One of the other devs asked about the description of the “Independent States of America” in the following passage. They asked if allowing for a southern succession was offensive or inappropriate. How does this read to others?
…
2077 - The American realignment
Following the third contested election in a row, the new governor of Florida declared that the state would no longer send taxes to DC, and began restricting the flow of goods from its coastal and space ports until its preferred candidate was seated as president. DC mobilized the military and national guard, and the governor of Florida demanded the backing of neighboring states. Internal conflicts within the military ranks began to rise as states began taking sides. Alabama’s governor immediately took the side of Florida and other states began forming alliances. Texas and Oklahoma declared joint neutrality. Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia allied in rejection of Flordabama, despite recognizing many of the same grievances and demanded a peaceful solution. Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, WV, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska formed a block in support of the US, as did New England. Mississippi and Louisiana were the most conflicted until an attack on US-loyal soldiers at Camp Powell began a civil war, and Louisiana and Mississippi joined the Texan alliance. The result was a transfer of power from the federal government to four regional state collectives:
Pacifica, made up of the west-coast: California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona.
Oyate Ni’na Tan’ka Makobdaye ka Heitanka (ONTMH), made up of Colorado, The Dakotas, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, and parts of Alberta, Iowa, Manitoba, Minnesota, Missouri, and Saskatchewan.
The Independent States of America, made up of most of the coastal south: Florida, Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc.
The United States of America: the remaining states of the north east and central continent remained within the United States, although many formed regional state compacts and much of the authority of the federal government was shifted to these states and their state collectives.
States are an absurd construct in modern times, and even more absurd in a solarpunk context. Borders are often based on geographical choke-points for military engagement rather than the culture, language, and peoples who live in the region torn by the arbitrary lines of martial conquest. Two communities that share a river are not naturally different peoples because they live on opposite banks. They have to coordinate their activities to properly manage their shared biome, and that’s complicated by the existence of states that seek to divide them. During long stretches of peace, the land resists these unnatural constraints. Treaties that govern territories are dead as the tree pulp they’re written on, but rivers and mountains are alive, and their erosion and meandering redraws maps and cultural regions, creating political enclaves out of river bends.
And that’s the best case when it comes to border logic: often borders are drawn based on invisible longitudinal lines chosen because they’re a nice round number in a numerical system invented by Babylonian astronomers. They are treaties based on the expected resource extraction to be shared by competing warlords, again with no consideration for the cultural and biological regions these compromises compromise. The state is an affront to nature.
I generally agree. Is there anything in specific you might suggest that would improve the writing?
I’m not sure if it matters, but the events described above occur (in the game lore) around 50 years into our future, and 50 years before the time at which the game takes place. So by the 2120s, all of these territories have open borders. Their distinctions exist primarily in the form of cultural identities and the legislative structure that exists at the organizing level between province governments and planetary/interplanetary governance.
If that stills sounds like bullshit to you, you should know that your attitude is a mainstream political opinion within the game. But as it applies to the writing, let me know if there’s any specific change you think would improve the passage above.
I apologize that I don’t have a simple specific change to offer; my criticism is of the underlying basis of the narrative.
The idea of southern states seceding successfully is absurd. The shenanigans that under-represent BIPOC voters in those states disappear when you trade the ballot for the bullet, and militia LARPers are in for a rude awakening when confronted by veterans of the US military’s long history of recruiting minorities to fight their wars. Thinking of ‘the South’ as a monolithic culture, and white confederate culture as representative of that region is reductive and wrong. If you have to write a scenario that implies ethnic cleansing into your world building, a white racist attempt leading to a Fire on the Mountain situation seems much more plausible. The people of Atlanta, Birmingham, and New Orleans would not leave behind their hard-fought civil rights without a fight.
