I would be pleased if your attempts at a mocking retort were actually good or tagged the person which you are attempting to mock; regardless, both I and
@MJ12 Commando have actually studied what an appeal to authority is (it's literally part of our jobs), and your attempts at deflecting arguments by inanely shouting "APPEAL TO AUTHORITY" while not actually making any counterargument will continually fall on deaf ears, because
that's not an argument.
You guys are making arguments, but I'm also hearing "You don't know X, I do because I study hard science." Or "you don't know X, but Y does because he studies hard science" as a rebuttle. Like, you're doing it again right now when you say "I've studied an appeal to authority and we're not making one."
I'm not mocking you here. I'm annoyed because rather than arguing, you're basically saying "I know about X because it's my job to know X." Which is honestly a pretty lame way to try to mount a rebuttal.
The aesthetic of something has everything to do with paradigm. Form follows function, and if you reject quantum theory and quantum phenomena you reject so much of modern science that I don't even fucking know what it'd look like. It certainly wouldn't look even slightly like what modern technology looks like. I mean, so much of modern technology exploits quantum effects in some way or shape that it's ridiculous. Which is why White Wolf removed this whole idiotic idea.
Actually, that's not really true. If the Technocracy rejects (or goes past) new physics, then a lot of the technology demanded by it's aesthetic is actually easier. For instance, it can do nanotechnology without having to worry about any of the weirdness that goes on at a quantum level. You can just build very very small machines which are a version of larger machines and that operate on the same kind of principles (obviously you still need to deal with stuff like heat, but that's still far less of a problem.)
So you're saying that the consensus in the middle of North Korea should be 100% identical to the consensus in the middle of San Francisco? That's ridiculous. And also, not canon, because every single book runs under the conceit that consensus is local. This is why if you, as a Verbena, gather 100 people who think that doing an animal sacrifice to bless the fields is possible, despite this not actually being normally in-consensus, it is in consensus and you can do it. This is why you can deploy a HITMark in the middle of the United States, and it works reliably, while they get glitchy if you send them into the boonies of Africa. This is why the farther you get from modern society, the more likely a Tradition mage is to be a pure mystic rather than a street mage. Because consensus thins as you get away from people, and moreover, consensus is heavily based on what local people think. It's why if you heal someone with prayer in the middle of the Deep South, your Chorister probably gets 0 paradox. If he tries to do it in front of James Randi, your Chorister probably eats a giant pile of paradox and has a hugely embarrassing paradox flaw, like, 'the guy gets up and it turns out the injury was fake. Also the light rig and special gloves you were using to make it look like your hands glowed falls out of your sleeves.'
This is in fact explicitly how the Traditions can 'win' in 2E-set up safe zones for themselves, with friendly local consensus, use those safe zones to teach and enlighten more students, and give more people the opportunity to achieve Ascension. You think it 'fails to deliver' because you are so dead-set on the idea that the Technocracy are losers and have been losers for the past 100 years ever since the Etherites schooled them that you throw out anything and everything which contradicts it, no matter how well-established it is.
Obviously there's areas where the Consensus is different, however that's not actually what I'm talking about.
You're suggesting that in areas where the technocratic paradigm broadly holds sway, there's basically two consensuses, one of which is the pop understanding of a subject, and the other a scientific understanding of the subject. That strikes me as unnecessarily messy. Just assume that most people have broad faith in science and scientists, and use that to move away from the fact most people lack understanding. Otherwise you have to make weird, messy compromises like "well the technocracy is mind controlling all scientists into giving result X" which is frankly pretty lame. Just have one consensus. It requires you to have a level of primacy towards second order beliefs, but that's pretty explicable.
Using quantum bullshit to justify your rotes is really just blatancy. You can do all kinds of shit with that, including making gundams fight to defend Tokyo.
It literally doesn't work that way because Time scrying can be done in your chantry, where none of this matters. It doesn't make it harder for the Technocracy to predict the future. The Technocracy just casts these auguries in their own chantries, where doing so is 100% coincidental, and sleepers can go pound sand. An augury doesn't interact with the outside world, it just tells you what's going to happen. You can cast it in your own construct without ever having to deal with paradox, because in your construct, all your effects are coincidental by definition.
