Note to You-Know-Who-You-Are: Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about the other thing; I just felt an urge to write this down now.
The Overall Setting
Right now, I think I'll have this all happen in the 26th century. Or, as the people who live there call it, the 126th century, because most of Earth has adopted the Holocene Calendar by then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar
The most important aspect of the scenario is the way the economy is run, so let's get right to that.
The Basic Economics
This part of the scenario is taken from what I posted during the recent discussion of economic policies over in the Random Thread, in this post: https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=73986#p73986
To save you the click, here are the important parts.
Of course, under such a system, there would have to be special guidelines for cases where something starts out as a purely personal project and then turns into an effectively "commercial" or at least economically relevant thing so gradually the people involved don't even notice.Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Aug 28, 2023 7:31 am [P]erhaps I might post a rough first draft of a proposed solution to the problem of how to run an economy.
[...]
First, all economic entities - what a capitalist economy would call "businesses" - are legally owned by the public. The public retains all ultimate rights to exercise control over them, and to reap the benefits, if any, of their activities.
However, that is not interpreted as meaning that the people in charge of economic entities - which I'll call "EEs" for the rest of this post - are selected or appointed by "the state", or "the government", or something or someone like that. Instead, they can be chosen in many different ways. Perhaps elected by employees, or by customers, or by suppliers, or by the local public where their EE is active, or perhaps, if the EE is seen as especially important, by the legislature of a larger area. Or by any kind of combination of those groups. There might be enough variation in the details of this process that no two EEs get their managers picked in the exact same way, or grant their managers, internally, the exact same amount of authority over internal decisions.
At the same time, there is still a certain amount of space for what capitalists would call "entrepreneurship". This happens in the way new EEs are initially set up.
There are a number of public organizations, institutions, agencies, and so on, that have the authority to authorize new EEs. Individuals, or small groups of individuals, can bring proposals for new EEs to any such institution. If one of those institutions rejects their proposal, they can try another one. If an institution approves a proposal for a new EE, it also provides what, in a capitalist economy, would be called the "seed capital" for the EE.
Now, if you, or you and a small group of people, get approval for a new EE, then you, or you and your small group, get to be in charge of that EE for five (5) years. During that time, you can only be removed from that position in really exceptional circumstances. If it should turn out that you really are the kind of brilliant, dedicated, driven, visionary entrepreneur-hero type that capitalist propagandists love to go on and on about, then you can work your magic during those five years, and hopefully create, or inspire others to create, a lot of great new things for the world. There might even be an unwritten, informal custom that if your first five years are seen as a success, you get re-appointed for as long as you want, or until people get sick of you, afterwards.
In such a system, it would probably be unavoidable that there would also be an unofficial, or perhaps downright illegal, part of the economy which would be a lot more decidedly capitalist. This factor, together with possible high salaries for managers, or for skilled professionals, would still lead to certain inequalities in wealth. To keep that kind of thing from getting out of hands, there would be a hard, non-negotiable upper cap on how much wealth each individual would be allowed to own - perhaps 10 million 2023 Euros or US dollars, adjusted for inflation and converted into applicable currencies. Own more stuff than that, and it gets confiscated, no ifs and no buts.
The process for getting new EEs approved might sound bureaucratic and complicated, but it isn't really any more complicated than getting the money to start a new business if you don't have it yourself would be in our time.
Politics
In the scenario, the world is united, under something like the constitution I posted in this thread: https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1221. This time, it would take up too much space to re-post the whole thing here, so you'll have to follow the link yourself. I have some important notes, though.
First, the version of the constitution posted in that thread leaves out some parts, most importantly Chapter 3 - Basic Human Rights and Fundamental Legal Principles. Those parts are supposed to be in there; I just haven't written them yet. And I might never do that, because, for instance, in the case of basic rights and legal principles, I think there will probably be future developments in cultural and social terms on that front that are basically impossible to predict from our time. However, in line with the economic system described above, Chapter 3 doesn't guarantee property rights in anything beyond personal belongings.
Second, I'm having second thoughts about Nairobi as the capital. In the scenario, climate change might have made what is now Kenya completely uninhabitable. I'll probably move the capital to somewhere less tropical, but still safely above sea level.
