White Wolf's World of Darkness

[vicky_molokh]

Okay, and how does this mean the Technocracy can't be against racism and prejudice? Everyone is an interchangeable cog living their interchangeable life as a drone or a post-scarcity Wall-E blob or whatever. Like, just remember your argument isn't "the Technocracy isn't inherently against racism" it's that the neoreactionaries would stay in the Technocracy instead of defecting, which assumes that:

1. The neoreactionaries were racist Technocrats;
2. They'll stay racist Technocrats because apparently despite the Technocracy being dominant in academia and science, which has a dearth of neoreactionary support (doubly compared to groups directly opposed to organs which would be Technocracy-sympathetic or dominant) despite being full of these neoreactionary Technocrats.

Even if you use the Technocracy as antagonists, they work approximately infinitely better if you treat them as an actual ideological organization rather than, you know, a gigantic strawman of everything your ideology personally dislikes.

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First, the original descriptor wasn't necessarily specifically about racism only. It was about being reactionary, fundamentalist and right-winged, and racism doesn't seem to be the only trait of right-wingedness. In the context of Traditions largely working for the improvement of civil rights, subverting the Technocracy's vision of society, I think it's reasonably acceptable to characterise the Technocracy as reactionary.

Second, cogification does not necessarily oppose racism and other -isms, and in fact can be subtly encouraging it. USSR supposedly embraced "everyone is an interchangeable cog-drone", and yet it also was the sanctuary for de facto institutionized attitude of "members of this one nation are more equal than those of all others" (telling this from experience; I was born in 1984, so I still witnessed the late years of this monster). The parallels between the Technocracy and USSR is why I think it's actually easy for the Technocracy to act as a sanctuary for these sorts of people, especially if they're in positions of power (and surely Enlightened Scientists are in a position of power relative to the mortals).

 

[MJ12 Commando]

First, the original descriptor wasn't necessarily specifically about racism only. It was about being reactionary, fundamentalist and right-winged, and racism doesn't seem to be the only trait of right-wingedness. In the context of Traditions largely working for the improvement of civil rights, subverting the Technocracy's vision of society, I think it's reasonably acceptable to characterise the Technocracy as reactionary.

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Which organization is the one which is deliberately hearkening back to some golden age in the past, and saying that we could fix all our problems if we return ourselves to that age? FYI: It isn't the Technocracy. Which organization believes that this 'progress' thing recently is actually bad for us and should be stopped? FYI: It isn't the Technocracy. Which organization believes that people have become soft, incapable of acting on their own best interests, and need some sort of Real Man to show them the real way against all those lies told by Big Media and Big Government and their ivory-tower intellectuals? Oh right, it's not the Technocracy. In fact, all of these are very explicitly and canonically things the Traditions do and are-just stated in an unflattering light. The Traditions are explicitly quite conservative, which makes sense given that their enemy is literally the combination of all 90s conspiracy theories.

Your argument is apparently that despite the enemy being small-c conservatives (and classical liberals) the Technocracy also absorb all the bad parts of conservativism, as well as giving up all the good parts of the progressive agenda, because we need the Technocracy to literally have zero redeeming qualities whatsoever. Because apparently someone in White Wolf said something vaguely like it somewhere, which means we must use all of it. Fundamentally, as people like @Revlid and @Eukie and @Chloe Sullivan have said, this makes about zero fucking sense and is literally just piling bad qualities onto a side until it's no longer sympathetic because you don't have the balls to have an antagonist with ideological rigor and some way to appeal to the endless quantities of people it seems to have.

Second, cogification does not necessarily oppose racism and other -isms, and in fact can be subtly encouraging it. USSR supposedly embraced "everyone is an interchangeable cog-drone", and yet it also was the sanctuary for de facto institutionized attitude of "members of this one nation are more equal than those of all others" (telling this from experience; I was born in 1984, so I still witnessed the late years of this monster). The parallels between the Technocracy and USSR is why I think it's actually easy for the Technocracy to act as a sanctuary for these sorts of people, especially if they're in positions of power (and surely Enlightened Scientists are in a position of power relative to the mortals).

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The USSR isn't the Technocracy, the Technocracy isn't the USSR, and "everyone is an interchangeable cog" does in fact contradict "but some cogs are better than others." Just FYI, the latter makes cogs non-interchangeable by definition. And of course the 1E "The Technocracy is 1984!" stuff was kind of de facto retconned repeatedly.

 

[ChineseDrone]

First, the original descriptor wasn't necessarily specifically about racism only. It was about being reactionary, fundamentalist and right-winged, and racism doesn't seem to be the only trait of right-wingedness. In the context of Traditions largely working for the improvement of civil rights, subverting the Technocracy's vision of society, I think it's reasonably acceptable to characterise the Technocracy as reactionary.

Second, cogification does not necessarily oppose racism and other -isms, and in fact can be subtly encouraging it. USSR supposedly embraced "everyone is an interchangeable cog-drone", and yet it also was the sanctuary for de facto institutionized attitude of "members of this one nation are more equal than those of all others" (telling this from experience; I was born in 1984, so I still witnessed the late years of this monster). The parallels between the Technocracy and USSR is why I think it's actually easy for the Technocracy to act as a sanctuary for these sorts of people, especially if they're in positions of power (and surely Enlightened Scientists are in a position of power relative to the mortals).

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Am I trying to suggest that racism never happens in the Technocracy? No, of course not, that would be ridiculous.

However, no part of the Technocracy is ever going to openly espouse racism. "Scientific racism" is a pseudoscience--if it were actually accurate, it would erase decades' worth of work in both biology and social science. This is exactly the sort of thing the Technocracy is trying to prevent.

