It was probably Morgan Industries that made me imagine an international space colonization mission (not necessarily SMAC’s; a generation ship, FTL, or in-system would do as well) where some astronauts wear patches of company logos instead of country flags. Ironically, that’s not how it went down in Planetfall, what with Morgan being a stowaway who essentially re-founds his business aboard a drop pod, but I think the juxtaposition of a faction without nations- look,
his is the only Earth-born profile with a Company listed instead of a Country of Origin!- got me thinking about that shift in primary identity. Yeah, for mundane Watsonian reasons it’s just because he’s a mission supplier who wasn’t even supposed to go. And from a Doylist perspective it’s likely that Firaxis, in the typical cultural worldview of the time, didn’t bother to figure out exactly which “African royalty” Morgan hails from. But let’s get back to the idea of interstellar travelers in the future, perhaps representing the last surviving remnant of humanity, claiming a corporation as their tribe.
I’ve already discussed megacorps previously, so just a few more examples to set the mood. From the novels of Peter Watts-
Starfish
Chapter: Quarantine - Bubbles said:
Strange things happening out there. A mysterious underwater explosion on the MidAtlantic Ridge, big enough for a nuke but no confirmation one way or the other. Israel and Tanaka-Krueger had both recently reactivated their nuclear testing programs, but neither admitted to any knowledge of this particular blast. The usual protests from corps and countries alike. Things were getting even testier than usual. Just the other day, it came out that N'AmPac, several weeks earlier, had responded to a relatively harmless bit of piracy on the part of a Korean muckraker by blowing it out of the water.
Chapter: Head Cheese - Racter said:
"Then Tanaka-Krueger wouldn't trust Japan. And then the Columbian Hegemony wouldn't trust Tanaka-Krueger. And the Chinese, of course, they don't trust anybody since Korea..."
"Kin selection," Scanlon said.
"What?"
"Tribal loyalties. Never give the competition an edge. It's basically genetic."
Blindsight
Chapter: Theseus said:
The Third Wave, they called us. All in the same boat, driving into the long dark courtesy of a bleeding-edge prototype crash-graduated from the simulators a full eighteen months ahead of schedule. In a less fearful economy, such violence to the timetable would have bankrupted four countries and fifteen multicorps.
I rather like the neologism “multicorps” here, and the ratio of national economies to multinational ones.
An unexpected example is 2005 Sci-Fi Channel original
Crimson Force, which has a joint Mars mission between members of the (United) World Government and the Xychord Corporation. I had only seen the first half hour (before it apparently becomes a Stargate knockoff) during which the two halves of the mission grouse at each other about one side’s bureaucratic red tape and the other’s unsafe cost-cutting. In a fit of b-movie babble, a government Russian engineer declares “It's the Bolsheviks all over again, only this time in suits.” The captain, a corporate ladder-climber, even frets over the prospect of a government mole. It’s the purest manifestation of my imagining of a U.N. mission where some crew members swear allegiance not to a country but a company, and might have even been the chief inspiration for the idea, and it’s from a real turkey of a made-for-TV movie.
I like how these might've just been the actual headshots of the cast members
But when we talk about the
future of society, and specifically within a SMAC context, we need not be limited to corporations. And
especially in a SMAC context. The factions are all what I like to call “Bioshockian theme parks of ideology.” They are all polities organized around a post-national ethos. Even the gimmicky expansion factions. That’s the beauty of the game, imagining a reboot of human development based on fundamental priorities, values, Big Ideas.
The game presents a decent enough pretext to imagine how this might have happened you take a very well-equipped mission with very well-trained people, force them to self-organize around very charismatic demagogues, and see what emerges. They all start from more-or-less the same material footing, are granted the same chances to attain sustainability and stability, give or take a drone or two. For gameplay purposes, they’re all viable factions- societies.
Now, certainly not all concepts for factions are as viable (see appendix A below). And a lot of the factions, even in the canonical expansion set, are dependent upon genre of game setting-specific conceits. So what other possibilities could there be, drawing from the speculative near-future?
In college, my political science courses explored the question of what might come after contemporary sovereignty.
In addition to the
corporations as states cliche, I’ve been long wondering about what other
institutions could potentially develop into polities. Besides the “astronauts with logos on their shoulders” idea, also in the context of a future
CIA World Factbook 2110 game that never got off the ground-
Strategos' Risk said:
So what kind of institutions will be able to control territory and gain anything remotely like national sovereignty in the future? Multinational corporations? International banks? Religious orders?