Third, I think I'll replace the President with an Executive Council along the lines of the Council I described in this post: https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=15168#p15168. To quote:
Regional and local governments have similar Councils.Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 4:03 pm A while ago, I had a few very rudimentary ideas about government in an SF project of my own that never got anywhere. At the core of it was a Council. [...]
Anyway, what was special about the Council was that it didn't have a single head or chief or chair or anything. Instead, Council members would take turns at being Councillors-on-duty. A shift as Councillor-on-duty might take 8 hours if you're generous to the Councillors, or 12 hours if you're less generous, though of course in a space habitat, the number of hours in a day might be different. The Councillor-on-duty would be obliged to stay awake and fully alert for their whole shift, and would spend the time in some kind of command center somewhere, waiting for things to happen. They would be expected to defer anything that's not too urgent to the next Council meeting, but would be authorized to make decisions on behalf of the whole Council in an emergency. Mainly, Councillors would appear in the story whenever the main characters would encounter a crisis that might potentially affect their whole political entity, in which case the main characters would contact headquarters and get more or less helpful instructions on what to do from the Councillor-on-duty.
The main advantage of this system over the way most countries currently do things in real life would be that, if an important decision would need to be made in a real hurry, there would never be any need to wake anyone up first.
By the time of the scenario, the Constitution of the United Earth has been in force for somewhere between 100 and 150 years.
There is still some opposition to the general political and economic setup of the United Earth, often from descendants of political camps already active in our times, but it's pretty marginal. Anarchists, religious conservatives or fundamentalists, nationalists of the larger dissolved former nations states, and even people wanting to return to capitalism all exist, but those are all fairly eccentric positions. People in favor of stricter environmental measures than the ones described below are a more serious political force, though still far from a majority.
Symbols
Since many of the founders of the United Earth saw the United Nations as a failed project which they didn't really want to imitate, they did not adopt the UN flag, though they did keep the sky blue/white color scheme. The flag of the United Earth in the scenario has a sky blue background, on which the words "United Earth" are written in Chinese calligraphy and Arabic calligraphy, in white. (Yes, I kind of like the idea of trolling certain people a bit, how did you guess?) The official logo has the same basic design, but with a horizontal ellipse rather than a rectangle as the background.
The anthem of the United Earth is a very sappy, sentimental song which is still seen as genuinely moving by some older people, but which many members of the younger generations see as one big cheezapalooza. I haven't come with most of it yet. It might be cheesy and sentimental, but not so cheesy and sentimental that someone as unskilled at writing songs as me could come up with it.
That said, it starts with the lines
So long we dreamed
So long we fought
and ends with the line
A world where we won't let you down
repeated once.
Environmental Matters
Environmental protection is taken a lot more seriously in the scenario than in our time. There is still a lot of environmental damage, and climate change is still re-shaping the world, with sea levels still rising. However, in a lot of places, the environment has recovered somewhat from the worst damages of our time or the times between our time and the time of the scenario.
Environmental measures in the scenario are mostly based on the scientific study of environmental impacts, not on deep-green romanticism. So, for instance, living in places with high population densities is usually encouraged rather than discouraged. Expect these places to look like some types of solarpunk art, though.
People usually live in fairly cramped quarters; there is none of what TV Tropes calls "Friends Rent Control". Outside the big apartment blocks, a lot of houses that were originally built for individual middle- or upper class families or as duplexes have been subdivided and further subdivided so that they now consist mostly of what our time would call ADUs or granny flats.
Very few people have their own cars - in some, though not all, places that's outright banned - but there still are a lot of (electric) cars around: ambulances, delivery vans, food trucks, take-craftspeople-to-work vans, and so on. Some people try to work to further reduce the number of cars. The cars don't fly. Most, but not all, places have banned self-driving cars.
Public transportation and cycling are very commonly used. In lower density areas, share taxis are really big.
Passenger air travel is still fairly commonly used, though. People haven't really found a good replacement for it yet. Regular tourism has been mostly replaced by visiting friends and relatives in different parts of the world.
The meat and dairy industries of our time have almost completely disappeared, to some extent - but only to some extent - replaced by the production of artificial alternatives. Many places have completely banned the farming of animals. Many others haven't, but even there, it's a lot less common than in our time. There are ongoing political debates about a global ban, but the proponents, though vocal, are not a majority. Eating insects and spiders is still legal in most places.