Even if we were to assume that every single person in Control was actually a horribly racist bastard (Which is already a pretty massive stretch), they would still have to openly oppose racism today because do anything else would be absolutely contradictory to their core ideology. If the Technocracy is about forcing conformity like you keep claiming, then one of the first things they should be forcing conformity to is mainstream science. and mainstream science pretty definitively says that racism is incorrect.

On a larger scale, whenever a lot of people discuss the Technocracy, they seem to suddenly gain this weird assumption that all authoritarian ideologies are basically the same. To be honest, I have no idea where this comes from, because in almost any other context if someone said that the same people were controlling both Communists and reactionaries, everybody would laugh at them. For one, you'd kind of be reducing the entire Russian Civil War to a case of people being really dedicated to kayfabe. Different ideologies mean different things, and, unlike the Traditions, the Technocracy is explicitly supposed to be largely ideologically coherent. Each of the five conventions fundamentally share a bunch of philosophical assumptions--materialism, either positivism or rationalism, and utilitarianism--which means that ideologies that fall outside that sphere are not going to be supported by the Technocracy.

Fascism, as an actual ideology as opposed to some word people toss out to mean "hyper-authoritarianism" (Which is not the same thing), is the single best example of this, actually. It's nature is heavily romantic, and it was meant to be a rejection of the modern world. It's exactly the sort of thing that the Technocracy is fighting against.

(Incidentally, this is also why my eye twitches whenever someone talks about the Syndicate members being Austrians. They can be libertarians, supply-side economists, or, hell, even ancaps, but not Austrians, because Austrian economics basically says "Fuck you Syndicate, your foci no longer work")

 

[Revlid]

I mean, I have absolutely no problem with seeing the Technocracy played as bloody-handed fascists, or cut-throat capitalists, or utterly amoral scientists, or ice-blooded rationalists, or priest-burning anti-theists or as any number of vile things. I have no problem with the Technocracy being, in a fairly unambiguous sense, the bad guys – for all that gels poorly with Mage's premise that literally every viewpoint is true in its own way. All I ask is that they be coherent bad guys, because that makes them compelling and useful and something I can understand and modify, rather than simply a meaningless, indistinct edifice of whatever qualities the writer of the moment considered "bad".

 

[EarthScorpion]

Well yes, but canonically that discrimination is directed at constructs or, at worst, the general population, not, you know, races. So... No, they're not racists.

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I actually disagree there.

Yes, the Technocracy has a problem with institutional racism - and sexism, too. That's because the sins of the Technocracy are the sins of the modern West. They're our sins. The Technocracy proclaims the neoliberal economic doctrines, the progressive agenda, and the other things the modern West supports. And because of that, because it's the Man the Technocracy should own and display those sins. It's white-washing to avoid it.

But the way this works is that it's an institutional thing. It is no longer acceptable in the Technocracy to publicly say such things, and if you do, you'll likely be sent on a very, very boring HR course with some low level Mind effects to correct your behaviour (Mind 2, promoting an aversion to expressing such sentiments or else you'll have to go on another HR course). But that just means that things are subtly, low-key and cumulative. They're just... how things are.

So there are firm HR policies saying that the Union has full gender, racial and sexual orientation equality. But the fact is, things will be easier for you if you're a white male, or you come from a 'proper' educational background. The Ivory Tower does officially set quotas for promotions and the like, but it still works out that when two people with the same skills apply for a position, the one from the "right" background has the advantage.

(Of course, things are liberalising. I believe the Revised Syndicate book makes it explicit that while it's still a boy's club, the upper ranks are now just as full of Chinese plutocrats, Nigerian oil barons and Arab princes as white men from Harvard.)

Hell, the Union was ahead of IRL society on the matter of sexism (at least if you were a white, well-educated woman), but the way this works out is that women are the equal of men as long as they act exactly like men. The culture is institutionally male. Female Technocrats have to take part in the same macho, how-long-hours-can-I-work, keep-on-chugging-stimulants-until-the-work's-done culture as the boys. If they want a child and they're in a field role, they can say goodbye to promotion prospects unless they find a surrogate or have the child vat grown. It's far more subtle than just "You don't get that job if you're a woman" - it's "you need a 1.0 rating to get this promotion, and you took time out due to 'personal reasons' so you only have a 0.9. So Mr Jones has the promotion instead, as he has a 1.1." (and of course, he got an extra 0.1 grade on his last review because he was felt to be 'strong' and 'assertive' and a 'natural leader' while the same traits in a woman got called 'demanding', 'pushy', and 'a prima donna'.)

Basically, I personally feel that the Technocracy should pride itself on its equality, and then in practice fall short of its high-minded proclaimed ideas. Just like we do. Because its sins are our sins, and paradigms should own their own failure states.

 

[ChineseDrone]

I actually disagree there.

Yes, the Technocracy has a problem with institutional racism - and sexism, too. That's because the sins of the Technocracy are the sins of the modern West. They're our sins. The Technocracy proclaims the neoliberal economic doctrines, the progressive agenda, and the other things the modern West supports. And because of that, because it's the Man the Technocracy should own and display those sins. It's white-washing to avoid it.

But the way this works is that it's an institutional thing. It is no longer acceptable in the Technocracy to publicly say such things, and if you do, you'll likely be sent on a very, very boring HR course with some low level Mind effects to correct your behaviour (Mind 2, promoting an aversion to expressing such sentiments or else you'll have to go on another HR course). But that just means that things are subtly, low-key and cumulative. They're just... how things are.

So there are firm HR policies saying that the Union has full gender, racial and sexual orientation equality. But the fact is, things will be easier for you if you're a white male, or you come from a 'proper' educational background. The Ivory Tower does officially set quotas for promotions and the like, but it still works out that when two people with the same skills apply for a position, the one from the "right" background has the advantage.

