Mankind, a dystopic (or, well, at least definitely not utopic) future

[Torco]

Inspired by the United Earth’s constitution, I thought I'd talk a bit about this bit of my conworld, a strange political entity which calls itself Mankind.

At some point in the future history of humanity, before humanity goes interstellar but after capitalism caused sufficient damage to the world to basically make the planet uninhabitable for human beings, the entire planet came under the political control of a single political entity. It didn't hurt that this entity (composed of both humans, extremely advanced artificial intelligences, and various kinds of hybrids between the two categories) was based in vast space stations located in mid earth orbit, had taken control of most of humanity's orbital weapons arsenals, and threatened anyone who disobeyed with precision orbital bombardment. It also didn't hurt that, controlling space, they could fill the electromagnetic spectrum with their message.

Mankind doesn’t have a constitution proper because it does not recognize its own institutional existence: indeed the regime has a penchant for obfuscating everything related to the fact that is a specific thing, and so what most works as a constitution are The Words, a document that's embedded as metadata in almost every computer file in human-occupied space. As an example of the sorts of techniques the regime uses to obfuscate and naturalize its existence as a concrete institutional body we can take our modern usage of the term “democracy”.

We mean so many things, some abstract and some concrete, by “democracy” that it’s become quite hard to distinguish between its different meanings: on the one hand, you have the concrete model of liberal capitalist republics inspired in the french revolution, with three distinct branches of government: a supreme court, a legislature <often bicameral, where the higher chamber is elected with some system that gives people in small rural much more power than people in cities> and an executive branch, with ministers, protection for private property, nominal separation between church and state, voting on representatives that are not revocable, private money in political campaigns and all the rest of it, and on the other hand you have the concept of people being ruled having a say in how they’re ruled. This has been, in many ways, a boon for these sorts of republics, as even the slightest criticism of their structure can be said to constitute opposing democracy, which in effect means, as we all know, that one advocates for one’s society to become a carbon copy of either North Korea, the Third Reich, or Venezuela, depending on the conersation. Mankind, in a similar manner, strives to in this manner confuse itself, a concrete power structure currently in control of most -though not strictly speaking all- of the population of the species homo sapiens, with the platonic idea of humanity itself, as well as with the species homo sapiens. It has instituted, through various means, not taboos per se but relatively strong social norms, the practice of not referring to the regime as anything other than Mankind or synonyms thereof (Humanity, the Species, and The Human Race are, for example, acceptable alternatives, but "people" is not).

The social engineers -not all of them properly speaking humans- who fashioned what we will call Mankind, capital M, took notice of this and other dynamics in order to design a stable and functional regime, and therefore speaking about it is somewhat complicated: it is not a state, per se, in the sense that it doesn’t have a distinct territory, or a foreign policy, or rules about citizenship, but it does have a highly centralized power core, an ideological apparatus, a ruling class, a system of subordinate classes and a de jure and de facto monopoly on organized violence.

The function of a constitution is, in this context, performed by the Words of Mankind, a document emerging from the very beginnings of the regime and which has come to acquire a mythical status, and is used as a loading screen for games, a substitute for ads in live broadcasts when the event itself is yet to begin, as well as a "lorem ipsum" kind of thing. The degree of veracity of the regime’s origin myth is questionable, but supposedly during World War 6, circa 2550, the crews of various military orbital stations decided to band together and, in effect, point all of their terrifying weapons systems at Earth, demanding various measures including universal basic income, immediate cessation of the burning of fossil fuels (humanity never reached peak oil, new and deeper deposits continued to be found deeper underground, then in antarctica, then in the depths of the ocean, etcetera) and all other destruction of Earth’s natural environment, the immediate dissolution of all national governments, the surrender of all national militaries, the abolition of various economic systems deemed undesirable (capitalism, rent, free enterprise, unnecessary industries and, interestingly, AI research) and various other things. Even though this was the ultimate act of what the old guard called “terrorism”, the measures were so popular (because they benefited the people, sure, but also because being in control of space means being in control of global communications, and also because a lot of the most advanced AIs were in those orbital stations, and so could enact a terrifyingly effective program of political marketing) that the movement came to, not without millions dying, establish control over the planet and for the first time unifying huamnity into a single political entity. The ideology of Mankind, the regime this planetary coup would ultimately evolve into, centers around the idea of preserving humanity, and life more generally, against what it calls the omnicidal: those who would kill everything and everyone. It is not a subtle, or nuanced, kind of ideology.

