The Dark Enlightenment

Another future 1984, this time playing with notions more cutting-edge than Neoliberalism, and way scarier for that matter. A good friend's own Creepy Teen Power Fantasies and how well they fit today's reaction and the way RvBOMally covered it in one of his scenarios, plus a wish to subvert the 1984 Britain Only Theory, also became main pieces of the puzzle.

The old liberal-democratic order looked like it wouldn't survive the backlash that came with the Great Recession. The disappointment with the decades-built consensus fueled a deep resentment against the old elites, while the world became more unstable, in the midst of ecological disaster, global cyber-attacks, new waves of domestic and international terrorism, erosion of rational discourse. Technology marched forwards, often not as a tool of liberation but as a hyper-monitorized and commodified mix of excapism and galvanization of anger, and those who pushed the boundaries became exposed to that virulent disaffection, when not giving it new forms. The increasingly deprived masses feared civilization would collapse under the wave of the migratory and refugee waves, the technologically-savvy new elites expected to shape the world at their convenience, and the new consensus seemed virulently xenophobic, ethno-nationalist and protectionist, all while Libertarian ideas increasingly mutated into forms of Chauvinism that expected to take back the decreasing middle class into a position of privilege and comfort at the expense of the most downthrodden, and the self-declared harbingers of common sense increasingly looked like hardliner apparatchiks of a defunct and self-complacent auto-cannibalistic time made of illusions of security held over the back of a vast, invisible underclass. The new leaders, successful or not, self-styled themselves as a countercultural common voice, but they were just a splinter faction of the same elites of yore, acting unrestrained, unchecked, when in power -lowering the standards of the acceptable below zero, dumbing people down with an overload of unprocessable shock therapy, displaying overloading levels of ignorance, incompetence and malicious caprice, accustoming the general consensus, between thunderous applauses, to the idea that it didn't really matter anymore. Truth had literally become old-fashioned.

This is not a fictionalized account of the future. This is the world you live in. This is now.

Fast-forward. After the long Second American Civil war that actually consisted of three separate conflicts over the course of forty years. After the Euro-Russian war, in which the European President, a discreet technocrat from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, managed to unify the continent granting himself emergency powers that would only grow more, and more... and more. After the pioneering Chinese experiments merging AI management and Market Socialism, and the first true Posthumans. Nothing of the old world remains anymore, but the Dark Enlightenment covers three unique manifestations.

The Ludo-Technocratic faction, particularly the Asian Hive and its associated partners, function as an all-encompassing, AI-managed neural social network. Individuals experience reality as an intoxicating interface that administers life goals and information patterns as it sees fit, under a system of competition based on "loyalty points". The system can physically manifest, "possessing a host", and has every conceivable means to individually destroy resistance individual by individual, which it does on a daily basis. Most countries outside the Hive are, de facto, part of it, as they're connected to the same network, with insignificant variations kept out of traditional inertia. The Concealed Imamate is different, as it operates under a modified system, if still completely subsidiary. Here the AI manifests as carrying the designs of Al-Mahdi, who rules from a hidden location, and the collective tasks are carried for society to be worthy of his disclosure. The system works less as a social network and more as a freemium game where personal sacrifice is the currency, the goal being de facto unreachable. India is a bit more complicated because, falling behind in the automatization process, but still increasignly bound and persuaded by the Asian Ludo-Technocratic stream, it resorted to more low-tech methods: a combination of rudimentary, wearable hardware augmented reality, with regular synthetic drug delivery, including the running water system. Said drugs correct the deficiencies of the augmented reality system, and have the added advantage of inducing a degree of synchronicity and ego dissolution that effectively simulates a hive-mind. This means the Sino-Cloud can only control India indirectly, but also, that can do it very easily anyway. If not, of course, because of the Rudra Expanse. Most probably the drug effects failed in an individual or a group of individuals, as they disconnected from the Communion and developed a colllective identity of their own that wants to engulf the Communion itself. It calls itself Rudra, and from the outside it looks a lot like The Crossed met the Rage Virus. Far from worrying, the Sino-Cloud finds this hilarious, and it's playing a bit with both sides before deciding who wins.