(Of course, things are liberalising. I believe the Revised Syndicate book makes it explicit that while it's still a boy's club, the upper ranks are now just as full of Chinese plutocrats, Nigerian oil barons and Arab princes as white men from Harvard.)

Hell, the Union was ahead of IRL society on the matter of sexism (at least if you were a white, well-educated woman), but the way this works out is that women are the equal of men as long as they act exactly like men. The culture is institutionally male. Female Technocrats have to take part in the same macho, how-long-hours-can-I-work, keep-on-chugging-stimulants-until-the-work's-done culture as the boys. If they want a child and they're in a field role, they can say goodbye to promotion prospects unless they find a surrogate or have the child vat grown. It's far more subtle than just "You don't get that job if you're a woman" - it's "you need a 1.0 rating to get this promotion, and you took time out due to 'personal reasons' so you only have a 0.9. So Mr Jones has the promotion instead, as he has a 1.1." (and of course, he got an extra 0.1 grade on his last review because he was felt to be 'strong' and 'assertive' and a 'natural leader' while the same traits in a woman got called 'demanding', 'pushy', and 'a prima donna'.

Basically, I personally feel that the Technocracy should pride itself on its equality, and then in practice fall short of its high-minded proclaimed ideas. Just like we do. Because its sins are our sins, and paradigms should own their own failure states.

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Well, yeah, like I said with vicky a post later, I'm certainly not saying that racism does not happen in the Technocracy--they very much should be a reflection of the same institutional problems that the modern world has, because they are the modern world (With a few exceptions owing to the Union's unique resources, the primary one I'm thinking of here being transgender rights, mostly because getting a perfect sex change is trivially easy in the Technocracy). Granted, I worded that post poorly--really, what I meant to say is that no Technocrats are going to be openly racist, and that the organization as a whole is going to at least outwardly be an advocate for equality, pretty much like you've described.

 

[Revlid]

Hell, the Union was ahead of IRL society on the matter of sexism (at least if you were a white, well-educated woman)

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Actually, how exactly does it work that the scientific consensus for a long time revolved around women being intelligent/emotionally mature/suited to intellectual pursuits than men? I mean, given that the scientific consensus was at least partly under the reigns of the Technocracy, and their potential membership is split 50/50 between males and females, both of whom can be objectively identified as having Genius? Were women just neglected for recruitment on grounds on emotional instability and obvious tendency toward reality-deviation? Was there a big upswell of female Traditionalists because women had a choice between being independent witches or lab assistants? What was going on there?

(also questions like "shouldn't the Consenus have actually lobotomized the Western female population at some point in the past" do come up)

 

[MJ12 Commando]

Fascism, as an actual ideology as opposed to some word people toss out to mean "hyper-authoritarianism" (Which is not the same thing), is the single best example of this, actually. It's nature is heavily romantic, and it was meant to be a rejection of the modern world. It's exactly the sort of thing that the Technocracy is fighting against.

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To be fair I can see the heavily-western heavily-capitalistic Technocratic Union backing the fascists against the Rationalists of the Soviet Union, made of a lot of disaffected Iterator defectors (and Etherites who liked the idea of sticking the middle finger to orthodox economics), who are now the go-to story by the NWO as to why ItX requires the NWO and Syndicate to run things when they have the second biggest army of the Union. "It turns out that your cybernetic economies implode when you use them on Earth right now. Now do what we say because we're right."

Of course that leads to excitement and we can't have that, the bad guys have to be a monolithic block (except when they defect to the good guys)

Hell, the Union was ahead of IRL society on the matter of sexism (at least if you were a white, well-educated woman), but the way this works out is that women are the equal of men as long as they act exactly like men. The culture is institutionally male. Female Technocrats have to take part in the same macho, how-long-hours-can-I-work, keep-on-chugging-stimulants-until-the-work's-done culture as the boys. If they want a child and they're in a field role, they can say goodbye to promotion prospects unless they find a surrogate or have the child vat grown. It's far more subtle than just "You don't get that job if you're a woman" - it's "you need a 1.0 rating to get this promotion, and you took time out due to 'personal reasons' so you only have a 0.9. So Mr Jones has the promotion instead, as he has a 1.1." (and of course, he got an extra 0.1 grade on his last review because he was felt to be 'strong' and 'assertive' and a 'natural leader' while the same traits in a woman got called 'demanding', 'pushy', and 'a prima donna'.)

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See, this kind of subtle, slightly uncomfortable sexism works in the Technocracy because it makes you ask uncomfortable questions about your own success.

Actually, how exactly does it work that the scientific consensus for a long time revolved around women being less intelligent/emotionally mature/suited to intellectual pursuits than men? I mean, given that the scientific consensus was at least partly under the reigns of the Technocracy, and their potential membership is split 50/50 between males and females, both of whom can be objectively identified as having Genius? Were women just neglected for recruitment on grounds on emotional instability and obvious tendency toward reality-deviation? Was there a big upswell of female Traditionalists because women had a choice between being independent witches or lab assistants? What was going on there?

(also questions like "shouldn't the Consenus have actually lobotomized the Western female population at some point in the past" do come up)

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I suspect that the Order of Reason would have been arguing that certainly exceptional women would also possess the spark of genius needed to be a proper member, but certainly most women weren't suited for it. Or something.

 

[The Laurent]

Actually, how exactly does it work that the scientific consensus for a long time revolved around women being intelligent/emotionally mature/suited to intellectual pursuits than men? I mean, given that the scientific consensus was at least partly under the reigns of the Technocracy, and their potential membership is split 50/50 between males and females, both of whom can be objectively identified as having Genius? Were women just neglected for recruitment on grounds on emotional instability and obvious tendency toward reality-deviation? Was there a big upswell of female Traditionalists because women had a choice between being independent witches or lab assistants? What was going on there?