EDIT: This is ignoring that Time/Entropy scrying is basically never vulgar because there's no actual way the result can be considered impossible. "I guess right on a question" is always a valid reason as to why you get the right answer, and that means that even trying to scry the future with chicken entrails should probably be coincidental, let alone using vaguely scientific things, chaos theory or no chaos theory. Consensus isn't as straitjacketing as you say it is. If, indeed, it was as much of a straitjacket as you claim it is, Mages would be by far the weakest splat. We can see what happens when consensus acts like this straitjacket with linear sorcerers, who are in fact incredibly weak.
And we already know that the Technocracy didn't have some special mastery of Time and Entropy effects. Indeed, we know that the Technocracy has found them hard, because they have an entire subconvention dedicated to future prediction (the Statisticians) and they are both known to be fallible in making long-run predictions and good at their jobs. They have always found predicting the future hard- and chaos theory is a convenient explanation as to why it's hard. In fact, the canon says that the Technocracy explicitly invented Chaos Theory, and it is core to the Technocratic Time/Entropy paradigm. Like, every Convention uses it, it's hardly something they've grudgingly accepted. The fact that the Virtual Adepts also use it... is really not relevant. The Virtual Adept paradigm is pretty explicitly called out as being basically 100% identical to the Technocratic one.
That's true to a point, but breaking it in the Consensus does something very important: It means that Sleepers cannot do it. While individual technocratic mages aren't going to suffer much from it, because like, they're mages, what it does mean is that technocratic social projects are suddenly far, far harder to pull off. The technocracy can't just institute central economic planning, or AIs that predict the weather, because hang on, Chaos Theory, oh shit we can't actually do that.
This is what I mean about the Technocracy reaching the end of it's spiritual power. It still has the ability to kill a lot of mages, but it is increasingly in a position where it can't push sleeper society around into the positions where it wants it. The ultimate football of the Ascension War is the Sleepers. New Physics makes it much much harder for the Technocracy to do shit that involves them. That's a huge benefit to the traditions and a massive defeat for the technocracy.
Except the problem is that we're talking about the 1900s, not 2016. Chaos theory came into play in the 1960s. Quantum theory in the 1900s. If the Technocracy was on its last legs, it would have collapsed then. But it didn't. In fact, it only got stronger.
Also, Trump makes more sense as the Technocracy doing something incredibly dumb more than the Technocracy losing power. The Technocracy has a record of backing someone they thought would be an easy patsy and then going 'holy shit what the fuck why did we think this was a good idea.' Or more conspiratorially, Donald Trump was brought in because the Technocracy wanted to create a false flag to discredit ideas they didn't like, like populism. Like, let's remember that Trump was basically elected literally because of the interference of intelligence agencies. (Which are now all trying to get him out of power). He made a bunch of populist promises, and broke every single one of them except the most horrible and vile ones. Insofar as he has a foreign policy, he's being lead by the nose by the experts. In fact, he's being led by the nose by right-wing 'expertise' and right-wing consensus all the time. There's a pretty noticeable effect by Trump which is dampening enthusiasm for right wing populism in Europe. If that doesn't scream 'possible Technocratic plant' to you, I don't know what is.
And moreover, I'd argue that you're seeing parts of the Technocratic agenda in resurgence. Just parts which were generally thought of as dead, because of the USSR losing the cold war and the death knell of socialism. Arguably you're seeing the NWO start to claw itself back to importance, what with the resurgence of the idea of big government as not inherently bad and the knocks taken by capitalism. You're seeing things like SpaceX, which means the Void Engineer dream is still alive. And the military-industrial complex, academia, and other organizations are still alive and pretty influential. And meanwhile you're seeing the Technocracy make huge gains throughout Asia...
I'd actually argue that this makes a lot of sense from a point of view of setting, because the 20th century is the point where the technocracy reached its height, and then its hubris caused it to enter a slow process of collapse. The technocracy is a big, powerful organization run by immortals. It's going to take a while to run down.
