Post by sleepingdragon on Apr 19, 2021 20:37:44 GMT
Managed Democracy
On a nominal level, those societies which had liberal democratic forms of governance in the early 21st century still have them today. Very few nations (most notably India) have outright suspended elections and imposed dictatorial rule. Furthermore, the United States and its allies who were recently defeated in the Second Cold War have not been broken up into smaller entities and subjected to punishing economic and political reorganisation in the manner of the Soviet Union following the First Cold War.
Nevertheless, there has been a lengthy process by which the power of elected governments has been eroded almost to nothing, the representative nature of electoral systems has been diluted to a nearly homeopathic level, concentration of economic power in the hands of megacorps has removed people's power over their daily lives, and states of exception and emergency rule that were nominally temporary in nature have been extended for decades, pulverising civil and political liberties in the process.
Historians and political commentators (or at least, members of those professions who retain any form of independence, who are very scarce in number) liken the current era to the beginnings of the Roman empire under Caesar Augustus - everything is supposedly the same as it was before, everyone really knows that it's all changed, but no one in any position of influence can acknowledge this obvious reality without suffering dire consequences.
Corporate Dictatorship
The processes of privatisation and deregulation that began in the 1980s have only accelerated in the Second Cold War, with the only real exceptions being those countries that retain a nominal link to the ideals of socialism (particularly the United Bolivarian Republic.) The remaining welfare states of Europe and North America have been completely dismantled. The role of the state has been largely reduced to one of contracting private entities to provide limited services - in some extreme cases, such as the United States and most of its proxies, this extends even to the army and the police.
In the absence of effective welfare programmes, the majority of people in the world have had to rely on the only organisations with the wealth and scale to actually provide services - the megacorps. While certain corporate entities have a specialism, and may still be referred to as if this was their function - as a weapons manufacturer, or an oil company, a car company, a grocery chain, or an insurance company - in practice all megacorps have vast bureaucratic apparatuses covering media, entertainment, housing, finance, health, education, and all the other irritating specific things that humans need to make their lives tolerable enough that they'll continue existing for long enough to create profits for megacorps.
Of course, since these megacorps are in competition with each other, this tends to place people in difficult situations that functionally prevent them from exercising even what limited democratic freedoms they nominally have. Many megacorps, for example, require their workers to sign exclusivity agreements that prevent them from seeking employment with rival firms for a set period after leaving, require them to live in facilities provided by their employer, and tie them to specific healthcare and finance providers. Open criticism of an employer through digital networks (one of the primary forms of social interaction in the late 21st century) is generally met with instant dismissal.
Inequality has opened up on a scale to match the Victorian era. Home ownership, the supposed dream of the original neoliberals, has collapsed to single digits in most developed countries. Unions are nominally legal, but practically non-existent, with the exception of strong police unions which insulate security services from punishment when they use arbitrary and excessive force. Working hours have lengthened, and the average life expectancy has fallen by between 10-20 years in most countries.
In short, employers are in a vastly stronger position than the already extremely strong position they held in the early 21st century. They can very easily impose sudden changes in pay and conditions, uproot workplaces and communities, force legal concessions from overmatched local or even national governments, easily curtail the exercise of free speech on pretences of national security and economic prerogatives, and generally dominate the entire social, cultural, economic, and political spheres of society.
Psychic Disempowerment and Mass Surveillance
In the early years following the Unlocking, some few psyker-utopians believed that the sudden emergence of psychic power would decisively strengthen the hands of individuals in their struggles against increasingly repressive governments and powerful corporations. In practice, the exact opposite has happened.
Strictly, all human beings possess inherent psychic power within them, which can be refined and trained until they can perform incredible feats. Practically, however, almost no one actually has the money and, most importantly, time, to devote to this kind of study.
States and megacorps responded to the revelation of mass psychic power with alarm and repression. Individuals being able to do unexpected things was a threat to stability, and so they created Psyker Registration Networks, forcing citizens to register with entities (originally states themselves, now most often contracted corporations acting on behalf of states) that monitor their use and learning of psychic abilities.
In the 2050s and 2060s, the ravages of unchecked climate change began to wreak havoc on the Earth, causing major refugee crises and flooding of coastal areas. The discovery of the psychic, crystalline power source, Psionisis, provided the world's most powerful institutions with a way to counteract, and even on a limited scale reverse, the effects of climate change, as well as to power other economic and military activity.
