Mankind, a dystopic (or, well, at least definitely not utopic) future
Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2023 8:15 am
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.
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.