(also questions like "shouldn't the Consenus have actually lobotomized the Western female population at some point in the past" do come up)

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I actually asked a similar question/similar point about racism and the Consensus earlier on in the thread. I can't dig up the answers right now, but there was some talk on how this would all make sense, or at least how it might work.

Just have to find the posts in this thread for it.

 

[vicky_molokh]

Basically, I personally feel that the Technocracy should pride itself on its equality, and then in practice fall short of its high-minded proclaimed ideas. Just like we do. Because its sins are our sins, and paradigms should own their own failure states.

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This one of those things where I think I agree with you:
Priding oneself on one's good official policies is not the same as actually truly upholding them in practice. That's why I brought up the USSR/1984 comparison - it's one of the more stark illustrations of this contrast.

The USSR isn't the Technocracy, the Technocracy isn't the USSR, and "everyone is an interchangeable cog" does in fact contradict "but some cogs are better than others." Just FYI, the latter makes cogs non-interchangeable by definition. And of course the 1E "The Technocracy is 1984!" stuff was kind of de facto retconned repeatedly.

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Yes, these two things contradict each other. Totalitarian organisations do tend to have some amount of contradiction, particularly between what they preach and what they practice. (On second thought, not only those. But it seems to be more drastic in those.)
Also, the 1984ish stuff seems to be being restored back to some extent, albeit with a different focus (because times have moved on).

 

[Broken25]

I actually asked a similar question/similar point about racism and the Consensus earlier on in the thread. I can't dig up the answers right now, but there was some talk on how this would all make sense, or at least how it might work.

Just have to find the posts in this thread for it.

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I don't think the game ever gives a hard answer, but there's a number of things to consider.

First, the Consensus isn't the same everywhere, and there can be pockets, even very small ones, set up inside larger ones. So slaves getting together might make a literal safe space, where the oppressive weight of the slaveholding consensus doesn't press down on them.

Secondly, I'm fairly sure that Mind effects can be resisted with Willpower. Life effects less so, but this does segue into the next point.

Thirdly, it would likely be hard to tell if the differences are due to the Consensus or due to the practical effects of discrimination - or even if there's a real distinction between the two in Mage. And is the person overcoming it doing so because their Willpower is resisting a subtle push from reality itself, or simply giving them the determination to push through mundane obstacles?

Finally, Mages get to go 'fuck that' regardless, and what Paradox they might for doing so would probably be subtle and functionally indistinguishable from the pushback against a member of an oppressed group trying (and succeeding) at getting ahead.

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[EarthScorpion]

(also questions like "shouldn't the Consenus have actually lobotomized the Western female population at some point in the past" do come up)

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Well, at that point, you're asking yourself questions like "If women had to pay XP surcharges to learn highly mathematical Abilities, is that because the laws of physics were different so womens' brains really did work differently, or was it just that it was much harder for a woman to learn these things with all that social pressure against it?".

I mean, even IRL, there's a known phenomenon that if people are told that their sex performs worse at a type of exam, they actually do worse than a control group.

 

[Eukie]

The religious right was a big (if not as big) thing in the 80's and 90's, so if White Wolf in 1993 decided that they wanted their representative of all evil and things we don't like (the Technocracy) to not have a religious angle, I find it hard to argue that this was not a deliberate choice. Consequently, arguing that the Technocracy should have this great and welcome faction of religious fundamentalists in their ranks boggles the mind; religious fundamentalism is not core to the Technocracy's concept, and the elaborate fiction weaved around it throughout MTAs supplements is that the Order of Reason/Technocracy got rid of organized religion before the 20th Century.


The neoreactionary/alt-right movement as The Man also feels a bit weird when they're so heavily entrenched in their opposition to (liberal, transnational multicultural, progressive) Man. Why would a world-spanning organization of "Chinese plutocrats, Nigerian oil barons and Arab princes" that seeks to establish a New World Order under a World Government comprise marginal white nationalists and anti-immigration groups? They'd be among the people who fight the Technocracy - though they don't have to be part of the Traditions, because not everyone fighting the Technocracy have to be part of the Traditions. The Traditions are far to liberal multicultural for the alt-right and religious right.

Well, at that point, you're asking yourself questions like "If women had to pay XP surcharges to learn highly mathematical Abilities, is that because the laws of physics were different so womens' brains really did work differently, or was it just that it was much harder for a woman to learn these things with all that social pressure against it?".

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I much prefer the 1950's, where women get XP-discounts to mathematics and computer programming.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

Yes, these two things contradict each other. Totalitarian organisations de tend to have some amount of contradiction, particularly between what they preach and what they practice. (On second thought, not only those. But it seems to be more drastic in those.)

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Your argument is literally "the USSR did it this way so the Technocracy also should do it this way." This is not a very good argument. Your shifting to "ideologies tend to have contradictions" is not particularly helpful because nothing says the contradictions have to be this instead of how, as a random example, the Technocracy might ignore an Awakened faith healer whose miracles are relatively low-key because it still has a lot of (nominal) Christians who (nominally) believe in god and miracles to drop HITMarks on the linear mage herbalists getting the same results despite the latter being objectively less of a threat to its goals than the former.

Also, the 1984ish stuff seems to be being restored back to some extent, albeit with a different focus (because times have moved on).

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Given the contents of the 4 Revised books I can say no, no they aren't. The focus of the four post-Ascension Revised Conventionbooks was the Technocracy putting itself together after it was basically torn apart, and the Technocracy being a strongly ideological group of crusaders... except for the Void Engineers who demonstrate that 'survival' rates more highly than 'ideology.' Which I think actually goes into the whole theme of the four-book arc. The Technocracy are absolutely not in agreement with each other because you have posthumans, militaristic paternalists, capitalism, the deep state, and SPACE MARINES, but they need each other, and this is why they're a Union.