However work in Psionisis power stations has numerous adverse side effects - specifically psychic burnout and mutation. Because Psionisis is essential and the work is dangerous, the pay at these stations is generally quite good (at least by the standards of the late 21st century.) Therefore, the majority of people spend a few years working in a power station in their early 20s. This typically ends with them suffering psychic burnout and having to move on, but the cash provides most people with a buffer against the uncertainties of late 21st century life.
The exception to this rule are people from rich families, members of the security services, or the military. They can develop their psychic powers to a high degree - but, almost inevitably, this means those with strong psychic abilities work for the megacorps.
The lot of mutants in most societies is extremely bad. Since mutations are unpredictable, vary wildly in type, and in some rare cases can be dangerous to others or contagious, most societies treat mutation as a public health risk, to which they respond with extreme and often brutal force, often with the support of the majority of the population.
Resistance and Running in the Shadows
Many of the traditional methods of resisting corporate domination, such as unions, political organising, social and protest movements, and so on, have been completely obliterated, through a combination of socioeconomic change, and, in those countries aligned with the United States, severe anti-communist repression.
With elections having become a hollow joke and living standards worsening, there are growing insurgency movements of both the revolutionary left and the nationalist right in most countries. In some places such as the former independent states of Europe or the many proxies of China and America, these may take the form of national liberation movements. Within the United States, there is a growing and extremely violent fascist revanchist movement, the American Eagle movement, which blames the greed of the megacorps and dissolute, permissive lifestyles within liberal societies for their country's defeat, and seeks to overthrow the long rule of the Democratic Republican Party.
Of course, given the unrest and uncertainty of late 21st century life, there are also many gaps which individuals can fall through, holes where they can hide, and daring deeds they can undertake to avoid a life as an exhausted wage-slave to a domineering megacorp. There is a thriving criminal underworld, consisting of psykers who have burned their registration numbers, or cybernetically enhanced former soldiers and security operatives, religious and political extremists, career criminals, or just desperate individuals doing anything they can to survive and live free. These people are called Shadowrunners.
On a nominal level, those societies which had liberal democratic forms of governance in the early 21st century still have them today. Very few nations (most notably India) have outright suspended elections and imposed dictatorial rule. Furthermore, the United States and its allies who were recently defeated in the Second Cold War have not been broken up into smaller entities and subjected to punishing economic and political reorganisation in the manner of the Soviet Union following the First Cold War.
Nevertheless, there has been a lengthy process by which the power of elected governments has been eroded almost to nothing, the representative nature of electoral systems has been diluted to a nearly homeopathic level, concentration of economic power in the hands of megacorps has removed people's power over their daily lives, and states of exception and emergency rule that were nominally temporary in nature have been extended for decades, pulverising civil and political liberties in the process.
Historians and political commentators (or at least, members of those professions who retain any form of independence, who are very scarce in number) liken the current era to the beginnings of the Roman empire under Caesar Augustus - everything is supposedly the same as it was before, everyone really knows that it's all changed, but no one in any position of influence can acknowledge this obvious reality without suffering dire consequences.
Corporate Dictatorship
The processes of privatisation and deregulation that began in the 1980s have only accelerated in the Second Cold War, with the only real exceptions being those countries that retain a nominal link to the ideals of socialism (particularly the United Bolivarian Republic.) The remaining welfare states of Europe and North America have been completely dismantled. The role of the state has been largely reduced to one of contracting private entities to provide limited services - in some extreme cases, such as the United States and most of its proxies, this extends even to the army and the police.
In the absence of effective welfare programmes, the majority of people in the world have had to rely on the only organisations with the wealth and scale to actually provide services - the megacorps. While certain corporate entities have a specialism, and may still be referred to as if this was their function - as a weapons manufacturer, or an oil company, a car company, a grocery chain, or an insurance company - in practice all megacorps have vast bureaucratic apparatuses covering media, entertainment, housing, finance, health, education, and all the other irritating specific things that humans need to make their lives tolerable enough that they'll continue existing for long enough to create profits for megacorps.
