Full Submission for the Unified Western Autonomy
(Effective Anarchists)
A splinter-group from the Effective Altruists, the Effective Anarchists were founded in San Francisco in the mid-2030s to determine the maximally just, maximally efficient political system. They rejected bureaucratic garbage. They rejected the rule of the few, but also 'rank democracy'. They decided to use technology to enable an entire society's participation in decision-making; every citizen would have a neural implant, which could be used to communicate instantaneously with every other. All political decisions would be made by the
consensus intelligence, a machine-learning algorithm trained on their collective mental corpus and with which every citizen can interact. For every major political decision,
consensus solicits feedback from all citizens and makes the optimal decision for all. Any consenting adult may join, though they must be invited to join
consensus by the existing membership.
History
2025-2041 - Intellectual Roots, Silicon Citadels, and the Menlo Park Autonomy
The first Effective Anarchists, operating in the California Bay Area in the mid-2020s, were responding then-popular Longtermist theories made popular by Will MacAskill. While MacAskill argued that stable liberal institutions were critical to long-term human flourishing, the Effective Anarchists replied that liberal institutions entrenched an unhappy state in which the vast majority were unfree, growing less free, and were in fact bound in a brutal web of hierarchism.
Emilia Valejo's pivotal essay
Autonomous Demarchy fused anarchism, most especially Bookchinist social ecology and democratic condederalism, with intense techno-optimism. Vallejo envisioned a society in which the fundamental social building block is the "collective intelligence," a small group that is democratic, self-governing, and oriented symbiotically around a machine-learning algorithm. Collective intelligences could instantaneously coordinate with one another through their ML algorithm, using democratic procedures to make and execute collective decisions. She was joined by
Lev Kraznov, who took a Marxist approach and argued that the capitalist mode of production was collapsing in favour of the anarchic mode of production, which was both decentralized and digital. Bourgeois social relations must be overthrown in favour of anarchic social relations as technology plunges asymptotically towards frictionless communication. The development of Effective Anarchist praxis was lead by
Herbert Rees, who attempted to build demarchy within the shell of the capitalist mode; to this end, he founded a number of demarchist start-ups were founded focused on consensus-building within small entities like neighbourhoods or cooperatives
; none of them succeeded.
However, the movement was given its first real opportunity with the collapse of the American political system. During the turbulent years of 2037-38, Silicon Valley tech firms chose to accelerate plans to expand their business parks and provide on-site housing and protection for their employees. These closed communities became known as the
Silicon Citadels, enclaves for the world's top knowledge workers. At Apple, a general corporate disinterest in providing actual governance lead Rees and Vallejo (who were lower-level executives at the time) to push aggressively for a "low-cost, decentralized, and automated" approach - to use tech from Rees' failed start-ups to quickly scale up a demarchic governing system for Menlo Park. This became known as the
Menlo Park Autonomy; democratic feedback was solicited from small discussion groups for all major policy decisions, followed by a vote of approval by the entire collective. All discussions were mediated and policies executed by the governing AI (and its support team),
Auto. During the Menlo Park Autonomy, most users interacted with Auto, the wider autonomy, and friends via Apple Glasses, though simpler interactions over smartphones and watches was also common.
The Effective Anarchists were jubilant. Finally, a real-world example of their desired system - and it was working great! Early kinks were quickly ironed out; while it was unwieldy to have mass discussions on every issue, individuals could be selected by sortition to participate in subject-specific working groups that would discussion an optimal solution, achieving consensus between themselves and passing their proposals on to the wider collective. Participation was high, and soon the
Auto was used to organize all social services, mediate disputes over public spaces, for socializing, and as social media. Unfortunately, the autonomy was a victim of its own success. Employees asserted that the Autonomy ought to be given more authority in Apple's corporate decision-making; it's model was so successful, it should be expanded! But top executive leadership realized this had gone too far. They fired Rees and Vallejo, quashed employee dissent, and pioneered new ways to limit information exchanged and democratic participation on
Auto, while maintaining a low-cost governance model. Effective Anarchists were crushed, as was employee morale, but they were too fearful of the chaos outside Menlo Park to give more than a weak protest.