@Eukie has also talked about the M20 chapter on the Technocracy and it certainly doesn't paint a picture of people whose endgoal is 1984. That being a possible stop due to the road to hell being paved to good intentions? Sure. But that's greatly different from the implications you want where the Technocracy is all aboard on building that dystopian future because they're evil. In fact the worst part of the M20 Technocracy is Brucato's insistence that the ~Nephandi~ are responsible for all the bad things it's done because ~Nephandi~ when it should fucking own that shit.

Which gives me an idea. The last actual Nephandus died centuries ago. Change nothing else about Mage's general broad-strokes history except that everything done by a "Nephandus" was done by a member of the Technos or Trads. The Nephandi become an excuse-the idea that there's this cosmic evil out there and if only they were eliminated things would be good, despite it being a complete lie and the real damage being man's inhumanity to man-because that gets us asking the same uncomfortable questions @EarthScorpion's treatment of sexism and racism in the Union does.

 

[EarthScorpion]

The neoreactionary/alt-right movement as The Man also feels a bit weird when they're so heavily entrenched in their opposition to (liberal, transnational multicultural, progressive) Man. Why would a world-spanning organization of "Chinese plutocrats, Nigerian oil barons and Arab princes" that seeks to establish a New World Order under a World Government comprise marginal white nationalists and anti-immigration groups?

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The current palava in the UK with regards to the EU referendum is the best example of this. Like, does anyone believe that the Exit campaign is backed by the Technocracy in the oWoD's equivalent? Where the IMF, EU, World Bank, Bank of England, USA, etc etc are all going "No stop you madmen what are you doing?" and the Exiters are busy churning out blatant lies, frothing at the mouth about THE IMMIGRANTS, and the world figures backing them are... uh. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Like, there's one side that the Man is backing. And that's not Exit.

Which gives me an idea. The last actual Nephandus died centuries ago. Change nothing else about Mage's general broad-strokes history except that everything done by a "Nephandus" was done by a member of the Technos or Trads.

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Entropy is the serpent that consumes its own tail. Inverted Avatars devour themselves within a hundred years or so, Cauls consume their own existence - and the last Nephandus from an organised quasi-Tradition of evil mages died in an insane asylum in New England in 1897, a soulless madman raving about things he saw when he was younger when the world itself obeyed his every word.

Occasionally a new Caul forms. Occasionally some fool pledges themselves to descension. It always ends the same way, with a whimper not a bang, but it's just enough to spark the fear afresh.

 

[ChineseDrone]

To be fair I can see the heavily-western heavily-capitalistic Technocratic Union backing the fascists against the Rationalists of the Soviet Union, made of a lot of disaffected Iterator defectors (and Etherites who liked the idea of sticking the middle finger to orthodox economics), who are now the go-to story by the NWO as to why ItX requires the NWO and Syndicate to run things when they have the second biggest army of the Union. "It turns out that your cybernetic economies implode when you use them on Earth right now. Now do what we say because we're right."

Of course that leads to excitement and we can't have that, the bad guys have to be a monolithic block (except when they defect to the good guys)

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Personally, I've never seen the Technocracy as necessarily a purely capitalistic entity. It is in its modern form, but historically speaking there would have to have been some branches of the mainstream Union that engaged with Communism--radical leftist thinking was way too common among the intelligensia in the West during the early-to-mid 20th century to be dismissed as an aberration, by the logic of Mage the Technocracy had to have something to do with it.

The way I've always seen it, the USSR started as an experiment by a small group of heterodox Syndicate young turks who wanted to experiment with inventing a better, new way of distributing capital a second time (Remember, the Syndicate did invent capitalism from mercantilism and it largely worked out--there's no reason for them not to think that they can't do something similar again). Given that the Technocracy has always had a utopian streak, these people eventually get pretty popular to the point where leadership feels the need to throw them a bone and let them put their ideas into practice. Hence, Control lets them go fuck around in Russia, which is at the edge of the Technocracy's control and still heavily influenced by Traditionalists, under the logic that if they fail they all die and if they succeed they'll bring the place under much firmer Technocratic control.

The Communists succeed and start to rule in the USSR far more openly than the Technocracy usually does, but as it turns out the actual economic parts of their program aren't really working out. The wider Syndicate finds that failure by their own embarrassing and begins a long campaign to pull the plug on the "Soviet experiment", causing most of the world to isolate the Soviet Union. Some of the Syndics involved with the USSR give up and leave, returning to the mainstream Union in disgrace. The others more or less get subsumed into the NWO and Iterator elements that come to run the USSR and continue to insist that the utopian "Soviet model" is workable and a superior mode of operation for the Technocracy. Strapped of resources, they also start cooperating with local Etherites to an extent that's considered near-treasonous, justifying this by claiming that the superiority of the Soviet model has even allowed them to reunite the Order of Reason.

Flash forward to the 1930s. Technocratic leadership is getting pretty nervous at the growing near-separatism of the USSR Technocracy from the rest of the Union and starts considering ways of fixing the problem. Unfortunately, WWII happens. Control initially orders the Technocracy to prevent war (No, they don't support the Nazis, because that's stupid), but the Germany Technocracy (which frankly has gotten a lot more disturbingly heterodox than the Soviet one after the rise of the Nazis) goes rogue, and the Union begins to prepare for war (There's a widespread perception that they "supported the Nazis" by dragging their feet until 1941, which happened for a variety of reasons I'll properly delve into in the Leviathan writeup). Control can't do anything about the USSR Technocrats because they need them to fight the Nazi Technocrats--by 1945, the Soviet Technocracy has amassed more influence than it's ever had. Cue the Cold War.

