#exodus is basically cyberpunk but make it alien | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jennamoran · 5 years

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IOSHI (Part 2)

Hi!

Today we’re sharing a bit more of the cyberpunk setting I wrote in, I dunno, 2003?

So far,

we’ve had a basic introduction to what’s going on.

Today, let’s talk about the core culture, and the first few outsider communities, in Tartessos!

Core Culture

Thesis: “Labour is an objective, measurable good that operates separately from the person it’s attached to.”

Development Pattern

Tartessos spreads by means of Projects. When a consensus of needs indicates financial justification for a new borough, a Project board forms. It makes a plan for the construction and drains resources from nearby portions of Tartessos to fund it. This strikes at the economic welfare of the residents of those regions. Those already living at the edge of their means flee the area, accepting a longer commute time to their job and separation from their previous habitat in exchange for sustained quality of life. Wealthier residents attempt a more judicious relocation. Once possible, both prefer to move into zones occupied by the new Project, since these areas receive an influx of wealth from the Project rather than suffering an outflow on its account.

Once the region is habitable, managers organize a workforce from available resources. They lure unskilled labourers to worksites within the new Project, typically hiring many of the underprivileged evacuees from neighbouring boroughs. These labourers oversee the automated development of the region’s pricier housing and basic amenities, in addition to handling miscellaneous tasks. The board then devotes its efforts to designing the overall corporate, social, traffic, financial, and data structures for the new region. Towards the end of this process, as exclusive service agreements begin to expire, other boards bid to hire away both Project managers and their accumulated staffs. The remainder of the Project board receives a greater share of power, influence, and wealth from the new borough. As members dissipate, however, insider information distributed by ex-board members may allow outsiders to out-manipulate the remaining talent pool. This can place the borough in the thrall of an outside board or outright ruin it, usually leading to the effort’s abandonment. Resentful sabotage by those on the way out often leaves these regions suitable only for outsider communities.

Cred

In the late 21st century, a character’s “cred” with a given community or group represents its willingness to hear what the character has to say. Characters in Tartessos can have cred with a variety of organizations, such as medical associations, security forces, and corporations. In addition, they can have cred with Tartessos as a whole, representing the idea that they have qualities that make them natural leaders in any Tartessian group.

Core culture cred derives almost entirely from economic resources. Those who can mobilize the wealth necessary to accomplish their aims have cred anywhere in Tartessos. This requires a combination of skill, wealth, and connections. Characters with only one or two of these have a limited sort of cred. The flaw in their abilities does not entirely exclude them from consideration. Thus, someone who can competently marshal every economic resource available to him or her has a certain cred even if those resources do not currently exist. Similarly, someone who has wealth but no idea how to use it receives implicit respect, just in case he or she someday understands the financial world.

Anthropophobic Culture

Prescriptive Thesis: “Advance beyond the biological destiny of humanity.”

Development Pattern

The anthropophobic culture rejects the human form and the human nature. Biotech and cyberware mods help anthropophobes turn themselves into aliens. This makes the surrounding Tartessians uncomfortable. An understated anthropophobe with a strong leaning towards Tartessian culture may fit in slowly with the Tartessians around it. A particularly exorbitant anthropophobe produces a quick exodus. If they can, the anthropophobe’s neighbours move away. The desirability of local property drops, making life there cheaper. This attracts all manner of unfortunates. Security levels drop. A criminal element typically drifts in. Similarly overt anthropophobes also move into the area, preferring the company of their kind — not as members of a shared philosophy, but as members of a shared species, surrounded on every side by predictable but terribly numerous humanity.

As the outsider community forms, humans who find anthropophobes attractive, admirable, or simply interesting gravitate to its boundary. They form the natural border between the community and the outside world. Separated from Tartessos, the society searches out a new equilibrium. In some cases, the criminal syndicates take advantage of the situation to establish dominance in the region. In others, a prevailing sense of solidarity among the anthropophobes creates a tight-knit internal economy and defence force. Usually, several Tartessian boards bid for a contract with the community for whatever exports they may have, producing an isolated work centre within the anthropophobic community.

The centre of an anthropophobic community usually abandons key elements of personhood in its quest to exceed human limits. Free will, senses, desire, subjectivity, long-term memory, and even sentience come under examination as possible qualities for a resident to abandon.

