Victoria Falls: A Post-Collapse American Nation Quest [Down With Victoria!]

[4WheelSword]

thread policy Discussion of politics that does not directly relate to the Quest or to Quest votes are banned from hereon out. This thread policy will be enforced by the Moderation team. Do not ignore it.

 

[silverpower]

AN: Inspired by certain musings of mine on the Discord, a small sample of... Victoriology. Updated after reading the Chapter 45 synopsis.

On "Retroculture" - a primer for would-be Victoriologists

(Reprinted 2075, San Francisco, NCR. From "Victoria: The Fires of Reaction", serialized in "SF on SF" zine in 2041 by members of the Street Fight Collective, collected and printed 2046. Text from Sixth Edition.)

When speaking of technology, "1930s-1960s America" isn't a hard cutoff, so much as a guideline. For example, you can do a surprising amount of industrial chemistry with nothing more than typical 1930s equipment. Moreover, many medicines and vaccines can be (and sometimes are) created without the use of proscribed technology. So what, specifically, is proscribed?

First, anything that's truly difficult to maintain. The ideal is "an untrained (read: in practice, semi-skilled) 1930s man should be able to maintain any Victorian equipment". They make exceptions in places - the F-16V has early-model discrete-transistor avionics built as black boxes by Californian factories for the... sensitivities... of the Victorian mindset. But overall, Victorian society prefers simpler and easy to maintain machinery. The other reason goes hand in hand with the devaluing of skilled labor.

The next is automation. Machines that can operate machines, that obey the principles of cybernetics and not merely Newtonian physics. Rumford feared such technology as being contaminated with the "cultural Marxist" mindset, but what he really objects to is the (purported) inhumanity of the automatic machine, and the mass communications it facilitates. This was a man who realized that software was eating the world - and wanted absolutely no part of this. Mass two-way communication is the great mistake - it's how the cultural Marxists transmit their degeneracy. To Rumford and his intellectual forebears, the world would have been a better place had Godel never proved the incompleteness theorem, had Church and Turing failed to grapple with the halting problem, had Lillenfeld been unable to invent the transistor, had Atanasoff not devised the electronic binary machine. Computation, automation, tabulation... all is suspect, at best. Technology that cannot be controlled has no use for Victoria, and fundamentally, the computer is a revolution. Like all revolutions, the possibility exists to recuperate that revolution, but Retrocultists maintain that crushing the revolution is essential to maintain the Victorian way of life. In a sense, they don't even understand how right they are.

The third category of technology proscribed by the Retrocultist is long-range transport. It is part of the fascist obsession with the imagined past, now carried into the horror of the present. Ostensibly, it is a way to reduce the atomization of society and meet carbon targets. However, long-range transport is proscribed in general, for those without connection to the Victorian State. Their open hostility to the transit bus, to light and heavy rail alike, betrays the true purpose of these measures - to ensure that the worker and the peasant cannot escape the reactionaries - in thought or in deed. As we will discuss later in the collection, this hostility to sustainable mass transport has everything to do with maintaining the fascist hegemony of the Victorian State, and has nothing to do with environmental concerns.

In short, Retrocultists accept that they can't win against the Gramscian hegemony of a modern media state and culture. Thus, they seek to eradicate it, to smash the material basis for mass culture that they cannot control. In its place, they substitute media forms amenable to control. So what is permitted?

Radio on the surface can be subversive, so why is it so prevalent? Radio requires capital investments, but not too much. Basic AM/FM radios are cheap to produce, but more general radios are likely banned. (No shortwave or 2/10-meter systems for you.) To maintain their media hegemony, they strictly limit what can be heard on air. Film theaters and newspapers are also strictly regulated, for those who can afford to partake of them. May the gods help the poor souls who defy the CMC censor, because Victoria is without mercy.

It is speculated that a few computers may be allowed, under the strict control of CMC Intelligence units. Only those of the highest moral caliber could be trusted in any sense with proscribed technology, and the CMC monitors these men, simultaneously trusted and untrusted - when they do not simply farm out such work to... deniable elements. (Victoriologists endlessly debate the question of how Victoria manages to maintain any presence on the Internet whatsoever. The historical North Korean example is less than entirely illuminating, and long out of date.)

 

[armentho]

AN: Inspired by certain musings of mine on the Discord, a small sample of... Victoriology.

On "Retroculture" - a primer for would-be Victoriologists

(Reprinted 2075, San Francisco, NCR. From "Victoria: The Fires of Reaction", serialized in "SF on SF" zine in 2041 by members of the Street Fight Collective, collected and printed 2046. Text from Sixth Edition.)

When speaking of technology, "1930s-1960s America" isn't a hard cutoff, so much as a guideline. For example, you can do a surprising amount of industrial chemistry with nothing more than typical 1930s equipment. Moreover, many medicines and vaccines can be (and sometimes are) created without the use of proscribed technology. So what, specifically, is proscribed?

First, anything that's truly difficult to maintain. The ideal is "an untrained (read: in practice, semi-skilled) 1930s man should be able to maintain any Victorian equipment". They make exceptions in places - the F-16V has early-model discrete-transistor avionics built as black boxes by Californian factories for the... sensitivities... of the Victorian mindset. But overall, Victorian society prefers simpler and easy to maintain machinery. The other reason goes hand in hand with the devaluing of skilled labor.

The other is automation. Machines that can operate machines, that obey the principles of cybernetics and not merely Newtonian physics. Rumford feared such technology as being contaminated with the "cultural Marxist" mindset, but what he really objects to is the (purported) inhumanity of the automatic machine, and the mass communications it facilitates. This was a man who realized that software was eating the world - and wanted absolutely no part of this. Mass two-way communication is the great mistake - it's how the cultural Marxists transmit their degeneracy. To Rumford and his intellectual forebears, the world would have been a better place had Godel never proved the incompleteness theorem, had Church and Turing failed to grapple with the halting problem, had Lillenfeld been unable to invent the transistor, had Atanasoff not devised the electronic binary machine. Computation, automation, tabulation... all is suspect, at best. Technology that cannot be controlled has no use for Victoria, and fundamentally, the computer is a revolution. Like all revolutions, the possibility exists to recuperate that revolution, but Retrocultists maintain that crushing the revolution is essential to maintain the Victorian way of life. In a sense, they don't even understand how right they are.