The Soviet Technocracy was never really more than 20-30% or so of the entire Union even at its height during the 1950s, but it exercised very outsize influence during this time and started trying to overtake the Western Technocracy through various methods of subterfuge. They were often on the frontlines of the Pogrom, for instance (in real life the Eastern Bloc was a pretty huge force for bringing things like literacy to the third world). However, after the luster of their WWII efforts in the grand crusade against the Nephandi wore off, people started getting uncomfortable with their heterodoxy again, and Control restarted its long-term plans to bring the Eastern Technocracy back into the fold of mainstream Technocratic thought (after using them to purge much of the leadership of the Five Elemental Dragons from China, whom Control disliked even more). Gradually, the Soviet Technocracy started hemorrhaging members and resources, forcing them to slowly move back into the mainstream from the 1970s onwards. The NWO branch of the Soviet Technocracy slowly begins to advocate for reform and reconciliation, while Iterator hardliners oppose it. After a period of internal politicking, NWO takes control and guides Russia through Gorbachev's reforms and finally pulls the plug on the Eastern bloc, bringing the Russian Union back into the mainstream (What, you thought it wass a coincidence that the KGB/FSB was one of the few Russian institutions that survived through the USSR's collapse more or less unaltered?). This whole thing is used as an excuse to drastically scale down the autonomy of individual national symposiums, bringing Control's authority to it's peak just as the Ascension War reaches its climax.

The Syndicate feels vindicated. NWO claims that all of this was exactly according to plan, and yeah they were totally responsible for guiding the entire world from the end of WWI to the end of history--the Cold War did help Western governments expand their authority and led to the rise of mixed economies, all while killing off Superstitionist bastions in the East, right? (No one is really quite sure if NWO really planned all of this or if they're just bullshitting, or if it's some combination of the two). Blame for all the Soviets' missteps gets pinned on ItX and Etherite subversion.

 

[Estro]

The current palava in the UK with regards to the EU referendum is the best example of this. Like, does anyone believe that the Exit campaign is backed by the Technocracy in the oWoD's equivalent? Where the IMF, EU, World Bank, Bank of England, USA, etc etc are all going "No stop you madmen what are you doing?" and the Exiters are busy churning out blatant lies, frothing at the mouth about THE IMMIGRANTS, and the world figures backing them are... uh. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

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Who would be backing them, or would it be a purely sleepers based set of ideas? I think the Etherites might like the idea, but my knowledge of mage is embarrassingly small.

 

[vicky_molokh]

Your argument is literally "the USSR did it this way so the Technocracy also should do it this way." This is not a very good argument. Your shifting to "ideologies tend to have contradictions" is not particularly helpful because nothing says the contradictions have to be this instead of how, as a random example, the Technocracy might ignore an Awakened faith healer whose miracles are relatively low-key because it still has a lot of (nominal) Christians who (nominally) believe in god and miracles to drop HITMarks on the linear mage herbalists getting the same results despite the latter being objectively less of a threat to its goals than the former.

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No, that is not literally my argument. But it's still a good illustration for what happens when a Big Brotherly organisation gets that sort of control. It also seems to be in line with the way Traditions vs. Technocracy are split on the human/civil rights debate.

@Eukie has also talked about the M20 chapter on the Technocracy and it certainly doesn't paint a picture of people whose endgoal is 1984. That being a possible stop due to the road to hell being paved to good intentions? Sure. But that's greatly different from the implications you want where the Technocracy is all aboard on building that dystopian future because they're evil. In fact the worst part of the M20 Technocracy is Brucato's insistence that the ~Nephandi~ are responsible for all the bad things it's done because ~Nephandi~ when it should fucking own that shit.

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IIRC the Technocracy is written with at least a mild pro-Technocracy stance, in contrast with the rest of the book. I mean, she also admits wanting to go Techno out of spite because the Technos are deliberately shown as eviller by default. This kinda reminds me how the Sabbat guidebooks are too written with a certain amount of Sabbat apologism in mind (and when I was younger, I too went into Sabbat apologism).

As for endgoals of 1984, well, things need not necessarily be simple about it. Surely both the reds in real life and the people who made 1984 possible in 1984 had good intentions. But sometimes good intentions do turn a person evil, once they become willing to sacrifice their goodness along the way to achieving the stuff behind those intentions. So yeah, the paving of the hellroad (at least in the popular sense of the saying; not sure if the original one differs from it). Blaming stuff on Nephandi is . . . that's only half the picture; that's like blaming Palpatine and forgetting that Anakin stepped onto the path of evil too. So "Nephandi have seduced technos onto the dark path" does not preclude technos going dark, it just gives a reason why it happened.

But perhaps I am reading too much into the new characterisation (and into the objections to it).

 

[ChineseDrone]

As for endgoals of 1984, well, things need not necessarily be simple about it. Surely [...]the people who made 1984 possible in 1984 had good intentions.

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Uh... no. No they didn't. That was the whole point of 1984.

You do realize that Orwell was a Socialist himself, right?

 

[vicky_molokh]

Uh... no. No they didn't. That was the whole point of 1984.

You do realize that Orwell was a Socialist himself, right?

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The people manipulating the masses didn't. But the masses were led to believe that they're doing the right thing, for a certain value of 'right' (i.e. at a minimum compared to the alternative). And 1984 wouldn't be possible without the masses. Notice how there isn't, say, a 99% defection rate, not much in the way of an attempt to overthrow the leadership etc.

 

[Mutton]

NRx is a while different beast from your standard nativist. I'd make them a Technocrat splinter group, as their gimmick is that they're looking at history through the lens of conservative thinkers; an Ivory Tower that wants it's own ideas in charge

 

[ChineseDrone]

The people manipulating the masses didn't. But the masses were led to believe that they're doing the right thing, for a certain value of 'right' (i.e. at a minimum compared to the alternative). And 1984 wouldn't be possible without the masses. Notice how there isn't, say, a 99% defection rate, not much in the way of an attempt to overthrow the leadership etc.