Of course, since these megacorps are in competition with each other, this tends to place people in difficult situations that functionally prevent them from exercising even what limited democratic freedoms they nominally have. Many megacorps, for example, require their workers to sign exclusivity agreements that prevent them from seeking employment with rival firms for a set period after leaving, require them to live in facilities provided by their employer, and tie them to specific healthcare and finance providers. Open criticism of an employer through digital networks (one of the primary forms of social interaction in the late 21st century) is generally met with instant dismissal.
Inequality has opened up on a scale to match the Victorian era. Home ownership, the supposed dream of the original neoliberals, has collapsed to single digits in most developed countries. Unions are nominally legal, but practically non-existent, with the exception of strong police unions which insulate security services from punishment when they use arbitrary and excessive force. Working hours have lengthened, and the average life expectancy has fallen by between 10-20 years in most countries.
In short, employers are in a vastly stronger position than the already extremely strong position they held in the early 21st century. They can very easily impose sudden changes in pay and conditions, uproot workplaces and communities, force legal concessions from overmatched local or even national governments, easily curtail the exercise of free speech on pretences of national security and economic prerogatives, and generally dominate the entire social, cultural, economic, and political spheres of society.
Psychic Disempowerment and Mass Surveillance
In the early years following the Unlocking, some few psyker-utopians believed that the sudden emergence of psychic power would decisively strengthen the hands of individuals in their struggles against increasingly repressive governments and powerful corporations. In practice, the exact opposite has happened.
Strictly, all human beings possess inherent psychic power within them, which can be refined and trained until they can perform incredible feats. Practically, however, almost no one actually has the money and, most importantly, time, to devote to this kind of study.
States and megacorps responded to the revelation of mass psychic power with alarm and repression. Individuals being able to do unexpected things was a threat to stability, and so they created Psyker Registration Networks, forcing citizens to register with entities (originally states themselves, now most often contracted corporations acting on behalf of states) that monitor their use and learning of psychic abilities.
In the 2050s and 2060s, the ravages of unchecked climate change began to wreak havoc on the Earth, causing major refugee crises and flooding of coastal areas. The discovery of the psychic, crystalline power source, Psionisis, provided the world's most powerful institutions with a way to counteract, and even on a limited scale reverse, the effects of climate change, as well as to power other economic and military activity.
However work in Psionisis power stations has numerous adverse side effects - specifically psychic burnout and mutation. Because Psionisis is essential and the work is dangerous, the pay at these stations is generally quite good (at least by the standards of the late 21st century.) Therefore, the majority of people spend a few years working in a power station in their early 20s. This typically ends with them suffering psychic burnout and having to move on, but the cash provides most people with a buffer against the uncertainties of late 21st century life.
The exception to this rule are people from rich families, members of the security services, or the military. They can develop their psychic powers to a high degree - but, almost inevitably, this means those with strong psychic abilities work for the megacorps.
The lot of mutants in most societies is extremely bad. Since mutations are unpredictable, vary wildly in type, and in some rare cases can be dangerous to others or contagious, most societies treat mutation as a public health risk, to which they respond with extreme and often brutal force, often with the support of the majority of the population.
Resistance and Running in the Shadows
Many of the traditional methods of resisting corporate domination, such as unions, political organising, social and protest movements, and so on, have been completely obliterated, through a combination of socioeconomic change, and, in those countries aligned with the United States, severe anti-communist repression.
With elections having become a hollow joke and living standards worsening, there are growing insurgency movements of both the revolutionary left and the nationalist right in most countries. In some places such as the former independent states of Europe or the many proxies of China and America, these may take the form of national liberation movements. Within the United States, there is a growing and extremely violent fascist revanchist movement, the American Eagle movement, which blames the greed of the megacorps and dissolute, permissive lifestyles within liberal societies for their country's defeat, and seeks to overthrow the long rule of the Democratic Republican Party.
Of course, given the unrest and uncertainty of late 21st century life, there are also many gaps which individuals can fall through, holes where they can hide, and daring deeds they can undertake to avoid a life as an exhausted wage-slave to a domineering megacorp. There is a thriving criminal underworld, consisting of psykers who have burned their registration numbers, or cybernetically enhanced former soldiers and security operatives, religious and political extremists, career criminals, or just desperate individuals doing anything they can to survive and live free. These people are called Shadowrunners.