Cred

Anthropophobic cred increases the further a given character deviates from the human form and human patterns of behaviour. The ability to justify one’s modifications as legitimate philosophical, practical, or aesthetic improvements enhances whatever cred one otherwise possesses. The character need not pursue any specific course of development away from humanity to have anthropophobic cred. No common standard for comparing the various approaches to the prescriptive anthropophobic thesis currently exists.

Identifiers

Characters from an anthropophobic community favour more obvious cyberware and biotech mods than characters from other communities. Further, they often sport mods that enhance a purely inhuman aesthetic and have no other purpose — scales, stripes, an ineffectual tail, antennae of limited sensory capacity, and so forth. In the event that he or she does not have such modifications, an anthropophobic character probably affects specifically nonhuman behaviour patterns, training him or herself away from human body language and patterns of social interaction. Sometimes, this serves little practical purpose. Voluntarily retraining oneself to identify smiles as shows of teeth or to hiss when threatened benefits the character only in those communities that explicitly favour animalistic behaviour. In other cases, this effort has some minimal value. Giving scent a stronger place in the character’s sensorium or recontextualizing relationships to cut off instinctive dominance/submission behaviour patterns may not pay off to a point that justifies the effort, but can give an anthropophobe an advantage now and again.

Characters influenced by anthropophobic communities tend to pick a few small, obvious mods that create a clear sense of inhumanity without requiring an excessive stylistic or financial investment. Unnatural eyes are particularly popular, as is mimicking the body language of a favoured community. Tartessians, overall, recognize such changes as an explicit statement of identification rather than a minor case of anthropophobia. Sufficient subtle cultural cues exist to distinguish between faceted eyes chosen to express sympathy with the anthropophobic thesis and the same biotech mod chosen to make a direct personal break with humanity. On occasion, a Tartessian will cross the line from ordinary citizen to understated anthropophobe without additional surgery. He or she may notice the discomfort of others before realizing his or her own philosophical shift.

Artistic Culture

Thesis: “Art is the highest human activity.”

Development Pattern

As noted yesterday, artistic cultures tend to evolve deliberately. First, citizens create a viable economic backbone for their artistic productivity. To sustain its economic influence, the community must embrace its thesis to an ever-greater degree. Eventually, the alienated centre of the community sees no virtue in any activity save art, while the fringe serves as a commercial and social intermediary.

Cred

Artistic cred derives primarily from the amount of effort a character devotes to art. The legitimacy and fervour of this effort matters more than its quality. Regardless of their underlying talent, poseurs and plagiarists find a chilly or even lethal welcome in artistic communities. Such communities view dishonest practice of the arts as an assault upon their sanctity. Similarly, a creative genius who does not love the arts and devote much of his or her time to them comes across as a heretic. Among those who pursue art passionately, however, or who have the worldview necessary to make every observation and take every action within the framework of their art, talent and skill determines who commands the greatest cred.

Identifiers

Characters from an artistic community style their appearance and every action to a personal aesthetic. The nature of that aesthetic varies. Characters from the community’s fringe often settle for presenting an image that appealingly represents them. In these cases, the “face” they show others is an affected construct but not an artificial one. Their studied innocence, wickedness, grace, wit, or good cheer expands upon their natural tendencies in that direction. Those who live in the outsider community proper often build their behaviour around less representational artistic models: surrealism, satire, and shock art can serve as lifestyles.

Characters influenced by an artistic community usually draw either on the community’s fashions or on a particularly notable artist’s work. In either case, this often takes the form of an adopted symbolism. They have a cross-identification of ideas and symbols atypical for Tartessian culture. In a trivial case, they might favour a particular mapping of colours to internal states, signified by a complex ribbon arrangement worked into a hair braid or an odd reaction to visual stimuli. The actual identifier is not the symbol set itself but the degree of emotional importance the character attaches to it. Some characters instead steal an artist’s philosophy of life, quoting it regularly, or copy the physical characteristics that one accumulates in artistic work — ink-stained fingers, paint splatters in odd places, or affected carpal tunnel syndrome.

Corporate Communities (Floating Boards)

Thesis: “Opportunity costs are a form of real costs.”

Development Pattern

Corporate communities have no specific physical location. Instead, they form within the non-physical and non-Euclidian managerial “space” in which the Tartessian corporations interlock. As it develops, a corporate community seizes an expanding collection of organizationally local resources. This replaces the need to secure control over a physically contiguous economic region.