Which brings us to
Food
A few people in the places that allow it still eat actual vertebrate animal meat. The rest of humankind is about evenly divided into those who eat artificial meat and those who don't. In many places, eating insects and spiders is fairly popular, though.
Cuisine has moved boldly onward from our time, innovating fusions, fusions of fusions, and fusions of fusions of fusions. There's a lot more variety in what individual people prefer to eat than in our time.
A lot more people than in our time care about eating in healthy ways, but there are also many other people who prefer unhealthy food. Some people see that last point as a serious problem, and spend a lot of time debating what should be done about it.
Both among many people who are into health food, and among some people who are not, it is popular to eat sliced, spiced, and often fried pieces of vegetables not the way we would eat regular meals, but the way we would eat potato chips.
Social Safety
The scenario has a fairly robust social safety net, though, because of the different basic setup of the economy, there's less need for it than in our time. If you have no other source of income, you get a certain amount of basic income. If you do have other sources of income, that income is partially, but only partially, subtracted from your basic income. Above a certain level of other income, you stop getting basic income.
Education is free. Well, to get pedantic, it is indirectly paid for by previous generations who got free education in their day. But higher education is less in demand than in the wealthier countries in our time, because EEs and the people in charge of them generally don't assume that, in order to do a job, you need to have a degree that focused on taking classes in subjects unconnected to what you have to do in your job. Besides, there are very few people left who think that there's something wrong with you if you spend your life in blue collar or service sector jobs, and the lives of people in such jobs aren't generally insufferable the way they were in our time, either.
That said, it is a lot more common, accepted, and respected than in our time to go to college later in life, after you've already worked in non-academic jobs for a while. Only about a quarter of all college students are what we would see as "college aged".
There's widespread consensus on the social safety net, partly because there aren't any billionaires who could spend their billions on funding anti-social-safety-net propaganda.
Demographic Matters
People with all kinds of physical characteristics live in large numbers almost everywhere where people live. It's a lot more common than in our time for someone to be, say, half Indonesian, one quarter indigenous American, one eight White European, one sixteenth Black African, and one sixteenth indigenous Siberian. As a result, to a visitor from our time, a crowd of random people might well look somewhat "odd", in a hard-to-describe way. (If any part of the scenario would ever somehow make it to any kind of screen that would probably make it difficult to find enough good actors and extras for all the characters in our time, but since that's not going to happen, there's no need to worry about it.)
White people are a lot less common than in our time, even in Europe and their traditional colonized areas. They no longer dominate any walk of life, and aren't overrepresented in important positions anymore, either. By the standards of the scenario, though not by the standards of our time, they are still somewhat overrepresented in some sports, some genres of popular culture traditionally associated with them, and some fields that might be of particular interest to them, such as the academic study of traditional European folklore.
Similarly, East Asia is no longer mostly populated, let alone dominated, by people who would look "stereotypically East Asian" to us.
About half of all people have physical features that would look Black to us. Most, but not all, of them also self-identify as such.
In terms of religion, there have been all kinds of developments I haven't thought about yet. Many people have abandoned the beliefs of their ancestors. Many others have made a point of rediscovering and reviving them. There might be some new arrivals on the scene. About one third of all people globally - a plurality - self-identify as Muslims, with varying degrees of observance. About one in six women globally wear the one or other kind of traditional Islamic head coverings, though with a lot more variations in style than in our time. There are, of course, some fundamentalists who don't accept those women who self-identify as Muslims but don't wear the one or other kind of traditional Islamic head coverings as being Muslims at all.
I'm seriously torn on how to handle disability in the scenario. On the one hand, it seems likely to me that by the time of the scenario, medical advances will have gotten very good at turning people with various disabilities into people without those disabilities. On the other hand, I'm generally all in favor of inclusion and representation, and that should of course include having a fair number of characters with various disabilities in a scenario like this. I think I'd rather err on the side of present-day inclusive representation than on the side of future plausibility.
Old age has not been beaten. Thanks to medical advances, people are a lot more likely than in our time to make it to 90, but they are not that much more likely than people in the richer parts of the world today to make it to 105.