In short, Retrocultists accept that they can't win against the Gramscian hegemony of a modern media state and culture. Thus, they seek to eradicate it, to smash the material basis for mass culture that they cannot control. In its place, they substitute media forms amenable to control. So what is permitted?

Radio on the surface can be subversive, so why is it so prevalent? Radio requires capital investments, but not too much. Basic FM radios are cheap to produce, but more general radios are likely banned. (No shortwave or 2/10-meter systems for you.) To maintain their media hegemony, they strictly limit what can be heard on air. Film theaters and newspapers are also strictly regulated, for those who can afford to partake of them. May the gods help the poor souls who defy the CMC censor, because Victoria is without mercy.

It is speculated that a few computers may be allowed, under the strict control of CMC Intelligence units. Only those of the highest moral caliber could be trusted in any sense with proscribed technology, and the CMC monitors these men, simultaneously trusted and untrusted - when they do not simply farm out such work to... deniable elements. (Victoriologists endlessly debate the question of how Victoria manages to maintain any presence on the Internet whatsoever. The historical North Korean example is less than entirely illuminating, and long out of date.)

Click to shrink...

To keep presence in internet they hired 4chan users to meme for them at exchange of tendies

 

[Godwinson]

To keep presence in internet they hired 4chan users to meme for them at exchange of tendies

Click to shrink...

Considering Victorias utter willingness to sell their own people into slavery, and the ideological commonalities between Victoria and most 4chan scumbags, they likely have plenty of ways to pay trolls to continue their work.

 

[silverpower]

Considering Victorias utter willingness to sell their own people into slavery, and the ideological commonalities between Victoria and most 4chan scumbags, they likely have plenty of ways to pay trolls to continue their work.

Click to shrink...

I mean, our friendly anonymous Victoriologist did mention "deniable elements"...

 

[Simon_Jester]

AN: Inspired by certain musings of mine on the Discord, a small sample of... Victoriology.

On "Retroculture" - a primer for would-be Victoriologists

(Reprinted 2075, San Francisco, NCR. From "Victoria: The Fires of Reaction", serialized in "SF on SF" zine in 2041 by members of the Street Fight Collective, collected and printed 2046. Text from Sixth Edition.)

When speaking of technology, "1930s-1960s America" isn't a hard cutoff, so much as a guideline. For example, you can do a surprising amount of industrial chemistry with nothing more than typical 1930s equipment. Moreover, many medicines and vaccines can be (and sometimes are) created without the use of proscribed technology. So what, specifically, is proscribed?

First, anything that's truly difficult to maintain. The ideal is "an untrained (read: in practice, semi-skilled) 1930s man should be able to maintain any Victorian equipment". They make exceptions in places - the F-16V has early-model discrete-transistor avionics built as black boxes by Californian factories for the... sensitivities... of the Victorian mindset. But overall, Victorian society prefers simpler and easy to maintain machinery. The other reason goes hand in hand with the devaluing of skilled labor.

The other is automation. Machines that can operate machines, that obey the principles of cybernetics and not merely Newtonian physics. Rumford feared such technology as being contaminated with the "cultural Marxist" mindset, but what he really objects to is the (purported) inhumanity of the automatic machine, and the mass communications it facilitates. This was a man who realized that software was eating the world - and wanted absolutely no part of this. Mass two-way communication is the great mistake - it's how the cultural Marxists transmit their degeneracy. To Rumford and his intellectual forebears, the world would have been a better place had Godel never proved the incompleteness theorem, had Church and Turing failed to grapple with the halting problem, had Lillenfeld been unable to invent the transistor, had Atanasoff not devised the electronic binary machine. Computation, automation, tabulation... all is suspect, at best. Technology that cannot be controlled has no use for Victoria, and fundamentally, the computer is a revolution. Like all revolutions, the possibility exists to recuperate that revolution, but Retrocultists maintain that crushing the revolution is essential to maintain the Victorian way of life. In a sense, they don't even understand how right they are.

In short, Retrocultists accept that they can't win against the Gramscian hegemony of a modern media state and culture. Thus, they seek to eradicate it, to smash the material basis for mass culture that they cannot control. In its place, they substitute media forms amenable to control. So what is permitted?

Radio on the surface can be subversive, so why is it so prevalent? Radio requires capital investments, but not too much. Basic FM radios are cheap to produce, but more general radios are likely banned. (No shortwave or 2/10-meter systems for you.) To maintain their media hegemony, they strictly limit what can be heard on air. Film theaters and newspapers are also strictly regulated, for those who can afford to partake of them. May the gods help the poor souls who defy the CMC censor, because Victoria is without mercy.

It is speculated that a few computers may be allowed, under the strict control of CMC Intelligence units. Only those of the highest moral caliber could be trusted in any sense with proscribed technology, and the CMC monitors these men, simultaneously trusted and untrusted - when they do not simply farm out such work to... deniable elements. (Victoriologists endlessly debate the question of how Victoria manages to maintain any presence on the Internet whatsoever. The historical North Korean example is less than entirely illuminating, and long out of date.)

Click to shrink...

Some notes:

See here.

Retroculturism is ALSO rather hostile to the automobile. On some level the Lind/Kraft/Rumford hive mind believes that the automobile was as much to blame as the television for the "rot of American culture" Broadly defined, that's just about all social change that took place after about 1913, but especially all change that took place after about 1938.