Strategos' Risk said:
Are any of these entries possible?
A megacorporation
A corporate state ruled by a megacorporation
An ecclesiastical fief
some sort of evil bank
Tribal wild zones
I'm trying to think of other possible entities that could have the powers of a nation-state in the future, but specifically with the power to claim and administer territory.
We’ve already discussed corporations. I know there are some posts specific to them in RTD, namely
the one that names corporatocracy, a system which would cover the second on the above list in addition to the first.
In the real world, the Roman Catholic Church both gets its sovereign city-state as the Holy See in Vatican City, and a holdover knightly order now international philanthropic group in the Sovereign Order of Malta. Amusingly, even after two decades of
Jihad vs. McWorld, the only proposal to create a Muslim version is the pluralist and liberal
Bektashi Sufi order pushing for one, and it’s often joked as an Albanian scam. (It’s a country that experienced
rebellions in 1997 over pyramid schemes, after all.) The long-bombed Islamic State was eschatological, unsustainable, and had a worse human rights record of the Khmer Rouge, so they weren’t going to establish an actual Caliphate anytime soon. Despite all this, the idea of a theocratic state is probably the most foreseeable form of non-national-state polity, partly because, again, the Vatican is right there as a living example.
The “evil bank” idea was after watching Clive Owen vehicle
The International, a highly-fictionalized account of the
BCCI scandal. Which makes one ask, in the context of RTD: could a bank go to space? How could a bank get a
Unity billet?
Tribal “wild zones” referred to frontier regions like Waziristan, which actually kind of exist in RTD in the form of the Nautilus Pirates, who are an anarchic grouping of sea raiders under an overall faction captain. Smacers would qualify, if anyone actually recognized them; the idea is actual entities that receive broad diplomatic recognition, not de facto regimes.
Other ideas also come from the TV Tropes article
N.G.O. Superpower, a superb and comprehensive list with a very decent
real life section. From prior discussion on that article we get the
continued confused suggestion of large financial entities as a potential case:
hexicus said:
Sovereign wealth funds, if they were corruptly detached from the government apparatus, could potentially do it in the future. Maybe not exactly an NGO.
The problem is that the assets of the NGO could be confiscated as soon as they become a criminal threat.
But how would you even do that? How can a sovereign wealth fund go rogue and become a polity of its own?
Another idea still I’ve seen is the notion of an information broker as a megapower, usually derived from early 2010s perceptions of
Facebook or of
Google (or
Facebook, again). These are tech multicorps that are unique in that their big selling point is in amassing large amounts of data, which causes some to consider them as different from other types of more “traditional” megacorporations. I’m not sure if that’s true, and if anything the last decade has revealed them to be truly how beholden they are to nation-states, but that’s an idea as well. The RPG supplement Outpost Mars I wrote about earlier actually has one or two megacorps that do this, albeit through a ‘90s old-school cyberpunk lens.
A note on nations
While most of the entities behind the mission, and that the passengers previously derived their identity and loyalty from, are nations, there shouldn’t be any nation-derived factions on Planet. As per the intro cutscene: “divided not by nationality, but by ideology, and their vision for the new world.” Earth-originated nation-states have no business on Chiron, not even in a “vengeful holdovers looking to settle old scores against colonists who originated from a rival country.” It just smack in the face of what SMAC is supposed to be about.
This goes double for ethnostates, which is frankly a word that should’ve only been known by social science academics, and not become the sort of casual online parlance used in today’s racially repolarized environment. (Which,
inshallah, we’ll get over this epoch just as we did the clash of civilizations of the first decades of this century. In time, Fukuyama’s future will be avenged.) Yang being placed as a political commissar responsible over the ship’s Chinese population could have potentially opened the door to such a concept, though obviously no one thinks the Hive is some sort of Han ethnostate.
Which isn’t to say that there shouldn’t be (slightly caricature-like, in fitting with
Civilization’s broad strokes characterizations) national influence over the factions. The Russian names of the University bases, the Celtic druidic hints of Gaian neopaganism, even the Taj Mahal domes of the Peacekeepers (okay, that one is probably genuinely offensive) pay tribute to national origins without centering upon them. So in RTD, L’Nouvel Etat being French chauvinists and a hint at the setting’s neo-Bonapartist France (and, in the fine tradition of the Gallente Federation of EVE Online) is fine. I kind of view the
Unity as a sort of
burning library for culture.
What’s a nation-state anyway?
