Because it is the status quo/sins of the west/whatever, it means that pretty much everything I've ever seen written here is designed to buff the Technocracy and its power even more. It's hard to even think of a way the Technocracy hasn't won, because of the way consensual reality and paradigm and "The Technocracy is the West" is set up.
I think...mm. I tend to come down pro-Union in the debates heh, just because I really like the scifi-futuretech stuff more than the repressed magical stuff and I like being a part of The Man more than I like being a scrappy resistance fighter.
But you've kind of got a point I think. In that the Union often does feel sorta rosy. Sorta "well yes
but" in how it's described in the thread wrt its sins.
I think the way that the Union is often described lacks a lot of the visceral fear and horror that would make it, not
relateable exactly that's not really the word I'm looking for, but more nuanced maybe? More subtle? I mean part of that is just the fact that the Union as a whole has been caught between hurricanes in the gameline and a lot of the vigorous masturbation is a reaction to the sloppy oral the devs were giving the Trads for a long while afaik. And even the more contemplative and thoughtful, uh, thoughts that a lot of the thread regulars hand out in here is colored by it. And that's not bad or good or anything, it's just sort of the way it is.
But in terms of what I think like...
Like ogres and onions the Union has layers ultimately. Taking it from the perspective of a character in the setting: there's the outside, where you first see it as this huge monolithic thing. Fearsome and implacable and unrelenting. More of a vast, cogent, machine than any human organization: moving and adjusting and pruning away the undesirable bits, cultivating and encouraging the things it prefers. Then you open it up, get inside, and see that it's got very human parts. Human parts that can be your friends, be your coworkers, be the people you grab a cyber-beer with in the neon near future and all that jazz. It's harder to be afraid of Alex Mercer when you see him 9-to-5 every day and trade days to bring in bagels for the office. The Union becomes a thing with very human foibles and human failings and human virtues. And its easy as a character to go "oh wow I was completely wrong, they gave us fast food and internet porn and all the things I really like, fuck yeah Union".
And then you peel back the final layer and see that it's dark and disturbing in a very different way than the implacable machine.
The Union is workers throwing themselves from Beijing rooftops because maybe death would be better than this miserable half-life and at the very least it can't be worse. The Union is war machines crawling through Mesopotamian dirt while vast engines suck Quintessence from the ground. The Union is the Great Barrier Reef dying and antibiotic resistant bacteria proliferating and soft black bags in the night and we can fix it, we can fix all of it, just give us some time and we'll get it right honest.
There's an unfairness there. There's that element of "
they can't keep getting away with it". Strains of hypocrisy that get buried deep and nobody talks about or analyzes or confronts them because hey, we're the good guys right? Sure we do bad things but we're doing what's right in the end. And we're better than we were and we'll be even better tomorrow so that makes it all okay right? And even the jaded senior operatives use their cynicism like armor. "Well
someone has to plunge their hands into the muck, just the way it is, world is a dirty and ugly place and we're just taking out the trash".
That's part of why I like Threat Null a lot heh. Because they're the Union's sins incarnate. They're reality taking the Union by the collar and grinding their face in the mirror and going "look at this. Look at what you made. Look at what you
are."
If that makes any sense I mean? Idk I'm sorta bleary and just slapping the keyboard at this point.