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Have you... actually read 1984?

The masses do not make the world of 1984 possible, they are ineffectual in it. The Party explicitly does not really give a shit about the Proles, and the Proles do not really give a shit about the Party. They're not supposed to be well-intentioned and believe that they're doing the right thing, they're kept complacent by bread and circuses.

(The people you're probably talking about are the Outer Party, but the Outer Party are... government workers. So what you're saying is that... the government is not possible without government workers. Which is true, I suppose, but a bit meaningless, don't you think? They're also, like, only 10% of all Oceanians, and not individually important to the Party--they can be, and are, easily replaced)

Look, like it or not, if the Technocracy has a largely coherent ideology and good intentions, then it... will act in accordance with its largely coherent ideology and good intentions. Even if we take the absolute worst interpretation of the Technocracy--let's just say they're the USSR like you describe (not the USSR under Stalin, that was shitty because Stalin was a horrible person, not because of ideology). For all that the USSR was authoritarian, it still made marked improvements in things like Russian literacy and education, infrastructure, etc. Hell, the early USSR made a lot of progress on social issues that were far ahead of its time--they even legalized homosexuality during the 1920s, until Stalin banned it. They were the first nation to end lobotomies. They were markedly more racially equitable than the West. The USSR was not some abyss of evilness from which no goodness could emerge, and, even in the worst interpretations one could possibly have of the Technocracy, they shouldn't be either. If someone has good intentions, that means they will probably do some good things.

Like, when we think of truly evil nations--the Nazis, the Khmer Rogue, ISIS, etc.--they don't have intentions that would be considered "good" by the vast majority of people alive today. That's not how the Technocracy would work, because we are explicitly told what the Technocracy wants--a rational, equitable, utopian world--and for them to turn around and start actively and openly undermining that goal makes no sense

 

[Eukie]

IIRC the Technocracy is written with at least a mild pro-Technocracy stance, in contrast with the rest of the book. I mean, she also admits wanting to go Techno out of spite because the Technos are deliberately shown as eviller by default. This kinda reminds me how the Sabbat guidebooks are too written with a certain amount of Sabbat apologism in mind (and when I was younger, I too went into Sabbat apologism)

Click to shrink...

In describing the Technocracy in its own chapter M20 uses a tone that presents what the Technocracy does in a positive light. Irrespective of that tone, the M20 chapter on the Technocracy does not paint a picture of people whose endgoal is 1984 or anything similar. It's a quite large gap between the two, and pointing to a bias and using this to conclude the Technocracy chapter is basically outright lying is taking the concept of an unreliable narrator way too far. For one, it is easy to tell that the Technocracy chapter is biased because it is deliberately written to invoke a dissonance between the positivity of the words used and the things it describes (like underplaying conditioning and brainwashing). What it doesn't describe is an organization that goes full 1984 with the-object-of-power-is-power and mass surveillance, disappearances, and brutal torture in order to keep an elite at the top at the expense of the freedoms and quality of life of the non-elite under the guise of progress and security.

Unless the "1984is stuff" you described are wholly confined to to the mind-control and surveillance, absent of that stuff's purpose. That I'll grant it does try to paint a rosy picture of, but that's stuff that I think falls petty much outside the scope of the discussion, since all of this was started over the everything-evil-and-bad kitchen sink-portrayal and the potential inclusion of the alt-right.

 

[AkatsukiL13]

The Technocracy is... well it's evolved as times have changed, both in and out of universe. When MtAs first came out, the Technocracy was the Big Bad and at the same time really, really gonzo in a lot of areas. I have the original Technocracy Books, Book of Chantries as well as Loom of Fate, the first adventure module for MtAs and one of its first books, and while some of it still holds up today, there's plenty that's pretty damn silly and absurd by today's standards. But then it was the early/mid 90's.

Back then it was the Orwellian Machine that crushed free-thought and creativity while spying on everyone. Like the Sabbat in 1E, it was the inhuman Big Bad. But as they developed the line and fleshed the Technocracy, they became more grounded and sympathetic, going from a largely villainous group to a more ambiguous group that stands in the grey more than the black and white.

And yes, they have made mistakes and gone down wrong paths since the early days of the more noble Order of Reason but I actually argue that they've developed a reason in-universe for that despite the fact the Union was made first and Order was fleshed out later. Ever since I began to explore MtSC, I've held the view that Order's core the Cabal of Pure Thought, the High Guild and the Craftmasons. They were the strongest and largest of the groups that created the Order and embody the trinity of Body (Cabal), Mind (Guild) and Soul (Craft). And while all the Conventions had their representatives on the Inner Council of the Order, they were the three big groups controlling and fighting over policy. Of the three, the Craftmasons were most focused on elevating Humanity and were much more... well socialist and democratic for a lack of better word. And in the end, they were destroyed by the Cabal and the High Guild, breaking the 'Soul' of the Order. With their increasing control and success over the Masses, the Order became increasing decadent and corrupt until the Grand Organization into the Technocracy in the Victorian Era which in and of itself further points to how and why they became more European-centric. When the Order was founded, the Craftmasons reached out to philosopher-scientists from across the globe, including the Middle East and Far East, though the Pro-Christian Cabal scared off many from the former. It was founded as an brotherhood of like-minded Enlightened Minds from around the civilized world of the time. The Union was forged in Europe at a time when Europe and European ideas dominated much of the world so the Union reflected those ideas. Namely European ideas focusing on Imperialism and pro-White Man. And even though they've grown past such ideas, you can still see their roots in them.

Of course the Craftmasons were not entirely destroyed and their ideals still live on in the Union and have been on the rise despite the group's death centuries ago.