[And yes, Victoria is supposedly a setting where men who cannot possibly have been born before, oh, 1970 or 1985 or in some cases 2000 or so decide that cars and televisions are too much technology-corrupting-youth, let alone the Internet. Riiiight. It makes it all the more conspicuous that the author, born in 1947 and a fuddy-duddy idiot even by his own generation's standards, is just copy-pasting his own opinions into the brains of men decades younger than himself]

Anyway, the automobile "destroyed community" (remember how hostile Retroculture is to urban culture in general), so Victoria went on a drive to forcibly limit the extent to which it could do that. SUPPOSEDLY this was a totally voluntary 'pledge' drive (see the post I linked to).

 

[armentho]

Considering Victorias utter willingness to sell their own people into slavery, and the ideological commonalities between Victoria and most 4chan scumbags, they likely have plenty of ways to pay trolls to continue their work.

Click to shrink...

Hey,im a 4chan scumbag!!
And you are totally right

/pol/ is cancer
My bois on /r9k/ are cancer too but less "final solution" and more "im going to commit sudoku"

I expect 4chan intitially memeing about the victorians saying they are good and similar bullshit

Untiml they notice their beloved page is going to be taken down by those crazy motherfuckers

*insert lord of the rings meme*

-i never though i would figth alongside a rigth wing troll
-what about a victorian hater?
-that works for me

 

[silverpower]

Retroculturism is ALSO rather hostile to the automobile. On some level the Lind/Kraft/Rumford hive mind believes that the automobile was as much to blame as the television for the "rot of American culture" Broadly defined, that's just about all social change that took place after about 1913, but especially all change that took place after about 1938.

(...)

Anyway, the automobile "destroyed community" (remember how hostile Retroculture is to urban culture in general), so Victoria went on a drive to forcibly limit the extent to which it could do that. SUPPOSEDLY this was a totally voluntary 'pledge' drive (see the post I linked to).

Click to shrink...

Thanks, that's very helpful. It's worth noting that the Victoriology book I'm 'quoting' from is somewhat of a living document, so by the time Sixth Edition rolls by it's almost forgotten that the shunning of high technology was originally 'voluntary'; only some very skeptical notes in the serialized zine version and the First Edition grappled with this notion.

Since what we've seen in-thread of Victoria is not the civilian but the military side of things, it's entirely reasonable to assume that Victoria is indifferent to the evils of motor transport, but thanks to pointing me towards the Chapter 45 synopsis. I got a good chunk of it right, but the in-universe analysis is incomplete without the attitude towards motor vehicles, so thank you.

ETA: I've updated my omake accordingly - a paragraph explaining the culture of anti-movement. The author, understandably, is skeptical about the motives, living in a city where mass transport is quite viable, thank you.

 

[Mopman43]

[X] Plan Reconciliation, Recuperation, and Compensation

 

[Simon_Jester]

Thanks, that's very helpful. It's worth noting that the Victoriology book I'm 'quoting' from is somewhat of a living document, so by the time Sixth Edition rolls by it's almost forgotten that the shunning of high technology was originally 'voluntary'; only some very skeptical notes in the serialized zine version and the First Edition grappled with this notion.

Click to shrink...

See @Norseman 's posts in that thread for a solid "outside view" of what's really happening in the notional country of Victoria during the events that are described by the Rumford-memoir-propaganda book.

Basically, by the time that Victoria starts its "totally voluntary" "pledge" to renounce high technology, its people have already been through multiple rounds of brutally violent purges at the hands of the CMC and other alt-right militias. Much of the population has fled as refugees, starved, or in some cases been sold into sex slavery by the Northern Confederation government for being 'too feminist.'

So during this mass renunciation of technology, it becomes clear that Kraft is serious about abolishing computers, televisions, video games, oh and all cars capable of driving more than 25 miles, and that the CMC will cooperate in organizing the brutalization of anyone who doesn't get with the program (a la the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution)...

Well, everyone starts throwing away their electronics and trashing or crippling their cars and in general desperately trying to avoid the next person who's singled out for a mass stoning by "community leaders" who totally aren't CMC plants.

Since what we've seen in-thread of Victoria is not the civilian but the military side of things, it's entirely reasonable to assume that Victoria is indifferent to the evils of motor transport, but thanks to pointing me towards the Chapter 45 synopsis. I got a good chunk of it right, but the in-universe analysis is incomplete without the attitude towards motor vehicles, so thank you.

Click to shrink...

I suspect that in the aftermath of the Russians purging Kraft, Rumlind, and the ultra-extremist Victorian ideologues from the government for being too fucking goddamn crazy for words, the subsequent Victorian regime eased the bans and restrictions on trucks in order to make commerce easier. That would have been after they realized that just obsessively building a giant rail network couldn't actually economically replace motorized vehicles in a largely rural society, if only because there are too many hills and mountains it simply does not make economic sense to run a railroad over.

 

[rikalous]

[X] Plan Reconciliation, Recuperation, and Compensation

Anyway, the automobile "destroyed community" (remember how hostile Retroculture is to urban culture in general), so Victoria went on a drive to forcibly limit the extent to which it could do that. SUPPOSEDLY this was a totally voluntary 'pledge' drive (see the post I linked to).

Click to shrink...

That section's great. Even if you take the events at face value and assume it's a genuine grassroots movement with no CMC meddling, it still makes the Retroculturists look like assholes. "The bad technologies destroy communities by isolating people from their neighbors! So if any of our neighbors use them we're going to isolate them from the community!"

Also it's got the shady corner video game dealers, which is just a wonderful image.

 

[bdun140]

Dear god. DOOM 2016 would probably make Rumford's head explode. Do we have any surviving copies of it in The Commonwealth? Or, of any videogame for that matter?

 

[Simon_Jester]

Dear god. DOOM 2016 would probably make Rumford's head explode. Do we have any surviving copies of it in The Commonwealth? Or, of any videogame for that matter?