[Torco]

the Words of Mankind

[The Words is a document of the computer age. The most complete versions of it, often used by, for example, lawyers, are such that you can double click every word and every comma and expand it into extensive explanations, commentaries, clarifications and summaries of relevant jurisprudence. Their first level goes thusly]

The existence of Life itself is under threat. Life is the only thing that’s meaningful, Planet Earth is the only place where life can be found, and Humans the only life intelligent enough to understand its role in the universe. If Earth is destroyed, not only all humans die, but also all sentience, all minds and every living thing dies with it, perhaps never to exist again. This must not be allowed to pass. *

The worst amongst us have brought us to the brink of destroying our planet, and ourselves, in the blind pursuit of greed. This must not be allowed to pass. **

Thus human beings rebel against division and against the self-serving omnicidal impulses of the worst of us. Nothing could be worse than the death of all what can live and, yet, that is where the worst of us have led us. No more and never again. Righteous are the arms that strike down the omnicidal. ***

Humanity comprises us all. The leaves are nothing without the branches, the roots are nothing without the leaves. Genocide is second in evil to omnicide. Righteous are the arms that strike down the genocidal. *** *

A house divided against itself cannot stand. If humanity is to face the challenges ahead, it must stand. Therefore kingdoms, republics, and political division are a threat against all. Righteous are the arms that protect from war and strife. *** **

Earth is the jewel of the cosmos, the favorite child of creation, the precious, the unique, the mother of us all. Ecocide is third in evil to omnicide. Righteous are the arms that strike down the ecocidal. *** ***

Peace is the birthright of us all. There is no peace without justice. There is no justice without law. Crime is a minor evil, but like Cancer, it can spread and destroy everything. Thus communities shall have laws, and those laws shall be respected. Righteous are the arms that strike down the criminal. *** *** *

*[the double click content of this section deals for the most part with evidence for the uniqueness of life, both scientific and political. Turns out, there weren’t fish in Europa, or bacteria in the briny lakes of Mars, or any signs of life observed during the flybys of the Proxima system in the 2300s]
** [this verse’s double click content is a lot less verbose than the rest, amounting to mostly a collection of rants against extreme wealth inequality, against having a burgeois or noble class, and against capitalism, industrialism, overproduction and all the things that, well, destroyed the planet in the past]
***[this is the only bit that does not have double-click content]
*** *[extensive and controversial jurisprudence exists as to what is a protected group in Mankind: sexual minorities are included, as are ethnic groups and fandoms, but, for example, trades, guilds and economic classes are not. It’s all very inside]
*** ** [extensive provision for what armed forced there are, who composes them, how to get in, how to get discharged, proper conduct, ritualized war as a method for conflict resolution, where a single civilian casualty results in the culprit’s side losing the war unless they make an example out of the military personnel engaging in the wrongful killing, etcetera]
*** *** [the jurisprudence here is mostly to do with who can engage in terraforming and geoengineering to restore and preserve earth’s natural environment, as well as guidelines for other megaprojects oriented towards expanding Life (i.e. earth biota) throughout the cosmos. They’ve already filled the subsurface oceans of Ganymede with fish, bugs, nullibranchs and so on]
*** *** * [the double-click content here is, well, the criminal and civil code, or, well, the guidelines for civil codes. Or indeed the guidelines for guidelines for civil codes... there are many levels to the law, making it ultimately very difficult to comprehend to anyone that is not either a team of lawyers or a highly sophisticated AI. this is not accidental]

[Ares Land]

I'd be very happy to read more about it. Among other things, I'd love to know who runs the regime.