The proliferation of the North Virginia Battle Flag in rural Indiana points to the real significance of southern secession fantasies. Renters in Austin and in Philadelphia are more similar to each other politically than they both are to home owners in Dixon, IL and Angola, LA. There’s no such thing as “Red” states and “Blue” states, those are merely symptoms of a much deeper divide between urban an rural people, and a product of their relative demographics within states. This tension isn’t unique to the United States and white supremacy; you can see it in the dynamic of Shi’a fundementalists in rural Iran brought into cosmopolitan Tehran to staff the morality police, or rural military units that were mobilized to massacre the 1989 movement after the Beijing commander refused. One can look at the decline and fall of Rome and the Bronze Age collapse as evidence that this tension dates back to the oldest Polis in existence.
It should also be said, the urban side of the divide has not always been the progressive force. The Kentucky foothills were once a hotbed of labor radicalism, Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery politics were typical of Illinois homesteaders, and Welsh miners eagerly aligned with the LGBT community to resist Thatcher’s capitalism.
Drawing the balkanization of America based on modern state borders is an easy shorthand to create fictional lands based on facile stereotypes of those states, but I feel there’s a missed opportunity here to do something more interesting.
For example, why not replicate the overlapping zones of the historical lands of indigenous peoples? It would be interesting to imagine a world where colonialism was a brief aberration in the millennia of stewardship of the land by people connected to it rather than exploiting it. To the plains people, for example, the story of petroleum civilization is told in allegory as a great fire that burned everything, but like the grasses of the prairie, the roots of return were too deep to destroy. A side effect of building lore on this base would be to familiarize your players with existing tribes and educate them on whose stolen land they live.
Another way of drawing world maps could be based on watersheds - in a region where states no longer exist, people still need to coordinate over land and water management. Instead of historical state lines, borders that still have importance are those drawn by nature. This may be inconvenient for splitting the familiar North American map into equal(ish) parts, but the largest zone, the Mississippi/Atchafalaya River Basin (MARB) could be sub-divided into large tributaries and their respective basins.
One of the advantages would be familiarizing your players with watershed geography, and their associated ecology. Instead of viewing land as calcified states, it might be more interesting to divide land into biomes, and familiarize them with the plants and animals they’re likely to encounter there.
It would also be an interesting exercise in imagining a post-state world, and how non-state organizations would operate and interact in that milieu. For example, the MARB council and the Pueblo of the Gulf could either coordinate or feud over the Delta they both claim stewardship over. How does the PG feel about the spaceport on the Nizuc peninsula? Does the launch debris safety committee of Nizuc Spaceport and the Guanahatabey Space Elevator in the Moon-Set Mountains have a cooperative relationship with the Pueblo del Golfo?
You could also use this structure to explore the theme of tension between urban and rural. For example, the watershed management councils would have to navigate the competing visions of large and populous arcologies at the river forks and the sparsely populated but upstream river highlands. How would this organization mediate between the interests of the two groups? If it was directly democratic, would the highlanders feel politically impotent compared to the more populous lowlanders? How far would the river people go to enforce their vision of water management on the culturally distinct stream tenders?
I love some of the work you’ve done to imagine a better future in this game, and I realize this is a large departure from some of the already established lore. I do think it has merit, as it not only envisions a better future, but also serves the meta-purpose of giving your players information that may be useful in building that future outside the game.
I love this, you summed up my thoughts on the south far better than I could have had I gone for it, and I really like both of these non-state solutions. I think there’s tremendous potential in them, and even if we keep the remnants of the states clinging on to different degrees in different areas, I really like the idea of overlapping, likely more important, systems of organization showing the transition to a post state world. I’ll talk with the others and see if we can at least add something around the watersheds, and if we can’t include it in the game I’m 100% saving it for my own writing. If we can do something with it, would it be okay if I reached out to discuss this? You’ve put a lot of thought into it and it’s the first time I’ve thought about organizing things this way.
I’m just the newest dev and the group has been working hard to finish the game manual so I don’t know how much we can change now but I’d be happy to at least add something on top of what’s there.
I don’t think this is a terribly big departure, honestly.