While I figure that political science has a precise definition for what they are, in the same way that biology has strict and specific criteria for evaluating whether an organism is alive, I’m coming at this more from a blind men ‘seeing’ an elephant sort of way. Namely, by looking at examples real and fictional and trying to figure out what entities could be contorted to take on the forms (or at least the abilities) of sovereign states.
Factions are post-nation states. They’re able to do the 4X, named in SMAC as Explore, Build, Conquer, and Discover, and RTD adds a few more actions as well.
But in the pre-mission Earth of Westphalian rules, it’s more ambiguous. Corporations can Build, and Discover, but that’s normally enough. I’m not even going to discuss non-state actors in terms of their capacity to carry out violence, because this setting is
rife with private military companies and mercenary bands, and few of them would make any claims of sovereignty. Not to mention groups such as Hezbollah that have political power and influence that express themselves in messy transnational ways. Or ex-state exiles that have military strength, political/social influence, and personal wealth like the White Russians. Or modern
pre-state nations, from the Czechoslovak Legion to the Kurdish
peshmerga. Or getting away from the IRL battlefield to cyber, where
state-level actors are increasingly less relevant.
I think for my intents and purposes, I’m thinking of sovereignties as less about being able to go to war, or achieve huge economic activity, and more about their ability to
administer. In RTD, Morgan actually rules half of Peru, which means it actually controls territory. That makes it more sovereign. Comprehensive Transport seems to be able to achieve the same in outer space. It’s about being an actual authority.
As an aside, a research institute becomes a nation is one that’s caught my eye ever since I read about the Academion Island free state from Orion’s Arm, which goes from pursuing “unorthodox and controversial lines of research” to becoming
its own polity based on an artificial island after the future EU basically adopts Common Core. (Seriously, that’s how the
original timeline portrayed it.) It’s truly a very University of Planet thing to do, and I basically envision Togra embarking on a similar project in the RTD pre-mission history, and I absolutely dig how there’s a future
CIA worldbook entry for Academion.
On the flip side of higher learning, I wonder if there could be a literal artist’s colony on Chiron. Not as a pre-mission post-nation-state thing (though
maybe, Bruce Sterling does that with the short-live Free State of Fiume in
his book where he makes their ruling school of art Futurist), but simply as a SMAC faction. But what kind of art?
Subcultures as sovereignty
Does this extend to other realms, such as the virtual? While I am disinclined to do so, mostly because I once read the synopsis for
Cybernation (Tom Clancy's Net Force) and that put me off the idea of taking so-called “virtual nations” seriously, it does make me wonder. But is that so different from religious authorities that have temporal power over the spiritual life of decentralized populations across the planet? Well, we take the Catholic Church a bit more seriously because it holds, and once held quite a bit of, territory. The Tibetan lamaists once ruled, now they’re another captive peoples, so poof goes the clout they had. Well, maybe if they had their own armed resistance movement.
(As an aside, since RTD already introduced at least one entity based on organized crime, albeit not necessarily a faction: peep this
1998 book by Senator John Kerry that advances the big threat to the international order is organized crime syndicates! Ah, looking for enemies in the End of History.)
What about speculative future tribal identities? That’s another near future speculative sci-fi trope. Cyberpunk is full of your Panther Moderns and your orbital Rastafarians and your Nomads and Voodoo Boys. Ironically,
Earth by David Brin, who is notoriously a
critic of cyberpunk, also has quite a few- the Gaians, the Ra Boys, the Settlers, even the astronaut occupation is viewed as one (“the spacers”).
Shadows Over Sol is a setting that elevates subcultures as the defining thought-tribes of the future, more influential than the moribund nation-states and more inspiring than cold corporations. They were inspired by Alpha Centauri, which takes on another level in the gameline’s Siren’s Call campaign which is basically an adaptation of SMAC, with the mission factions inspired by Shadows Over Sol factions inspired by SMAC factions.
My own take on such identities, which sometimes are at the organizational level of a fan club or a street gang, is that while traditional authorities might give them some recognition as a cultural phenomenon (equivalent to the U.N. appointing a popular thought leader or Scoutmaster to the mission), no way they’re getting any sort of sovereignty on Earth unless the nations truly start falling down.
External views
The obvious other half to having internal authority is external recognition. That’s what actually makes sovereignty, after all.
I’ve looked at the types of entities that make up the
U.N. General Assembly observers- hello again, Holy See- and you see regional pacts, various development banks (I guess they’re
public, multinational governmental orgs?), other intergovernmental groups focusing on various issues, Palestine, formerly some pariah states or liberation movements, the Red Cross, the Olympics, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and
the parliament fandom.