However, 1900 is a good time to date the start of the Technocracy's decline. In 1900, the Technocracy seemed like it had basically won. The world was in the grip of apparently endless colonialism, physics seemed like it was well understood and pointed to an essentially clockwork, essentially predictable universe which humanity could dominate. This was the point where reason was at its height, with humanity under the benevolent rule of the great men of London, New York, Berlin, Paris and Tokyo. While there were still areas which required discipline the last few areas into the global system, such as China.
However across the 20th century, the Order of Reason project blew up. The Order of Reason fell into factionalism and infighting, both in science and in society. Assuming you want to keep the relativity thing being against the etherites, the first victim of this infighting is either those who want to immediately push into the deep universe in a renewed bout of colonialism, with the technocracy on earth believing that this kind of free expansion is both far too dangerous due to the presence of powerful alien entities, and also likely to lead to too much space for non-technocratic views. Alternatively, if you want relativity to be an etherite position, then it's a fight between those who wanted a basically materialistic universe of freedom, and those who want a universe of geniune clockwork, with the former winning the battle for the minds of sleepers, but then being ousted in response.*
The world order they'd created in the 19th century, which had proved relatively stable then blows up in the world wars, and a lot of the cherished pieces of the technocratic project (such as eugenics) are coopted by nephandic forces, and rapidly discredited by the horrified technocracy. Starting in 1917, and accelerating post WW2, the Technocracy splits into two factions, with a smaller, broadly accelerationist faction taking over the communist world in the hopes of renewing the technocratic project, while the second, larger faction (which includes much of the old core members) regards an attempt to push ahead with further acceleration so soon after the calamity of the world wars, and the now apparent nephandic ability to co-opt elements of the technocratic paradigm as utterly irresponsible. The rift is first widened by accusations of social sabotage by the accelerationists, with the removal of certain biological theories they were relying on for the USSR's development from the consensus, narrows during the war as both sides have to work together, then widens again as the accelerationists grab China, and feed the USSR the secrets of the atomic bomb against previous agreements, creating the conditions for the cold war.
This distracts the Technocracy as a whole from the resurgence of traditionalist and deviant technocratic factions. The etherites introduce New Physics, which begin to invalidate the Technocratic ability to spread their techniques to sleepers, and undermine the techniques they'd use for social reform, while allowing a lot of virtual adept technology. While the technocracy has taken Asia, it finds itself in a huge fight in Africa and the Middle East with resurgent Islamic choristers, and increasingly with virtual adept technology and ecstatic, verbena and hermetic mysticism in the first world. There's also an increasingly nasty series of paradox backlashes and conflicts with spirits going on, causing environmental problems, increasing rates of crime and frequent economic shocks.
In the 1980s, the Western Technocracy, faced with the resurgent traditionalists and an escalating arms race which they believe tempts Nephandic forces, decided they had to finish this once and for all. They induced the accident at Chernobyl, and then began a massive mind enchantment which would manipulate the consensus, use the Etherite ideas of New Physics and render the whole USSR central planning system vulgar. This caused the USSR to rapidly disintegrate, and the victorious Capitalist technocracy celebrated and declared the end of history. They were further heartened by the rapid development of China, and by their success in programs designed to exploit and discipline the Virtual Adept's introduction of networking, such as Echelon.
Then waves of paradox and tradition attacks began to hit. Markets crashed, terrorist campaigns began to mount, and the technocracy finds itself more and more failing to hold what it had gained. This brings us to the present day, with the Western technocracy reeling from market crash, from failure in the 3rd world, and new splits between Capitalists and Socialists. A collapsing edifice ready for your PCs to interact with.
And no, this isn't really cannon, but I think we can both agree it's kind of more interesting than most of what White Wolf put out officially, can't we?
Notice how in the last post I pointed out that the collapse of the technocratic project as it was previously constituted would make a good game for both technocratic and traditionalist parties. If you want to play a group of reformist technocrats, then you can do so. Like, if you want to play a technocracy game, you can totally have a game where the party is like, cyborg bernie sanders, (or cyborg Lenin), NWO Snowden, Progenitor Contrapoint and Syndicate Lindsey Ellis, fighting to regain the technocratic ideal with social media and transhumanism.