Language
It will be generally assumed that characters are speaking some future variety of either English or some other language, which has been translated into the English of the early 21st century for the convenience of readers. Therefore, there shouldn't be any fancy future slang; if humanity makes it to that time, there wouldn't just be fancy new slang; there would be entirely new speech varieties.
Technology
I'm not imagining all that much new technology. Some medical advances, some advances in food production, some advances in energy-related technologies, some other stuff that wouldn't be too difficult to predict from our time; but not much more than that.
I admit that that's not very plausible; but I want to focus on social, cultural, and economic stuff in this scenario.
However, as a bit of a personal indulgence, I'll allow myself to break the laws of physics and have an early form of interstellar travel, as something still fairly new at the time. It shouldn't be the main focus of the scenario, though; main characters should either not be involved in it at all, or, at most, work as part of ground crews. I'm mainly having this aspect of the scenario so that I can have one other aspect of the scenario described later.
Oh, and in the scenario, humanity can be divided about equally into people who use "smart" household devices at home, and people who don't. There are occasional calls for bans on such devices, but most decision makers think that banning something used by half of all people would be a bad idea.
Various Aspects of Life
Fashions have developed in a similar way to food (see above), except perhaps with even more new variations. There should never be too many characters wearing the same or similar clothes. The conventions of our times about who wears what kinds of clothes in which contexts have mostly broken down, except when it comes to religious garb, or to the kinds of work clothes that are simply more practical than any alternatives in specific workplace environments. Completely boring, conventional, and non-rebellious office workers might go to work dressed like late-20th-century punks.
Among most people, sex is at least as liberated as in most of those Western countries not named "USA" in our time; but there is also a substantial minority with religious conservative views which prefers a more restrictive approach to sexual matters. Outside the Religious Special Districts, they don't have the power to force their views on others, though.
Sex work is generally legal, except inside some of the Religious Special Districts. But in one crucial aspect, it is treated as different from other professions: There's a general expectation that sex workers who dislike doing sex work but find it difficult to leave should get more help with switching jobs from the rest of the world than, say, office workers in a similar situation.
Most (or perhaps all; I haven't decided that yet) of the drugs illegal in our time are legal, again except for some of the Religious Special Districts. Most of the ones that were illegal in our time have the same mandatory health warnings that tobacco has in some places in our time, though.
Differences in lifestyles between what our time calls the "Global North" and the "Global South" have disappeared, except for a few lingering cultural matters. In some ways, the "Global North" has become more like the "Global South"; in others, in "Global South" has become more like the "Global North".
People in the former "Global South" generally get more and better food, better working conditions, better physical infrastructure, and better health care than today. They live in buildings a lot more likely to have been built according to basic safety standards, and are therefore less likely to die in natural disasters, than in our time. Life in the former "Global South" is also, on average, for lack of a better word, more "orderly" than in our time.
At the same time, people in the former "Global North" live in much more cramped conditions than in our time, rarely ever have personal cars, and usually don't own any other luxury goods, either.
Phew. Deep breath. So far, this has probably been mostly something many left-wingers of our time would see as at least close to their own preferred Utopia. Unfortunately, there's one field where I personally simply don't think Utopian left-wing approaches can work, and where I'll therefore have to disappoint many of those people who might have liked this scenario so far. That field is...
Handling Crime
There is still a kind of public security force. It's structure started out as a compromise between some people opposed to all police forces and some people who saw them as necessary. So, unlike the police forces of our time, it is divided into two clearly distinct groups: praetors and lictors. I got the idea from this blog post by Bret Devereaux:
https://acoup.blog/2023/08/18/collectio ... -imperium/
The lictors are the "enforcement muscle" and get to actually do things, but they aren't allowed to do anything without a praetor telling them to do it.
Praetors are not simply the equivalent of "high-ranking" police officers of our time. No, their physical presence is absolutely required for the lictors to do anything at all. Lictors aren't allowed to go anywhere while on the job without a praetor present, and aren't allowed to do anything while on the job without a praetor explicitly telling them to do it, either. Therefore, there is, on average, one praetor for every three lictors.