In doing so, I realized that going back to the “what primary non-national identity might people on a space colonization mission might adhere to” question, maybe the importance isn’t in one’s entity’s sovereignty, but the diplomatic recognition as well.
This, of course, could lead to some bizarre places. For instance, until
a decade ago, FIFA under its South American confederation was granted
diplomatic immunity in Paraguay, essentially having its own embassy. Does that mean FIFA, with all of its political-social-cultural influence and hands in lucrative pockets, is a non-state actor? [And more pertinently, would they have cause to have a
Unity billet?]
But given that
travel documents for diplomats does exist, allowing primary identification by organization, maybe there is something to the idea of homeland-disaffected globe-trotting internationalist apparatchiks swearing primary loyalty to the WHO, the UPI, or Interpol. One could imagine in the future, do-gooder citizens of the world who commit to working for international organizations and relief groups choose to renounce their birth citizenship in favor of one that allows them fluid transit.
There are also non-citizenship for nationless war refugees, so perhaps the no-pats of RTD would be covered by
an rtd. And perhaps,
nations of the newly-nationless.
And, if we want to get cute about it, perhaps we can imagine the
Red Cross or the
United Nations) getting their headquarters recognized as their territory, thus making them microstates or ministates. Actually, the ministate idea does provide some fun for stretching the idea of what’s sovereign. We’ve seen cyberpunk corpo families and far future Dune-style neo-aristocrats in sci-fi, how about
exiled royalty as a sovereignty? Imagine all of the tax evasion and data scams such an entity could facilitate. What if the
Order of Malta got a bit more stuff? Also,
Mount Athos should totally be the Eastern Orthodox equivalent to the Holy See, diplomatic status-wise.
I’d like to close out this section on perhaps the best example of a world that has loose, decentralized, notions of sovereignty and diplomatic recognition. Malê Rising by Jonathan Edelstein (see
TV Tropes article) has the Consistory as its U.N. Essentially, any group, including stateless peoples, tribal sub-nations, states and provinces of nations, and perhaps corporations and international agencies as members. The only criterion for membership is the ability to make treaties. A graphic from an in-universe social studies textbook:
The story behind its founding, links to more clarifying info, and a beautiful little passage about Consistory membership in action
here. “We are larger than nations,”
indeed.
Conclusion: What does all of this matter to SMAC anyway?
In short, I think holding a mirror to our world, with all of its complexities, helps to flesh out both the future that led us to Centauri, and what might result over there. The (non-)nations that the colonists come from and the factions they form. I’ve already discussed Outpost Mars as a great example of a setting that mixes the speculative and the mundane to engender greater verisimilitude, providing a lived-in feel. Anchoring
Unity passengers to real world
institutions grounds the story in our own history. And having a great variety helps to flesh out what might exist in this faraway future society. Another example in sci-fi is
this quote about Freelancer:
g3rmb0y said:
Honestly, something I really loved about Freelancer was there's like 30 factions or something insane like that. You'll be flying around, and see someone from a terraforming company, and then later, a waste disposal cruiser, then get attacked by a bunch of rogue software nerds, or roving scavengers. Just love it. I get that there's a bit of redundancy, but I like how they made everything a little different. Really wish other games would get this, I get so tired of big space sims with like, 4 corporations. Cowards.
While I don’t think RTD needs 30 factions (though there might be more than that already lmao), and I generally try to constrain my additions to being sub-factions, movements, and so forth, I do think that ultimately- the more, the merrier.
Appendix A: fan factions
When it comes to expanding upon canon, I again always like to examine the NetworkNode.org
custom factions. And when we see what fans come up with, see that aside from the usual adaptations of characters from other series, they’re just sort of a modding Wild West of random concepts, few of which really approach the thoughtfulness of the originals. This blurb from
a faction set review really says it all in its turn-of-the-century way:
::My Comments on the Kappa Set::
Androgynous - I can’t imagine there being a whole faction of multisexuals(aren’t there only two?). Hmm let’s see, mindworms are overrunning our bases, drones are rioting…I think I need to be a different sex…Other than that this was a pretty good faction. I liked the graphics and the gameplay was above par
Bards - Damn this is one powerful faction! How come these singers and musicians keep kicking my ass!?! Hey that’s not a guitar!! Put down that fusion laser!! The Bards were the best faction in the set, as well as the most powerful. The base names and graphics were also very good. Definitely download this faction if you want some serious compitition.