Click to shrink...

Sara Goldblum:

"Sometimes, it's not so much the games I miss, as the things that they inspired."

[walks away humming]

 

[silverpower]

See @Norseman 's posts in that thread for a solid "outside view" of what's really happening in the notional country of Victoria during the events that are described by the Rumford-memoir-propaganda book.

Basically, by the time that Victoria starts its "totally voluntary" "pledge" to renounce high technology, its people have already been through multiple rounds of brutally violent purges at the hands of the CMC and other alt-right militias. Much of the population has fled as refugees, starved, or in some cases deliberately sold into sex slavery by the Northern Confederation government for being 'too feminist.'

So during this mass renunciation of technology, it becomes clear that Kraft is serious about abolishing computers, televisions, video games, oh and all cars capable of driving more than 25 miles, and that the CMC will cooperate in organizing the brutalization of anyone who doesn't get with the program (a la the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution)...

Well, everyone starts throwing away their electronics and trashing or crippling their cars and in general desperately trying to avoid the next person who's singled out for a mass stoning by "community leaders" who totally aren't CMC plants.

I suspect that in the aftermath of the Russians purging Kraft, Rumlind, and the ultra-extremist Victorian ideologues from the government for being too fucking goddamn crazy for words, the subsequent Victorian regime eased the bans and restrictions on trucks in order to make commerce easier. That would have been after they realized that just obsessively building a giant rail network couldn't actually economically replace motorized vehicles in a largely rural society, if only because there are too many hills and mountains it simply does not make economic sense to run a railroad over.

Click to shrink...

*reads beyond the synopsis*

Oh, damn, yeah. This sounds a lot like Matthew Bracken's work. By the time Cyrano4747 finished his reading series on those damned books, he was pretty convinced that what he was looking at was the writing of a no-shit, actual fascist. (A suit-and-tie fascist, but a fascist nonetheless.) Lind is writing in that same crypto-fascist vein, and his work is utterly dripping with it, if you know what to look for.

So all this is in the end, is warmed over ecofascism, put into extremely brutal practice - the kinds of things ecofascists want to implement also make the populace much easier to control, and for the same reasons. And yeah, I strongly suspect they did indeed allow trucks for commercial activities. This isn't easing back, though, so much as ensuring that there's a civilian motor pool to be tapped for... ugh, logistics. (What, you want the military doing *logistics*? That defies all our doctrine! Leave it to the impressed civvies!) I'm not sure they allow mass transit, but then again that'd be a debate for Victoriologists, wouldn't it? Kinda hard to write about Victoria when as an NCR/"Azanian" citizen you can't risk visiting on pain of death, after all.

Ironically, Victoria most closely resembles the DDR in that it's also a panopticon state, but without even the barest pretense that the State will help you in any way.

The point of the omake is, the tech proscriptions are largely about maintaining total social hegemony. Not only are there top-down efforts, like the CMC "editors" and "selection committees", but also (and more importantly) bottom-up efforts implemented over decades to create the "panopticon state". The state of perpetual snitching, of human surveillance, of feeding and caring for the Focaultian cop in your head. This particular strain of Victoriology proceeds along those lines, if perhaps a bit amateurishly.

 

[PoptartProdigy]

AN: Inspired by certain musings of mine on the Discord, a small sample of... Victoriology.

On "Retroculture" - a primer for would-be Victoriologists

(Reprinted 2075, San Francisco, NCR. From "Victoria: The Fires of Reaction", serialized in "SF on SF" zine in 2041 by members of the Street Fight Collective, collected and printed 2046. Text from Sixth Edition.)

When speaking of technology, "1930s-1960s America" isn't a hard cutoff, so much as a guideline. For example, you can do a surprising amount of industrial chemistry with nothing more than typical 1930s equipment. Moreover, many medicines and vaccines can be (and sometimes are) created without the use of proscribed technology. So what, specifically, is proscribed?

First, anything that's truly difficult to maintain. The ideal is "an untrained (read: in practice, semi-skilled) 1930s man should be able to maintain any Victorian equipment". They make exceptions in places - the F-16V has early-model discrete-transistor avionics built as black boxes by Californian factories for the... sensitivities... of the Victorian mindset. But overall, Victorian society prefers simpler and easy to maintain machinery. The other reason goes hand in hand with the devaluing of skilled labor.

The other is automation. Machines that can operate machines, that obey the principles of cybernetics and not merely Newtonian physics. Rumford feared such technology as being contaminated with the "cultural Marxist" mindset, but what he really objects to is the inhumanity of the automatic machine, and the mass communications it facilitates. This was a man who realized that software was eating the world - and wanted absolutely no part of this. Mass two-way communication is the great mistake - it's how the cultural Marxists transmit their degeneracy. To Rumford and his intellectual forebears, the world would have been a better place had Godel never proved the incompleteness theorem, had Church and Turing failed to grapple with the halting problem, had Lillenfeld been unable to invent the transistor, had Atanasoff not devised the electronic binary machine. Computation, automation, tabulation... all is suspect, at best. Technology that cannot be controlled has no use for Victoria, and fundamentally, the computer is a revolution. Like all revolutions, the possibility exists to recuperate that revolution, but Retrocultists maintain that crushing the revolution is essential to maintain the Victorian way of life. In a sense, they don't even understand how right they are.

In short, Retrocultists accept that they can't win against the Gramscian hegemony of a modern media state and culture. Thus, they seek to eradicate it, to smash the material basis for mass culture that they cannot control. In its place, they substitute media forms amenable to control. So what is permitted?

Radio on the surface can be subversive, so why is it so prevalent? Radio requires capital investments, but not too much. Basic FM radios are cheap to produce, but more general radios are likely banned. (No shortwave or 2/10-meter systems for you.) To maintain their media hegemony, they strictly limit what can be heard on air. Film theaters and newspapers are also strictly regulated, for those who can afford to partake of them. May the gods help the poor souls who defy the CMC censor, because Victoria is without mercy.