First, regarding the American south: I think there was a miscommunication somewhere. The game definitely doesn’t imply that the actual Confederate States of America reconstitutes itself. It just says that during the 70s, the US broke apart, and the result was a handful of regions that adopted their own identities with various levels of cooperation between themselves and other regions. The overall post was meant to ask if the language and the grouping of the south felt too similar to the historical civil war. But to be very clear: the southern states are still assumed to be democratic and pluralistic.
Second, this all happens about fifty years prior to when the game takes place. It’s mostly intended as historical context for what happens between our present and a future in which state power is far weaker everywhere than it is now. Borders are described as very permeable in the game, and far less defined. They exist primarily as a tool of distinguishing who is responsible for maintaining and supporting the health and protection of a territory.
It’s definitely not fully post-state. But the game is meant to be a flexible template. If you wanted to take a version of it and add to it the assumption that state boundaries were dissolved you could.
Also, dissolving state power completely is described as a central goal of the in-game Anarchist movement. I think it’d be interesting to describe one or more nations within the world adopting the anarchist position fully, and dissolving their own state. It’d be particularly interesting, I think, to envision how that would play out in a world where they’re the first (or second or so on) to do so, but they have neighbors who haven’t.
Anyway, I like all those ideas. Even if they’re not directly contained, the visions you’re describing seem to me to be a demonstration that the book is a useful prompt for brainstorming. I take it as a given that a lot of the ideas it inspires are based on noticing where the imagination of the world falls short. So I think this section is largely serving that function well enough that I’m happy to say it’s good enough as is.
They asked if allowing for a southern succession was offensive or inappropriate. How does this read to others?
I think as long as it’s not glorifying it (which, I mean, obviously you guys aren’t), I don’t really see how it could be offensive. I looked over the abbreviated history after reading your post here, and it’s clearly speculative fiction that’s trying to illustrate how humanity is going to transition away from our current mess, and it’s not unrealistic to anticipate that transition is going to be a little messy in the ways you’re describing. Maybe I’m biased since I’m personally a huge fan of alternate history fiction, but yeah, personally I don’t think offensive is something I would ever use to describe exploring an imperfect but improving future.
Inappropriate though, I guess that depends more on the vibe you’re going for. If you’re wanting this to be a pure escape where people don’t have to consider how this world got to their solarpunk utopia, I guess mentioning an ISA would be inappropriate. But if you’re going for a slightly more gritty vibe, where the world the characters live in was not an easy one to get to, then I think it gives nice flavor to the lore.
But that’s just my 2 cents.
I think that the complicated, messy aspects that you mention describe my general approach to this kind of writing, so I think it’s okay, then.
In my reading of it, it’s not in any way a justification for the original succession attempt. The intent was to describe how the US – the world’s premier empire and hegemon – transitioned into the status of a former world power (as every other world power eventually has), and this version of a breakup seemed believable. I think it works, but I’ll keep looking at comments and see if there are any suggestions for how it might be amended.
I will admit I wasn’t thrilled to see the ISA, but mostly put it off to the cyberpunk origins of the game (I think Shadow run has a similar region).
I don’t think the Confederacy had anything worth trying again, but I also get that there’s a lot of lore and glamorization around it that’ll mean there’ll always be someone who thinks it’s worth a second try.
I’ve also been only been in a few parts of that region a few times. I know it’s a diverse area with a lot of history and complexity and that opinions are all over the place. I’m skeptical you can discuss/conduct secession in the American south without dragging the lost cause mythos and it’s inherent racism and revisionism along with it. So even if people from all groups were largely in favor of secession, I’m uncertain as to how much confederate branding end up being included, especially in a more solarpunk world. It’s another of those things I don’t feel qualified to write about. I just don’t know the people well enough.
I think what I’d really like is to find a few people from the area with a different vision for what a solarpunk southeast could look like, and to break the sort of Confederacy default attached to the place.
All of that said, I think this is fairly mild and leaves room for changes in future drafts. I’d almost prefer a handwavy ‘the US broke up during the Global Climate Wars’ and we can add to it in future editions but I’m not against what’s here either.