[I like how this next one sounds like Miriam and the Believers redux:]
Guardians of Morality - Brother Robert Rydell was deprived as a child, and now he’s gonna tell you what to do. In reality, the Guardians weren’t very moral, as they repeatedly attacked me FOR NO APPARENT REASON. I’m sitting their minding my own reason when his little comlink pops up and says he’s gonna eliminate my faction! So much for understanding. Of course, I kicked his ass good! If you like factions that easily pick off, then the Guardians are for you. If you want a challenge, look elsewhere. The Guardians got off way to slowly and don’t develop their economy, research, or basically anything else. However they will produce countless laser batteries to throw at you.
[...]
Showbiz - Umm…lets see…mindworms are overrunning the base…the drones are rioting…HOW COME THERES NEVER ANYTHING GOOD ON TV!?!? Come on people, a showbiz faction? I think there are more important issues on planet than making movies. The base names were good though, and the text made me laugh. Too bad the parody faction contest is over.
I’ve found more feasible faction concepts elsewhere- the
SMAC Fac Pack set and Pickly’s
5 Custom Factions, both of which I’ve imported into RTD. The amount of additional lore that come with both sets helps a lot, with the former replacing blurbs.txt with its own characters’ quotes, and the latter having its own (sadly unfinished)
narrative in the style of the Michael Ely novellas. But ultimately, I think when imagining the new civilizations of Chiron, we all sort of abstract away the physical difficulties and realities involved in creating something workable. Which is fine, because that’s what the game does at its core.
Appendix B: what they brought from Earth
Some observations about the
institutional origins of the factions. Going off of “Journey to Centauri,” ironically it seems that only the Peacekeepers and the Spartan Federation directly originate from institutions from Earth. The former from the U.N. mission itself of course, and the latter from a survivalist movement known as the Spartan Coalition. (I’ve always disliked the novella characterizing the Spartans as such, creating a secret faction before the mission feels like prewriting a resolution before you go to a Model U.N. conference.)
Morgan Industries, as I’ve mentioned, doesn’t really count; its only original employee is Morgan himself. Maybe some former staff were appointed to the
Unity as contractors or colonists in their own right. But the faction in the game is basically him winning over a pod’s worth of passengers that they could reach heights of untold luxury if they joined him. So it is an essentially re-founded corporation, an idea of a company with its original head, grafted into a new body.
Similarly, Miriam Godwinson’s Evangelical Fire, whatever it actually is, is not actually the basis of the Lord’s Believers, even if it might be the faith she continues to preach on Planet. And I like to imagine that the Believers, in some versions, might be ecumenical enough to practice the “pluralist theocracy” from generation ship story “
Alis Volat Propriis” by Ephraim Ben Raphael-
To that end Stanley King inaugurated what had been termed the “Pluralist Theocracy” that would persist at least on paper for the rest of the Tupaia’s journey. The Pluralist Theocracy didn’t favor any specific religion, rather it required that all members of the ship’s complement belong to a religion. They could be Jews, they could be members of the different Christian churches, they could be Pure Land or Zen Buddhists, they could belong to the Church of Radiance, provided they belonged to some religion. They could not be atheists, agnostics, deists, generally irreligious or spiritual, nor could they be Taoists or Humanistic Buddhists as King did not consider those last two groups to be religions.
Interestingly enough, that story also presents the idea of a movement- or perhaps a faction?- that promotes religion for purely utilitarian purposes. Potential fodder for RTD.
It has been argued among historians that despite Stanley King’s apparent religiosity (he was circumcised as an adult) he does not seem to have entirely understood either Judaism or organized religion in general. His speeches on the subject tend to stress the practical sociological consequences of organized religion, disregarding elements like the Jewish dietary laws that he regarded as outdated and de-emphasizing sincere belief in the supernatural. For these reasons some maintain that the Pluralist Theocracy was more an act of social engineering on the part of the Captain, rather than the result of his genuine attitudes.
If Morgan appealed to the greedy and hedonistic and Godwinson provided a salve to the lost and fearful, the other factions seem more aligned towards actual crew organizations. Skye to her botanists, Zakharov to his scientists, and Yang to the young ensigns and loyal security staff. So those institutions are simply departments aboard the ship. It’s also interesting to note that “Journey to Centauri” contains allusions to the crew being familiar with Yang preaching his vision about “Utopia,” though we do not hear of his pre-fall ideas of it. Other than for Zakharov calling it ‘contrived,’ and it being “a controlled society.” So in a way, even Yang’s radical new vision for dehumanized humanity as one gestalt being is also something that was brought along from Earth.
