the renewable energy industry, they actually have the clout to pull it off. China, seeing a golden opportunity to further destabilize the West, supports the new Calexit movement.

Ultimately, the federal gov't reaches a compromise with them - the territories that the Calexiteers have projected themselves over become the 'West America Special Autonomous Region', or the WestAm SAR for short. In exchange, they help the military root out the southern secessionists from DC. Despite this, the secessionists still remain firmly in control of the south, forcing the federal gov't to concede and let them keep their territory. They name their new country the RUSA - the Real United States of America.

Over time, WestAm steadily accrues more and more wealth and influence, while the DC government becomes a powerless rubber-stamp body - the President and Congress essentially becomes the Western equivalent of the Emperor of Japan and the Imperial Court under the Shogunate, while the devolved WestAm government - complete with its own President - becomes the Bakufu. Internationally, 'WestAm' becomes synonymous with the USA as a whole. The RUSA meanwhile devolves into North Korea, spending all of its money on its military and (horribly inefficient, barely-functioning) surveillance expenses while its people starve. It actually replaces North Korea as the global boogeyman, as the original North Korea fell apart a while ago (the resulting refugee crisis was what helped contribute to a Chinese economic collapse that nearly toppled the CCP). When, over a hundred years later, the governments of the world form the World Sol System Organization (the precursor to the Federation of Organized Systems) to facilitate administration over space habitats, the RUSA was the only state that didn't sign on.

Interesting, though I wonder about the impact of the events leading up to the Second American Civil War and the conflict itself on the rest of the world. And whether the European Union didn't stagnate and even backslide as well due to its own internal and external pressures. And IRL China is expected to begin a constant decline from 2030-ish simply due to its already ongoing demographic crisis and economic troubles, hence why it's been escalating its saber-rattling towards Taiwan lately (after 2030, China would constantly grow weaker militarily).

Edited by MarqFJA on Jul 1st 2022 at 4:18:49 PM

Dont take the the wrong way, but it reads like a progressive political karmic justice fantasy.

Maybe you're right; I'm not too proud to admit some of that might have seeped in, since I'm still kinda mad about *cough* certain events.

Which parts specifically crossed the line into fantasy, though? My guess is it's either the part about California forming its own military or the part where the CCP nearly collapsed (though if Marq is to be believed, that might be less implausible than some would imagine). Maybe the bit about the oil industry, but I didn't think that was too implausible - my logic was just that renewables eventually became more economically viable than fossil fuels, and the switch was further hastened by the climate crisis becoming very real and very close-to-home in a way that was impossible to ignore. Or is it the part where Trump had a heart attack? I don't wish death on him, but I do genuinely think that his party being thrown into disarray is a logical result of his sudden demise, given the personality cult he's created.

I should probably mention, on that note, that WestAm wasn't exactly a progressive paradise - it's still heavily influenced, if not controlled outright, by vast tech and energy concerns, and they basically took over the C-SDF after deciding that they'd Outlived Their Usefulness. But next to the RUSA, they were the lesser of two evils.

I haven't thought much about Europe, tbh. I had floated the idea that Poland and Hungary split off from the EU and try to form their own bloc, effectively replacing a weakened Russia as the main Western European nemesis (Russia is still kicking, but is dealing with some internal issues as a result of the long-term fallout of the Ukraine invasion).

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Jul 1st 2022 at 5:59:39 PM

Mostly just how badly the Red states do, compared to Blue states. They do have some things going for them (like their appeal to large corporations), which is how they survive.

Red states would not turn into such terrible places as you describe. The states with the strongest economies are not solely Democratic, and I do not believe that Republican states would immediately turn into dystopic cesspits.

According to USN news, the top five stable economies are Utah (R), Colorado (D), Washington (D), Idaho (R), Massachusetts (D). And if you were going by biggest economies in general, that would be New York (D), California (D) and Texas (R).

That's a fair point. My thinking was that this is a very staggered-out process, akin to the division of the Koreas - at first, both the Koreas were relatively equal (IIRC the North was actually better than the South at one point in its early years), but over the course of decades they drifted into the forms we know today.

Unless you're referring to the initial decline that happened before the Second Civil War, in which case... yeah, maybe I overdid it with the description. I still think those those three things (climate crisis, the collapse of an entire industry and repressive policies) would be enough to provoke an exodus, even if it's not the majority of people, and plenty of businesses would probably stick around. In that context the threats of secession to close the borders are probably an overreaction, but not one I'd consider out-of-character.