Otherwise, kudos. Very chilling and very plausible.

[rotting bones]

Amazing! I can already feel myself siding with the rulers against the inexplicably pro-omnicide "opposition".

[Torco]

hehehehe. yeah, as we all know, fellow human beings, anyone who doesn't support our glorious government is obviously a proponent of murdering everything in the universe.

The question of who rules the regime is not super well developped: I know it lasts a couple of centuries, maybe a millenium, and the ruling faction changes hands from time to time: it was originally started by an illicit coalition of scientists, military astronauts, techbros, pure GAIs* and uploaded people**, the Founding Parents, but they were within a few decades quietly displaced by military authorities (who gave the regime a lot of its more fascistic elements, like ritualized war, or the ability to legally declare someone not human). The military old men were eventually ousted by liberal sympathizers and remanents who tried -and failed- a capitalist revival. They were killed, and substituted by somebody else and so on and so forth. some people say that some of the founding parent's machine souls inhabit the internet still, and silently guide the destiny of Mankind through the various governments... and, I don't know, maybe they do ? AI research is banned, so how would people know, you know?.

In a class sense, however, it's a bit more clear who rules: astronauts. They don't call themselves that, but people who go to space, you know? most people, understandably, do not want to be astronauts: suffering the six gees reentry is still the preferred way to come back, riding on top of a couple hundred tons of explosives is still the preferred way to go up, various kinds of radiation shorten your life and makes you get cancer over and over again: thankfully there's a cure or two for most kinds of cancer, but people still rather not chance it... so most people live on the planets: Earth, mostly, but also the moon and the low orbit habitats. But some people choose to go into the Human Space Services, become astronauts, and, well, those are the people that maintain the space infrastructure which allows the regime to exert power on earth, and on which most human settlements outside of earth entirely depend on, so naturally these are the people that run the actual political apparatus: the satellite guys run the global surveillance and censorship apparatus, all of the computer farms operate in space, in the moons of jupiter or somewhere like that, interplanetary trade, the ongoing terraforming efforts on Mars and Venus, the oceanforming of the outer worlds (europa and so on), as well as the running of the earth economy (which is a weird combination of democratically planned and war economy), they all require a lot of manpower and, crucially, it would be politically dangerous to do it on Earth, so this is all run by, nominally, selfless men and women (and other minority genders) who have decided to, well, go into space and do space work. They're worshipped in a similar way as how the US worships its soldiers, thank you for your service blablabla.

Interestingly, there are strong taboos against heredity and dynasticism amonst this astronaut elite: it doesn't really happen that often, but they're always telling stories about dying at the hands of the incompetent child of a meritorious person (it could be a result of the social engineering of the founders, it is said by sociologists): anyway, this means in general you need to have an extraordinarily quick rise through the ranks to become powerful. the careers of exceptional people are much mythologized.

*General artificial intelligences
** in reality, they aren't themselves uploaded, in the sense that the process is not destructive and so you can just... copy your mind into the machin? but they are human persons... ported? into a computer... except, in a way, they're also like advanced chatGPTs wearing the informational equivalent of a human skin. whether the "soul" of the human who undergoes the process is present in the resulting AI construct is, well, a philosophical question I myself don't know how to answer, but they do seem to adopt the goals and moral principles of people: this was fundamental in the development of early GAIs, since people never did figure out how to code values, goals an ethical taboos in a way that the result wasn't eldritch and weirdly against human moral intuitions and sentiments. after a couple hundred years, however, such minds become both extremely weird and also uninterested in human affairs. The AI construct does act as if it believed it was the person from whose mind the personality was uploaded. it's a whole thing.

[Ares Land]

In a class sense, however, it's a bit more clear who rules: astronauts.

Makes a lot of sense. I'll start looking at these guys with some suspicion now.