It is speculated that a few computers may be allowed, under the strict control of CMC Intelligence units. Only those of the highest moral caliber could be trusted in any sense with proscribed technology, and the CMC monitors these men, simultaneously trusted and untrusted - when they do not simply farm out such work to... deniable elements. (Victoriologists endlessly debate the question of how Victoria manages to maintain any presence on the Internet whatsoever. The historical North Korean example is less than entirely illuminating, and long out of date.)

Click to shrink...

An excellent look into how the NCR views its most hated foe. Canon.

 

[Simon_Jester]

*reads beyond the synopsis*

Oh, damn, yeah. This sounds a lot like Matthew Bracken's work. By the time Cyrano4747 finished his reading series on those damned books, he was pretty convinced that what he was looking at was the writing of a no-shit, actual fascist. (A suit-and-tie fascist, but a fascist nonetheless.) Lind is writing in that same crypto-fascist vein, and his work is utterly dripping with it, if you know what to look for.

Click to shrink...

...It is very poorly encrypted crypto-fascism.

Like, "a rot-26 Caesar cipher" level poorly encrypted.

So all this is in the end, is warmed over ecofascism, put into extremely brutal practice - the kinds of things ecofascists want to implement also make the populace much easier to control, and for the same reasons.

Click to shrink...

Well, uh... yes, but also no, mostly no. Because the Victorians are aggressively indifferent to the environment and will casually devastate it for whatever reason they feel like. They dislike cities for aesthetic and cultural reasons, and if that results in the prevention of any environmental damage it is purely coincidental.

And yeah, I strongly suspect they did indeed allow trucks for commercial activities. This isn't easing back, though, so much as ensuring that there's a civilian motor pool to be tapped for... ugh, logistics. (What, you want the military doing *logistics*? That defies all our doctrine! Leave it to the impressed civvies!) I'm not sure they allow mass transit, but then again that'd be a debate for Victoriologists, wouldn't it? Kinda hard to write about Victoria when as an NCR/"Azanian" citizen you can't risk visiting on pain of death, after all.

Click to shrink...

I suspect they allow mass transit precisely because it's relatively easy to control. Trains, streetcars and buses are good, private motor vehicles are bad.

Also, I think another reason motor vehicle bans were rescinded is that the Victorians realized something that IRL we learn by looking at World War Two: having a highly motorized society is a huge advantage if you're recruiting an army that needs to deal with motor vehicles. The Victorians circa 2050-55 were faced with a world where within another generation or so, very few of their young military-age males would still really know what to do with a pickup truck, let alone a tank. Which would vastly increase the amount of training required to turn them into useful soldiers capable of even the most vaguely motorized warfare operations.

It's possible to make military truck drivers (note that we're talking about the trucks the Viks use to move their soldiers, not just supply trucks) out of civilians who've only ever seen a horse or a locomotive before. But it isn't easy, and you have to put them through driver's ed first.

Ironically, Victoria most closely resembles the DDR in that it's also a panopticon state, but without even the barest pretense that the State will help you in any way.

Click to shrink...

Another big difference is that I suspect the CMC and its satellite/sister organizations probably do a lot to keep up the pretense of being informal, non-state and non-party/partisan institutions.

The "group of concerned citizens" that beats a woman up for being "too feminist" was totally not the government. It's just, well, one of the two or three secret CMC members in the village knows full well from reading CMC dossiers which of the local menfolk are sadistic creeps that can be counted on to help out with that, while keeping up the deniable pretense of it being totally ordinary "grassroots outrage" at her "unfeminine behavior."

This is why I draw analogies to the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution. The object of the game is not merely to have pervasive secret police intrusively controlling and monitoring lives. It is to create the official illusion that the government is not doing so, that the people as a whole are unanimously in support of, and actively participating and complicit, in such behavior.

HOLY FUCK but I would not relish trying to manage the Truth and Reconciliation work it's going to take to stabilize Victoria after the regime collapses...

Not looking forward to that.

The point of the omake is, the tech proscriptions are largely about maintaining total social hegemony. Not only are there top-down efforts, like the CMC "editors" and "selection committees", but also (and more importantly) bottom-up efforts implemented over decades to create the "panopticon state". The state of perpetual snitching, of human surveillance, of feeding and caring for the Focaultian cop in your head. This particular strain of Victoriology proceeds along those lines, if perhaps a bit amateurishly.

Click to shrink...

Also yes.

 

[luhar1997]

[X] Plan Reconciliation, Recuperation, and Compensation

 

[uju32]

Is it because you think it is specifically a bad idea to promise Detroit first pick of the Victorian supplies? Or for some other reason?

Click to shrink...

Yes. I think it's a terrible idea.

At best it's a level of micromanagement that should be below the level of abstraction.
At worst it sets a terrible precedent for our future dealings with other citystates who will look at Detroit's example and feel slighted at not receiving weregeld for whatever Old America assets we happen to salvage in their vicinity.

I would note that it is to our advantage to give Detroit the Victorian supplies. Remember that along the main and only practical route by which large Victorian forces can reach Chicago, Detroit is squarely between us and them. Detroit being a strong and well-defended place, that can resist a surprise attack or limited raids even if we don't have forces available to help them, benefits the Commonwealth.

Furthermore, the Commonwealth, while currently not so heavily industrialized that it can equip large armies, is much larger and has much more industrial and economic potential to expand and do so than Detroit. Detroit has amassed only light equipment for one division, and while part of that was likely deliberate on Victoria's part, there are surely other reasons. Detroit needs a windfall of this nature if it is to have any hope of equipping a large and formidable army.