To function, Tartessian corporations must evaluate “opportunity costs” — benefits that, by making a certain decision, they prevent themselves from realizing. As a whole, Tartessian corporate culture recognizes a strong distinction between opportunity costs and resource costs. With some regularity, however, a pocket of business professionals develops a worldview in which the two are commensurable. Opportunity costs then represent genuine losses. This perspective allows the formation of boards that exist not to use resources efficiently but to prevent the inefficient use of resources. They seek to alter the fundamental purpose of corporate activities rather than maximize functionality within those corporate activities.

Outbreaks of this philosophy typically give rise to two or three boards whose purpose is to adjust the goals and approach of the local corporate structure rather than its methods. Measuring opportunity costs is inherently inexact, as is measuring the final benefit or loss that preventing a given opportunity cost brings. Accordingly, these “floating” boards must measure performance not in accords with resource usage and benefit yield, but rather by the degree to which they succeed in implementing their ideological agenda.

Floating boards exist to impose their assigned imperatives on the corporate activities around them. To maintain viability, on which their members’ advancement prospects depend, they must do several things. First, they must establish their will firmly on the Projects with which they come into contact. Second, each must fiercely protect their underlying assumption — that every Project not implementing the floating board’s agenda suffers a real and staggering opportunity cost thereby.

Floating boards, as they grow large and influential, often merge into conglomerates or fission into multiple management teams. This produces a large corporate structure of floating boards surrounding a core business model. That business model does not usually include a specific agenda, for the simple reason that the benefit of a given agenda is always finite and a better agenda always exists. Rather, the corporate structure and its core exist primarily to provide structural and intellectual support for the community of floating boards that surround them.

To occupy the core and take a position in such a company, one must abandon the concept of corporate purpose. Companies cannot exist to do something specific, because doing something specific imposes the maximum possible opportunity cost — the company will never do the best possible thing, whatever that thing might be. The purpose and implementation of a Project are qualities of a fungible good, an opportunity benefit or loss, something that corporations exist to produce, alter, buy, sell, and trade.

Corporations exist to impose policies on other corporations. Corporations with other goals are aberrations that their own inefficiency will ultimately destroy.

Cred

Cred in a standard corporation boils down to Tartessian cred. With floating boards, characters have a small amount of cred roughly proportional to their historical efficiency at achieving their goals. To develop serious cred with powerful figures in a corporate community, a character must also display a profound flexibility in choosing their goals. Ultimately, the boards respect those who can implement any agenda far more than those who can advance a specific ideology. A human being, they assert, should be able to raise a child, advertise a product, improve technical performance, organize an atrocity, organize a rescue, purchase influence, take orders, give orders, spread faith, spread reason, proceed aesthetically, proceed ruthlessly, sacrifice their life for a loved one, or sacrifice a loved one for market share. Anything else indicates an unhealthy rigidity of thought.

Identifiers

Characters from the core of a corporate community can usually do all of the above. This is their greatest single identifying trait. If persuaded that a goal is appropriate, or if legitimately hired to consider it so, they show no hesitation in pursuing it. They evaluate their life wholly in terms of the value of each pursuit rather than the costs of its implementation. Corporate communities form around managers, and so most members have relatively innocuous abilities. However, once someone drifts inwards from the individual boards to the central structure of a floating board community, they no longer act as a manager as such. They develop other skills potentially useful for creating and imposing their policies, such as deep statistical knowledge, theological expertise, or the ability to kill. Characters from a floating board have this syndrome to a lesser degree. Most characters from a corporate subculture show a certain disinterest in reality. To function efficiently, members of corporate culture have to perceive the world through a lens of reports rather than direct observation.

Although corporations have less esprit de corps, in general, in Tartessos than in the early 21st century, the communities built around and within floating boards regularly strive for it. Team spirit goes hand-in-hand with the abstraction of corporate activity that these communities strive for. With it comes in turn the kitsch of company hats, cups, jackets, pillows, and backpacks. Members of the community proper have at best an understated interest in such things. Their corporate clothing does not much resemble professional attire. Pillows with the corporate logo would clash with their luxury homes. Those influenced by the corporate subculture, however, prize such things dearly. Something as small as a JQ & Metterly shoulder pin can make a Tartessian feel connected to the floating board of his or her choice.

(stay tuned for a few more of these communities tomorrow!)

#ioshi #patreon-supported posts

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