2041-2057 - Effective Anarchism in the Southwest Union, and the Twelve Minutes of Revolution
Meanwhile, Lev Kraznov had not been able to join the Menlo Park Autonomy; he was a technical specialist at Google during Citadelization, and failed in an early attempt to convince his superiors of automated demarchic governance. Instead, Kraznov grew resentful and increasingly reclusive; he began developing neural implants for impossibly fast, deep, and complex communication, the earliest of which he prototyped on himself. The Menlo Park Autonomy collapsed just as he was realizing a truly successful device, and Kraznov decided to flee with his tech and a few die-hard Effective Anarchists to a secret facility in the Sierra Nevada mountains, founding the
California Collective, the first independent autonomy. The founding of the
Collective marked a conspiracist turn for the Effective Anarchists; Kraznov focused on developing low-profile neural implants for
Collective members, who subsequently infiltrated many powerful positions across California. It was during this time that the
Ritual of the Transcendent Intelligence, and other secretive rites, were developed to bind the committed to one another. Rees and Vallejo, meanwhile, worked on evangelizing demarchy and planting new autonomies. Demarchist, algorithmic governing systems could be off of smartphones, and became popular throughout the central valley and southern california as a means of organizing communities and coordinating (encrypted) resistance to cartel infiltration. Demarchism spread throughout the years of the Southwest Union, but Tech oligarchs continued to regard it as a fringe social movement until the fiasco of the Frontera War.
During the war, elite confidence in the government of the Southwest Union rapidly degraded. The oligarchs began tacitly began endorsing the spread of the Effective Anarchist network, as successful autonomies began merging and federating and demarchists became increasingly open and prominent within the Silicon Citadels. On April 12th, 2057, a small group of Tech oligarchs, many of whom had been Kraznovian agents, initiated the
Twelve Minute Revolution. They instantaneously broadcast a proposal to every Autonomy - to secede from the Southwest Union and form an Autonomous Republic. Discussion immediately took place within each autonomy, consensus was rapidly achieved, and the Autonomists declared themselves independent. The Demarchists simultaneously seized all communications and military infrastructure, and most major oligarchs, CEOs, and municipal leaders declared themselves for the Autonomy; the Los Santos cartel and the Southwest Unionist had only to accept the fait accompli.
2057-2084 - Unity, Fragmentation, and the Neuroterror Conflict
The young Western Autonomy found itself needing to manage new challenges; foreign affairs, domestic crime, and the incorporation of non-demarchist regions into alignment with the wider Autonomy. To cope, the Tech oligarchs moved into effective leadership. They introduced a new, more sophisticated governing intelligence known as
Unity to act as a kind of national government, and overseen by a board of elected trustees. However,
Unity's management and consensus-finding processes, while sleek and easy to engage with, were manipulated to produce elite-favoured outcomes such as the expansion of Chinese "Embassies" throughout the Autonomy, ostensibly to support and protect the Autonomy from its neighbours. In response, many Autonomies seceded from Unity, and California became saturated with competing Autonomies, while simultaneously at the edges of the Autonomy there was energetic expansion as revolutionary fervour spread; the Autonomy was therefore expanding, successful, and dysfunctionally chaotic.
Ultimately, the forces of centralization won out.