Because while Willworker groups of all stripes like to say how they influenced aspects of Sleeper culture and beliefs, so to does Sleeper culture and beliefs shape as Willworker are not born in a vacuum. Most grow up in the world of Sleepers and their beliefs. Ultimately their roots come from the Sleeper's World and favors their beliefs. Hence how the Union became what is despite its origins as the OoR and why in the post-Avatar Storm world, with the top of the Monolith is cut off from the base, the Union changed as younger minds took higher positions of control and leadership.

As for the rise of the Nephandi, especially in M20, is for a good reason. Originally the Technocracy was the Big Bad, the evil mirror to Mages. However as the setting has grown and evolved, the Union has become less the dark mirror of Mages and more a mirror of the Traditions which makes more sense in MtAs today. But the Nephandi with their inverted Avatars are the ideal mirror to Mages of all stripes. All Mages, regardless of what they believe or call themselves seek this upward path of Enlightenment and Ascension while the Nephandi are the reverse, their inverted Avatars driving them into a downward Descent.

I don't entirely agree with blaming most problems with the Union and the Traditions on them but I support that they have infiltrated both groups over the years, creating some and/or worsening the problems of both groups and throwing fuel on the fire of their conflict. Having the Traditions and the Union responsible for most of their problems makes them more human than blaming it on a third party. Likewise, having both groups focus more on each other than the more significant threat of the Nephandi is another more human thing, focusing more on age-old grudges than seeing the rising threat of the Nephandi.

But that's just my two cents.

 

[vicky_molokh]

Have you... actually read 1984?

The masses do not make the world of 1984 possible, they are ineffectual in it. The Party explicitly does not really give a shit about the Proles, and the Proles do not really give a shit about the party. They're not supposed to be well-intentioned and believe that they're doing the right thing, they're kept complacent by bread and circuses.

(The people you're probably talking about are the Outer Party, but the Outer Party are... government workers. So what you're saying is that... the government is not possible without government workers. Which is true, I suppose, but a bit meaningless, don't you think? They're also, like, only 10% of all Oceanians, and not individually important to the Party--they can be, and are, easily replaced)

Look, like it or not, if the Technocracy has a largely coherent ideology and good intentions, then it... will act in accordance with its largely coherent ideology and good intentions. Even if we take the absolute worst interpretation of the Technocracy--let's just say they're the USSR like you describe (not the USSR under Stalin, that was shitty because Stalin was a horrible person, not because of ideology). For all that the USSR was authoritarian, it still made marked improvements in things like Russian literacy and education, infrastructure, etc. Hell, the early USSR made a lot of progress on social issues that were far ahead of its time--they even legalized homosexuality during the 1920s, until Stalin banned it. They were the first nation to end lobotomies. They were markedly more racially equitable than the West. The USSR was not some abyss of evilness from which no goodness could emerge, and, even in the worst interpretations one could possibly have of the Technocracy, they shouldn't be either. If someone has good intentions, that means they will probably do some good things.

Like, when we think of truly evil nations--the Nazis, the Khmer Rogue, ISIS, etc.--they don't have intentions that would be considered "good" by the vast majority of people alive today. That's not how the Technocracy would work, because we are explicitly told what the Technocracy wants--a rational, equitable, utopian world--and for them to turn around and start actively and openly undermining that goal makes no sense

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It's not meaningless. It's extremely important. It doesn't take a single Palpatine or Stalin or Nephandus to turn something into an evil empire. An evil empire also requires between thousands and millions of various Commissars willing to shoot anyone who disagrees, soldiers who are willing to participate in conquests, overseers who guard the gulags, upstanding citizens who yell "Yay!" on parades dedicated to the glorious leader, and last but not least, informers willing to report anyone not agreeing about the party line to the local alphabet soup. The latter is very important: citizens willing to throw their neighbours under the boot. Citizens willing to evil stuff due to thinking either "this is for the greater good" or "if not me, somebody else would do it, so it's okay for me to do it".

Yes, bad organisations can still do good stuff from time to time. But a murderer who gives billions of dollars to charity is still a murderer. Doing good stuff occasionally does not wash away the blood. (No, the Traditions aren't innocent either, I know. Still, in terms of successfully performed bad stuff, Technocracy seems to be a 'winner' against them.)

In describing the Technocracy in its own chapter M20 uses a tone that presents what the Technocracy does in a positive light. Irrespective of that tone, the M20 chapter on the Technocracy does not paint a picture of people whose endgoal is 1984 or anything similar. It's a quite large gap between the two, and pointing to a bias and using this to conclude the Technocracy chapter is basically outright lying is taking the concept of an unreliable narrator way too far. For one, it is easy to tell that the Technocracy chapter is biased because it is deliberately written to invoke a dissonance between the positivity of the words used and the things it describes (like underplaying conditioning and brainwashing). What it doesn't describe is an organization that goes full 1984 with the-object-of-power-is-power and mass surveillance, disappearances, and brutal torture in order to keep an elite at the top at the expense of the freedoms and quality of life of the non-elite under the guise of progress and security.

Unless the "1984is stuff" you described are wholly confined to to the mind-control and surveillance, absent of that stuff's purpose. That I'll grant it does try to paint a rosy picture of, but that's stuff that I think falls petty much outside the scope of the discussion, since all of this was started over the everything-evil-and-bad kitchen sink-portrayal and the potential inclusion of the alt-right.

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Does the observation that the Guide to Technocracy is written with a pro-Technocracy stance as a satire stop applying to M20? Are they now (as of M20) above quietly eliminating dissenters and otherwise acting Gestapoish?
(Genuine question, since your reading of M20 was surely deeper than mine. But I had the impression that no matter what they tell you, they're still the total-control-freaks with brutal, totalitarian methods. Or perhaps such organisations with such methods and agendas are not considered 1984ish enough.)