Or you could play a tradition party who just want to kick the whole edifice over and restore a new age of magic. We're not seeing the latter so much because you know magic isn't real. However if you're playing a tradition game, then you can totally use this as a way to spread the magical world view by Harry Potter books or whatever.
E: The Technocratic power balance of the 1990s, with corporations and capitalism ascendant, is clearly not holding up. But the Technocracy changes along with the times, and if you're arguing that every major power player in the Technocracy is weakening I have a bridge to sell you. The NWO is getting more and more powerful on a local scale, even as one world government falters on a large scale. The Syndicate is suffering from setbacks, yes, but it's still ridiculously powerful. The Void Engineers are making gains throughout Asia and throughout private industry. Iteration X and the military-industrial complex are as important as ever. And biosciences are still advancing at a breakneck pace.
(Friendly reminder that the Technocracy is not inherently capitalist. Not even the Syndicate.)
E2: Corbyn's actual staff economist, Mr. Stiglitz, is as Syndicate as they come, just from the academic wing rather than the finance and business wing.
Game idea: You play Syndicate academics who are trying to do a coup d' etat on the finance and business wing who have been dominant for so much longer (and probably get rid of the SPD while you're at it). Economics puns are necessary.
"I always believed in the Tactical Pareto Principle: 20% of the threats you face require 80% of the bullets."
"You see, Mr. Financier, you forgot about supply and demand. By creating so much suffering, there now exists a large demand for bullets to lodge themselves in your face, and therefore I am now here, to provide an ample supply of bullets lodging themselves in your face."
Remember, if you kill capitalists with a plasma cannon, you can say that they are feeling the Bern.
If I existed in the world of darkness and was a mage, with the same politics I had now, I'm a reformist technocrat, probably deeply angry about the fact that the Syndicate/ Western technocratic faction had embraced tradition minded heresy in order to get rid of the USSR, which I'd admit had run out of control, but consider the campaign which finally undermined it (by the use of techniques which would undermine it's central planning system), had thrown the baby out with the bath water, and likely caused memetic disaster on a huge scale.
This is because magic isn't real. We're all technocrats in real life, because you know, science is actually not the result of a giant conspiracy. If you're in WoD, then their are other options, and the effects of the overall political situation are going to be different.
*Having actually thought about it not at 5 AM. I much prefer the idea that the Technocracy came up with relativity, but not either Chaos Theory or Quantum Theory.
The alt-right basically rejects a lot of the ideas the Technocracy has at its most base level. The Technocracy fundamentally believes in expertise, in the idea that you might have different opinions but the facts are real, that you should trust in institutions and academia and the government. People who are more educated than you deserve to be provided inherent trust. If someone with the proper degree tells you something that you don't like, the proper result is to listen to it, not go 'lol fake news.' The alt-right are explicitly anti-intellectual, and almost anti-intellect in a way. Sure, the Technocracy spans a large political space, but that space is one where expertise is respected. They're the National Review right, the New Republic left, the managerial center, and so on.
Fundamentally the Technocracy's most basic tenet is "there are people who know better, trust them and trust the system" which these populist movements reject.
The Alt-right rejects the idea of the expertise of current experts, not all experts all the time. Like, they're on the whole perfectly happy with the expertise of Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, or with the executives of Wall Street banks, or of military officers. At best, you can say they're Technocratic Nephandi, but I'd say they're more likely just some rogue faction.
If you want to say "Fascism is the Nephandi coopting Technocratic principles" then you can use that on them, but I think it's a little crass to say "our opponents are literally backed by demons" even in this context. It's easier to just suggest they're some thoroughly unpleasant group of rogue syndicate and NWO operatives, possibly with the backing of equally unpleasant rogue Choristers and blood and soil Verbena who've decided that this is the only way they'll regain any ground at all in the West.
I don't really like Rev, but actually, the Alt-right would make a pretty good "the Ascension War is Over!" response faction, a bunch of Tradition and Technocratic mages coming together to form something new. Just, you know, horrible. On the other hand, you could easily have it be the main technocracy effort, to just hold shit together as best they can and ride out the storm without making space for either their own accelerationist wing (the socialists) or for the traditions.
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