I may as well mention that the RUSA doesn't contain all the red states - the USA and WestAm keep most of the midwest, including Idaho and Utah (because my understanding was that Utah has its own ecletic brand of local politics that is often at odds with the other red states). The only state in that list that does join the RUSA is Texas - in fact, because there's a lot of space infrastructure in Texas and Florida, they actually set up a space habitat before WestAm does (even if they had to borrow money from Russia to do it), while WestAm had to build a new launch facility in Arizona basically from scratch (this is at least fifty years later, by the way).

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Jul 1st 2022 at 5:18:20 PM

I've read a recent online article about how the German government is now gripped with concern over the possibility of the far right (i.e. neo-Nazis and similar ilk, in Germany's specific case) actually coming to power should the establishment fail to deal with the impending energy crisis during the upcoming winter due to Russia drastically reducing the flow of natural gas through NordStream 1, and that reminded me of how Europe in generally has been seeing a persistent rise in the influence of the far right across Europe.

So that got me thinking... This could actually help with my earlier scenario for the emergence of a Post-Soviet Reunion, by having the same disasters that savage Europe be the catalyst for far-right parties quickly taking control of their respective governments, or at least becoming influential enough that the most successful non-far right politicians are the ones that curry their favor. Since racism is common among the far right, and most of my Post-Soviet Reunion's countries are dominated by Slavic ethnicities, it wouldn't be unreasonable for western Europe's politicians to pin the blame for the EU's ills on the "Slavs" (lumping Hungarians, Romanians and Greeks in that category for convenience, despite only the Romanians having even the flimsiest justification for being considered "Slavic"), providing an even stronger justification for the "new western betrayal" narrative.

Bonus points if the western governments, after eventually shucking off the far right's yoke, keep dodging the issue and insisting on letting bygones be bygones in the East-West relations because in their minds, accepting the guilt means accepting an obligation to pay massive reparations for both the damages caused by their predecessors' favoritism and the many acts of terrorism that had been conducted by western European nationals during the far right era in the name of "revenge against the Slavs for betraying the West", and risking widespread unrest from their own constituents over having to pay said reparations instead of focusing on domestic issues.

What do you think?

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 10th 2022 at 2:41:52 PM

I know the idea of a corporation that has as much power as a nation state is a trope as old as time, but I want to ask about the "humble" mega corp being scaled up to galactic heights whether as a single tera-corp or as a conglomerate of megas under a libertarian style of government.

Likewise I also want to ask about corp's that straight up run their businesses like governments, be it Democratic co-ops, dynastic monarchies or the usual imperial flavors of cyperpunk corpos.

We've had this conversation before (back in 2015). To quote one of the tropers there: "Look at real world examples - most companies DON'T want to run a lot of day to day things; it doesn't generate revenue etc. So they leave all the hideous stuff to governments."

Corporations are really good at making stuff and selling things for a profit. They really aren't very good at administering populations. A corporation might become as powerful or more powerful than a government, but the government would still be there because it's very useful for corporations to have around.

The underlying reality is that any corporation in a position to replace a government would become a government, since it's easier to just tax citizens than it is to market things to a customer base.

Any feedback on this?

Might want to tag ~Morning Star 1337 since it's been so long, and they might not have this thread on their watchlist.

I checked the response. FWTW the context around my inquiry is to have four intergalactic empires. One of which being the aforementioned Tera Corp. A company town upscaled to parodic heights, basically.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jan 24th 2023 at 8:50:35 AM

@Marq: That sort of thing has happened in the past, so I don't find it implausible. Heck, we basically have that attitude toward colonialism today. Popular feelings of anger and bigotry don't go away with a change in administration, so I would imagine that ordinary people in each region continue to have negative stereotypes of each other well after the far-right regimes fall from power.

I'd imagine a megacorporation that got sufficiently powerful would tend to turn the government into a puppet state rather than become a nation itself if you will. This does happen in real life.

The nation would aesthetically appear to be a normal country and present itself as such. They wouldn't call themselves "the corporate state" or anything like that. However, it would be one whose government was quite keen on keeping the wheels of industry turning.

This is generally how things would tend to go for a lot of NGO superpowers, I imagine.

Also an "apolitical" organization can become political. For example, a gangster can become a terrorist or a revolutionary, and then become an evil emperor.