By contrast, the Commonwealth will, within a few years, be able to mass-produce its own weapons on a large enough scale that the Victorian weapons captured during this campaign will no longer be such a valuable asset. Weapons manufactured by foreigners and designed according to Retroculture may not be the best choice for equipping our army in the long run, especially when we are not planning to use our army heavily in the immediate future.

On top of all of that... his is a city that took a tremendous risk for us, as well, and while the Commonwealth has sacrificed quite a lot to hold off the Victorians, we ultimately did so in our own interests as well as theirs. And if we had failed, it would be Detroit that would be taking an utterly brutal beating right now. For Detroit to see direct benefit in the form of military strengthening would not be unreasonable.

Click to shrink...

-No it's not to our advantage.

We fought this entire campaign at an almost 4 to 1 numerical disadvantage in professional troops, and we have no current forecast on the growth rate of our indigenous military industry. We will be able to mass produce weapons eventually, but in the interim we have a window of vulnerability and no international arms trade.

We need to double the number of divisions in our expeditionary forces yesterday at a minimum.
Especially since we have no intelligence estimates on the rate of Victorian rearmament.

We will want to fill in deficiencies in the Detroit Militia where there is an identified need, the way we arm our own , but simply passing out weapons to secondline troops so they can claim they have them rubs me wrong.
Not with a genocidal hostile polity barely several hundred km away.

-Detroit did not take a risk for us.
Characterizing it as such does them a disservice.

Basically, I don't want to give a local allied city-state veto authority over Commonwealth foreign policy, but I DO want to make damn sure that our (relatively) old friends don't start to feel like we're trampling over their backs in our haste to make new friends. I don't want to put our military plans on hold until the Detroit City Council argues out the "can we trust Toledo" question for three days. But I do want to make it very clear to the Detroiters that we're not going to allow a future state of affairs where Toledo is a serious military threat to Detroit.

I don't want to set the precedent that the Commonwealth as a whole is easily paralyzed, Sejm-style, by the opposition of a single involved party's interests. But I also don't want to set the precedent that when we make strategic decisions we are unmindful of the interests of our local allies who have entrusted their future to us.

Basically I want the Commonwealth to be a person nobody ever regrets supporting if I can possibly avoid it. Even if that means giving them some shinies that we might theoretically take for ourselves. Especially in cases where them having the shinies benefits us, too.

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We came running for Detroit basically the same day Victoria declared war on them. Same day we signed the treaty. No hesitation.

We have subsidised the Detroit economy against the economic blockade since last autumn.
We have equipped their militia with weapons moved up from Commonwealth heartland.Our soldiers formed the vast bulk of soldiers who have fought and died in the city's defense. We went all in.

Our local and international bona fides are pretty well established in that regard.
And if we did it against Victoria, they can be pretty fucking sure we'd do it against anyone else local.

The main issue is that if we wait for the different vote in a future update, events may well outpace us. It may be weeks before we fully finish offloading the freighter (many of the items we're salvaging from it are live explosives after all), and have a full inventory of just what was on there. Other Victorian supplies, such as the stockpiles in Toledo and the field equipment in the hands of the Victorian armies, will also need to be divided up. By the time we're in a position to make a final distribution of the spoils, the Detroiters may already have drawn their own conclusions about what it means for the future of Detroit, that we were so quick to accept Toledo as an ally on account of how big and strong their army is. Detroit may look at how they were sidelined here and remember this event in a way informed by their feelings in and of this moment- glad that Toledo switched sides, but worried at how quick the Commonwealth was to embrace the faction with more guns, even when historically that faction had been their enemy.

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Everyone on the Great Lakes can read a map.

Detroit controls the northern entry into Lake Erie, and it's biggest port.
A structural advantage in both military and economic terms that will only become more important as we grow in size. There's a reason both we and the Victorians wooed them.

Conversely, Toledo has maintained 3 military divisions by basically running their economy on the redline for the last several years.
Their army is militia, parttimers that cannot be deployed far from their city, and is a depreciating asset as the Commonwealth stabilizes and starts actually running armies commensurate to it's population and economy.

We have gotten this far by not assuming the Victorians are stupid. Let's not insult our allies by thinking they are.
If anyone has room to worry here about realpolitik screwing them, it's the Toledoans.

EDIT:
Think about this in terms of what people hear in-universe.
Suppose someone in the Detroit city government asks Burns, "so, will we be getting weapons to make sure we can defend ourselves against Toledo in the future if they turn out to still be hostile to us and not just Victoria?" We know this question is on Detroiters' minds, after all.

Click to shrink...

Think about what people see.

We committed our entire field army to defend Detroit. We committed our entire navy to defend Detroit. We committed all our semi-modern airforce to defend Detroit. We stripped our own cities of air defenses in order to make sure Detroit did not have to fear air attack on it's civilians while at war, at a time when Chicago was well within combat range of F16 airstrikes from Toledo.

We have paid cash money for our goodwill.

 

[buli-buli]

My problem with the write-ins, is that they are trying solve a non-existent problem.

Sure Detroit will probably be a bit wary at the Commonwealth and Toledo being on good terms.

But, in what world are they going to say no to Toledo helping fight Victoria? Even more to Toledo bloodying itself in the process.

You all want to bribe Detroit to do something it will accept anyway.

At best it is a waste, at worst it makes the situation look hinky.

 

[uju32]

AN: Inspired by certain musings of mine on the Discord, a small sample of... Victoriology. Updated after reading the Chapter 45 synopsis.

On "Retroculture" - a primer for would-be Victoriologists

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Nice. Couple nitpicks:

-The things I'd criticise is the idea that Victorian society can function with FM radio only.

AM broadcasting predates FM radio by at least two decades, and you can build simple AM radios with a highschool education and a bit of mechanical skill, and even in Victoria everyone from fishermen to your local cops will need to maintain communications by shortwave and mediumwave radio, especially up in Quebec.