Joachim Santiago, a passionate Effective Anarchist rising from the fractured political landscape of Los Angeles, managed to unite the region by building a highly transparent, procedurally fair governing algorithm that any constituent autonomy could trust. He called this system
Liberation, and over time it was successful enough to pose a real threat to
Unity and the Tech oligarchs, who were now lead by scion and bombastic strategist
X Musk. What followed was the
Neuroterror Conflict, a quasi-war from 2081-2084 that took the form of successive drone strikes, weaponized computer viruses, and terror plots between
Liberation and
Unity that forced many independent Autonomies to merge and federate for safety. The conflict saw widespread use of both neural implants and neural viruses, i.e. malware for the human mind, which could cause implanted humans to hallucinate, go blind, develop intense phobias, or even stroke. The conflict ended with the
Malibu Conference; in response to the damage of war, growing international instability, and the need to defend the Great Demarchic Experiment, Santiago, Musk, and the representatives of several smaller Autonomies agreed to merge and form the Unified Western Autonomy. They would further merge their governing systems into
Consensus, which combined the transparency and legitimacy of
Liberation with the streamlined UX design of
Unity. The simultaneous discussion groups, consensus-building process, and referenda were overwhelmingly supported; California found itself suddenly stable for the first time in over forty years.
2084-present - Migration, Citizenship, and Invigilation
Since the founding of
Consensus, Autonomy politics have been dominated by the questions of Citizenship and Invigilation. Political stability and direct investment from China has driven economic growth in the Autonomy, which has caused it to attract migrants from across North America. Individual intelligences within the Autonomy, however, have absolute control over citizenship, and advocates of
Pure Mind demarchy have jealously guarded that privilege. While they have been opposed by member of
Transcendent Spirit, who seek to expand Effective Anarchism to the whole of humanity, Transcendists have often prioritized increasing the intensity of inter-human and human-AI communication when they've negotiated with their peers. Transcendists have also advocated for introducing increasingly advanced, and opaque, artificial intelligence into
Consensus; they hope to achieve new depth of consciousness in communion with such 'higher beings.'
Unified Purpose has stood firm opposing the advance of inscrutable intelligences; they view machines as mere tools to facillitate higher human collaboration, who can achieve greatness through collective action and purpose. They do not believe that anarchism means an abandonment of order, but merely the transition from hierarchism to egalitarianism. Both Unified Purpose and Pure Mind have been strong advocates of the
Invigilation movement, whose landmark victory is the establishment of the
Network for Scrutiny and Transparency (NST) tasked with relentlessly interrogating and aligning
Consensus to ensure it is fair, reliable, and non-manipulative. However, NST has been gradually evolving into a league of independent, investigative journalist-bounty-hunters, where investigators are paid based on the size and scope of malfeasance revealed. The Autonomy moves into the 22nd century with the forces of unity and fracture in delicate balance.
Military
Economic
1) Technology -
Silicon Citadels remain competitive worldwide, attracting top talent to their autonomous campuses.
Kraznova is an innovator in neurotech, and have rapidly expanded their product line in the second half of the 21st century to include a range of products that can interface directly with neural implants (cars, smart homes, etc.).
2) Engineering -
Hyperloop Galactic is a company founded on grandiose visions of space elevators and rail lines in geosynchronous orbit - in reality, they manufacture a range of sleek transportation technologies and operate a thriving satellite and rocketry division.
Political
1) Espionage -
Resolute Mind is a shadowy organization of demarchists, steeped in the ritual and conspiracy of pre-revolutionary California and hardened by the Neuroterror Conflict.
2) Memetics -
Nexi is the hugely-popular communication platform developed by
Kraznova, which is cross-functional on all devices.
Factions: Competing constantly within
consensus are a range of views, which can be distinguished into three main factions:
Pure Mind - defined by the maxim "Garbage in, Garbage out;" they believe that
consensus represents the ideal political instrument, but that it can be corrupted if citizenship is expanded too rapidly. Pure Mind adherents stress that the primary advantage of democratic anarchy is to optimize decision-making, but that it cannot do so if it is given inferior inputs. Citizenship must therefore be limited to intelligent and educated individuals who share Effective Anarchist values.
Transcendent Spirit (under construction
)
Unified Purpose (under construction)
Also relevant within demarchist society are the
Contractors - everyone who isn't in
consensus, but lives in EA-controlled territory and works for their companies; individuals may or may not wish to join
consensus.
Claims: California, Nevada, maybe some surrounding areas, I'm flexible
(Incomplete)