Agreeing to take a job as a lictor means agreeing to a lifelong ban on working as a praetor, and vice versa.
To avoid misunderstandings: Unlike their namesakes in Ancient Rome, praetors have no role whatsoever in organizing or running the court system.
The relationship between praetors and lictors is often tense, and that's entirely by design: Praetors aren't supposed to be all that comfortable with letting lictors do things.
The more "technical" aspects of what we would call police work, such as detective work or the technological analysis of physical evidence, put praetors and lictors on a somewhat more equal footing, but even there, when it comes down to it, the praetors are clearly in charge.
What if the lictors, acting on orders from the praetors, actually arrest you?
First of all, the standard punishment for any crime that, by its very nature, can only be committed by people in a specific position in life, such as embezzlement, abuse of authority, or being so sloppy at work that it endangers others, is a longtime or, in more extreme cases, lifelong ban on being in that kind of position.
For most crimes, the punishment is some form of probation. If the crime is minor enough that the harm caused by it might still be repaired, part of the probation conditions will be that the convict contributes to repairing that harm.
Fines have been completely abolished, because of their discriminatory effect on people with less money.
There are still prisons. Violations of probation terms are often punished by a few weeks or months in prison. However, if you're convicted of a crime that's so serious that the very fact that you were willing to commit that crime is seen as proof that you're a permanent threat to other people, you'll get locked up for a very long time, with no furloughs. People in that position, unless their convictions get overturned, are usually only released on humanitarian grounds once they're so old or sick that, because of their physical frailty, they're no longer seen as a threat to other people.
Prisoners have a basic right to decide themselves how much or how little contact they have with other prisoners or outside visitors. Depending on their preferences, they can have anything from quasi-solitary confinement to a very sociable life.
There are still some regional differences in how actual court systems work, based on local legal traditions. So, for instance, courts in places that traditionally had common law still work a bit differently from courts in places that traditionally had civil law.
Finally, there's one more aspect of the scenario. Remember how, in the section on technology, I wrote that I allowed myself the indulgence of interstellar travel so that I could have one other aspect of the scenario described later? Well, that other aspect consists of the...
Aliens
At the exact start of the scenario, humanity makes its first confirmed contact with an intelligent alien species. The main characters will, of course, talk about that a lot, but at first, it won't play much of a role in their lives. Outside of media reports, characters from that alien species will only appear later in the plot(s).
I haven't yet decided what to call the aliens.
To make them easier to relate to, I'll probably keep them physically as standard-issue sci-fi-TV-style added-rubber-features humanoids. They are a lot like us, with sentient being hearts and sentient being heads and sentient being hands and other sentient being qualities (sorry, couldn't resist).
Psychologically, their difference from us is subtle but important: They are simply mostly or completely immune to the standard psychological mechanisms we have for fooling ourselves. Simply read a book like Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me), or similar academic or popular scientific writings on various aspects of social psychology, and assume that the psychological effects described there don't exist in those aliens. I think this might open up all kinds of interesting possibilities for interactions between human and alien characters in the scenario.
So, where do we go now?
My basic idea would be to have plots centered on a group of friends and acquaintances who try, with varying degrees of success, to set up new EEs. Usually, they would, of course, fail, but sometimes the scenario could go against readers’ expectations by having some characters succeed at something.
Problem is, I don't really have the kind of creativity that would be required to populate this scenario. I'm simply not that good at coming up with interesting and memorable characters, intriguing plots, or hilarious jokes.
So right now, my best plan is to wait until I come magically into possession of €100 million or €200 million, use some of that money to hire great writers and comedians to populate the scenario with characters, plots, and jokes, and then use the rest of the money to turn those characters, plots, and jokes into a big-budget tv/streaming show. But of course that's not going to happen, so I absolutely don't know what to do.
And now for something completely different...
Since this is, so far, my most serious attempt at conworlding posted to the ZBB, I thought I'd add some links to the other conworlding stuff I've posted to the ZBB, although that stuff is not related to this scenario.
First, Péchkizhénk, the Kingdom of Broken Chains, formerly known as the Ageist Kingdom:
https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=527
Second, Preservianism, a conreligion:
https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=680
And third, some very incomplete, very half-baked juvenilia:
https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1132
And that's it.