They will need regular topup doses of internal propaganda as well, and FM radio is too shortranged for good coverage of a society that has deliberately been de-urbanized to avoid population concentration in cities. Not to mention that an FM network devolves control to local broadcasters, which would not suit the CMC.

Their foreign "aid workers" will also need to keep up with home and receive transmitted instructions as well, best done by code words inserted in normal radio transmissions.
And their sympathizers abroad will need a regular drip feed of their foulness.

Places like North Korea IRL have MW, SW and FM networks.
Their solution against external comms is jamming.

From an OOC perspective, I'm looking forward to broadcasting propaganda radio into Victoria and attempting to elude Waffen SS KGB CMC jammers trying to block us.
It was an interesting part of the Cold War.

-The F16 cannot fly without computers.

It was designed to be aerodynamically unstable below the speed of sound in order to improve it's maneuverability, with a fly by wire system and flight control computer to offset that instability; any attempt to fly that thing without a functioning computer is a very expensive suicide.

 

[buli-buli]

Nice. Couple nitpicks:

-The things I'd criticise is the idea that Victorian society can function with FM radio only.

AM broadcasting predates FM radio by at least two decades, and you can build simple AM radios with a highschool education and a bit of mechanical skill, and even in Victoria everyone from fishermen to your local cops will need to maintain communications by shortwave and mediumwave radio, especially up in Quebec.

They will need regular topup doses of internal propaganda as well, and FM radio is too shortranged for good coverage of a society that has deliberately been de-urbanized to avoid population concentration in cities. Not to mention that an FM network devolves control to local broadcasters, which would not suit the CMC.

Their foreign "aid workers" will also need to keep up with home and receive transmitted instructions as well, best done by code words inserted in normal radio transmissions.
And their sympathizers abroad will need a regular drip feed of their foulness.

Places like North Korea IRL have MW, SW and FM networks.
Their solution against external comms is jamming.

From an OOC perspective, I'm looking forward to broadcasting propaganda radio into Victoria and attempting to elude Waffen SS KGB CMC jammers trying to block us.
It was an interesting part of the Cold War.

-The F16 cannot fly without computers.

It was designed to be aerodynamically unstable below the speed of sound in order to improve it's maneuverability, with a fly by wire system and flight control computer to offset that instability; any attempt to fly that thing without a functioning computer is a very expensive suicide.

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In my own canon omake, one of the characters had a ham radio.

I expect there are plenty of AM radios in Victoria.

I also strongly suspect they are heavily discouraged, lest the user pick up on Cultural Marxist propaganda from beyond Victoria's borders.

 

[uju32]

In my own canon omake, one of the characters had a ham radio.
I expect there are plenty of AM radios in Victoria.I also strongly suspect they are heavily discouraged, lest the user pick up on Cultural Marxist propaganda from beyond Victoria's borders.

Click to shrink...

They're literally next door to New York, a major mercantile city and news organization site.
And modern radios get increasingly small.

Click to shrink...

Every household would have a smuggled radio. It's one of those things that it really isn't worth legislating about, except as an excuse to arrest people when you want. Kinda like alcohol during Prohibition.
Or porn.

You want to prevent people listening to foreign broadcasts, build broadcast jammers to jam stations you deem unsuitable.
There are certainly multiple organizations broadcasting from New York annd further abroad into Victoria.
Some for ideological reasons, and others just to irritate the Russians.

 

[Twiggierjet]

Deleted

 

[silverpower]

The reason I used the term ecofascist is because Lind's reasoning dovetails with ecofascists. A lot of this local devolution stuff, the evils of the car-as-atomizer, the evils of automation and complex machinery and *spits* computation, are present in a lot of ecofascist critiques of the present order. Ecofascists, in practice, tend to be more of the "the State is the one that gets to burn the carbon, all carbon-based fun is banned" variety, which is compatible with mechanized armies and such, but not compatible with anything we'd remotely recognize as modern society. Industrial slaughter with serf-grade civil society - the worst of all possible outcomes.

FM radio was a flub on my part. What I meant is mainly that shortwave, medium-wave and satellite radios (non-exhaustive) are proscribed. Two-way civilian radio is proscribed, as well. But I see your argument that they wouldn't much like FM radio *either* and frankly, I agree with it. I'll edit accordingly. (In-universe, they're likely right on the broad strokes, wrong on the particulars. The peculiarities of owning a two-way radio system, or short-wave/medium-wave receivers in Victoria are beyond an intro chapter of a primer for NCR leftists on Victoria Studies/Victoriology.)

Oh, and the omake did mention that the F-16V does in fact use computers - there's a specific exception carved out. Specifically, it would use the early F-16 FLCC unit. Likely not even the DFLCC unit, but the FLCC analog flight computer. The NCR sells them FLCCs and the Vicks pretend they're not *really* computers.

I'll also point out that a group that started out as a pre-Collapse internet radio show from Ohio and ended up in what's now the NCR is not going to have a perfect window into just what the hell Victoria permits and allows. It's called Victoriology, after all, and like Sovietology back in the Cold War days, there are of course misconceptions. Some of them are even pervasive, like "the Vicks banned mass transit" or "nobody has a proper radio anymore".

 

[natruska]

-snip-

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...Street Fight?

TO BE A LEFTIST IN SUCH TIMES IS TO BE ONE AMONGST UNTOLD DOZENS. IT IS TO LISTEN TO THE CRUDEST AND MOST BORING SHOW IMAGINABLE. THESE ARE THE TALES OF THOSE TIMES. FORGET THE POWER OF THEORY AND PRAXIS, FOR SO MUCH HAS BEEN FORGOTTEN, NEVER TO BE RE-LEARNED. FORGET THE PROMISE OF PROGRESS AND UNDERSTANDING, FOR IN THE GRIM DARK FUTURE THERE IS ONLY MEMES. THERE IS NO PEACE AMONGST THE TWEETS, ONLY AN ETERNITY OF CHAPO AND SLAUGHTER, AND THE LAUGHTER OF THIRSTING PODCASTERS.

......huh, blacked out there for a second.

(no hate, but I had to do it to 'em)

 

[Simon_Jester]

Yes. I think it's a terrible idea.

At best it's a level of micromanagement that should be below the level of abstraction.

At worst it sets a terrible precedent for our future dealings with other citystates who will look at Detroit's example and feel slighted at not receiving weregeld for whatever Old America assets we happen to salvage in their vicinity.

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"What we decide to do with the captured Victorian weapons" has REPEATEDLY been indicated to be a top-level strategic decision, and is not below our level of abstraction at all. Especially not during a military campaign where for fuck's sake we're making decisions like "capture or sink those freighters."

And I can only squint and go 'WTF' at your 'terrible precedent' argument. Firstly since there is a colossal difference between us doling out spoils of a battle where Detroit helped us fight the battle (since we could never have based our forces here or fought this battle in particular without their support and consent). Secondly because... I mean seriously what, are you suggesting that we're going to wander the rest of the country randomly looting salvage and taking it away from people without compensation?

FUCK THAT SHIT.

-No it's not to our advantage.

We fought this entire campaign at an almost 4 to 1 numerical disadvantage in professional troops, and we have no current forecast on the growth rate of our indigenous military industry. We will be able to mass produce weapons eventually, but in the interim we have a window of vulnerability and no international arms trade.

We need to double the number of divisions in our expeditionary forces yesterday at a minimum.
Especially since we have no intelligence estimates on the rate of Victorian rearmament.

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If the Victorians are going to be fighting us again soon, as in faster we can up-arm our troops, they'll have to try to go through Detroit again. In which case having a well armed and well-supplied Detroit Militia (i.e. one with trucks so it can actually range farther from the city) would be a huge asset.

For the foreseeable future, Detroit is "the cork in the bottle" between us and Victoria. Weapons handed to the Detroiters are weapons handed to a permanent, fixed, garrisoned position that stands between us and Victoria. We have no other viable military targets that would require the full might of our armed forces. We are planning no other offensive campaigns. Our one serious enemy is Victoria... and arming Detroit IS arming the forces that will help us fight Victoria in the future.

Detroit did not take a risk for us.
Characterizing it as such does them a disservice.

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Fucking bullshit.

Detroit took a massive risk by declaring for us. Namely, the risk that we would fail. The risk that we would try to fight Victoria to the last Detroiter, and lose, and that Victoria would rape, pillage, and burn Detroit to the ground in the process. They had no way of knowing we would win the campaign so handily beforehand. The balance of forces was unfavorable; only the weakness of Victorian doctrine- hardly something we could prove in advance!- made it possible for us to win against such terrible odds.

It would have been much, much safer for Detroit to let Victoria pass through their territory and suffer only a little minor looting and 'requisitioning.' Because in that case the risk of VIctoria burning Detroit to the ground was nearly zero. As it stands, the risk was considerable, based on what they knew before hand.

...

Now, did we make large commitments to Detroit? Yes. Yes we did. Did we fight and sacrifice defending Detroit? Yes, yes we did. But that was after Detroit came under attack because they publicly took our side. When they, who had not even the slightest hope of being able to stand up to Victoria alone, said "you know what, fuck you, Vic, you can't come up our river to attack the Commonwealth."

They stuck their necks out for us, at least as much as the other way around. Which, again, doesn't mean the Commonwealth didn't fight or sacrifice here- just that the Detroiters aren't going to, and SHOULD NOT, remember this war as "that time the Commonwealth fought and bled to save us from a horrible fate when they didn't have to." Our necks were on the line just as much as theirs, and (importantly) they volunteered to get in the line of fire when they could have gotten out of the way.

...

I'm basically done with engaging with the rest of your arguments on this, because you keep just inexplicably missing obvious things like "the Detroiters were taking a big risk by accepting our guarantees and refusing Victoria passage to attack us." I can't trust your instincts, you build elaborate chains of reasoning based on patchy foundations, and arguing minutiae with you forever will just drive me crazy to no purpose when I have more productive things to do.

My problem with the write-ins, is that they are trying solve a non-existent problem.

Sure Detroit will probably be a bit wary at the Commonwealth and Toledo being on good terms.

But, in what world are they going to say no to Toledo helping fight Victoria? Even more to Toledo bloodying itself in the process.

You all want to bribe Detroit to do something it will accept anyway.

At best it is a waste, at worst it makes the situation look hinky.

Click to shrink...

The point isn't to bribe Detroit to keep them from saying 'no' now.

The point is to give Detroit a gift* as a token of our continued intention to regard Detroit as a major Commonwealth ally. They may, with reason, worry that we will start viewing Toledo as our main ally in the region, or turn a blind eye if Toledo starts pressuring or threatening Detroit, seeing as how Toledo is now helping the Commonwealth fight a war in a way that Detroit could not help us.

Making it apparent that Detroit is still important, respected, and not going to be left to be in any danger of falling under Toledoan military domination is important.

*(that we were probably going to give them anyway and that they arguably deserve and definitely need more than we do)

I never understood the hatred many on the far right have for cities. Like, cities have been around for far longer then any of the things they complain about, and in fact many of the ancient societies they obsess over were literally city-states, or at least started out that way.

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Retroculturists hate cities because in a city, you can't use small-town social mechanisms to pressure everyone into conformity. And because cities tend to be gathering-places for diversity, innovation, and strangeness, whereas Retroculture is very deliberately a rejection of all those things.

They wouldn't mind cities if it was possible to create cities that lastingly remained in "a place for everyone and everyone in his place" conditions forever, but you can't actually freeze a city in amber like that. It's easier to exert that kind of control over the countryside.