The European Empire styles itself as a pure meritocratic system that says to embody very best of the European spirit -universal dignity, high culture, unity in diversity-, the continental defeat of national-populism and the rebirth of a cosmopolitan and caring entity with a spiritual sense of purpose. In truth, the Empire is a unipersonal Totalitarian dictatorship in all but name, with a tupid chamber of appointed "expert" General-Commisars acting as the executors of the Emperor's will, with penal forced labor as a standard, fortified and weaponized borders, purges and disappearances not just as a standard but as an often accidental and unavoidable procedure, a Transhuman monastic elite force of occultist executors, refined and often endless forms of torment for the slightest mishap. While it's true that the Empire provides the basics of life and that it's color and class-blind when it comes to selection of aptitudes, total devotion to the Emperor and a mental hygiene in the devotion to the European Leitkultur are a given, and memetic engineering and subliminal induction work in full swing to spread a Roman Catholic revival -Popes being line-assembled for that matter under Imperial instructions-, even in the Islamic parts of the Empire: surveillance might be slightly less invasive than in the Asian Hive, but it works to the same extent, and failing to thing the right way is as dangerous as in most of the world. The Emperor and a few, carefully brain-mutilated and monitorized chosen between his camarilla, -a bit too cruel compared to the mere neural suggestion amongst the vast army of civil servants and technocracts that actually constitute tha backbone of the Empire- have been made effectively inmortal, and the Emperor's vital constants are connected to a doomsday weapon that will activate should he die, or even should his Pretorian army of bioroids held a single rebellious thought. The Emperor, completely unchecked, becomes more demented every passing year, and some of his measures include the mandatory usage of Latin as a lingua franca, a mandatory return to 18th century fashion, the construction of an Imperial Palace that stretches from Salzburg to the imperial capital of Vienna (fortunately, he can wait), the design of genetically-engineered cherubs that regard him as a God (with... mixed results), and setting a court of aides whose only task is correctly decyphering his grunts. His centennial birthday is only a year away, and the Empire is already preparing for the gargantuan, *spontaneous celebration to come. Other parts of the Empire include the Chancellery of Muscovy, under a special transitional regime -the last generation of sterilyzed Russians are forced at gunpoint to take part in their own demise; the Territorial Commisariats, that some General-Commisars use to escape from the Emperor's designs and act as mini-Emperors on his behalf, often in a more deliberate yet random and depraved way that echoes the Neo-Reactionaries; the Protectorates, like-minded Neo-Bonapartist regimes under tributary and military subservience, and thus sucked dry at two fronts.

In the Neo-Reactionary side of the world, Gods truly walk among men. Where declining populations relied on high technology and life extensions, where voids of power emerged, where the brightest met the randroids, the Hoppeians and the Pinochetian-Minarchists, where exponentially growing know-how met new forms of lethal power and irresistible forms of blackmail... even simply where nobody could stop them, post-humanity broke all technological boundaries, subverted and subdued all opposition, and started its worldwide revolution. It only reached that far, though -the Asian and European opposition was fierce- but they set up their techno-Libertarian utopia of fused brains and biomechanical demigods, of living urban spaces provided with a cruel will, dedicated to stamp the baseline humans and teach them new forms of screaming, to create variations of humanity designed for servitude, leisure, obedience, or even for refined ways of suffering. A new marketplace for a new flesh. They called it the Hall of the Mountain Kings. Some hypernationalistic dictatorships modeled in the old-fashioned populistic and countercultural right-wing of past times persist. Intellectualy mutilated by "post-truth media" by their Quislings, they taint them with promises of ascendancy, using them as pawns and eventually rewarding them with experiences that make them envy the moments in which they truly whished they were dead. Amazon and Alphabet Inc., wile still operating within the Hall, are powerful enough to set their own private and independent fiefdoms in what were respectively the Amazon Rainforest and the Democratic Republic of the Congo -now Google Congo-, inhabited by a form of humanity which not only doesn't need to sleep at all but can develop so fast they're apt to work within a few months of life. A benchmark in the history of human resources.

Only Britain, wich suffered a cultural revolution after rather turbulent decades, stays close to the ideal of reaching a freer, less unfair society via technology. From crypto-markets to VR-migrants to self-sustained arcologies, Britain blooms with all kinds of social experiments, bound by virtual democratic councils. They're a rogue state by all accounts, and the only thing that prevents assimilation is their willingness to let the world be engulfed by grey goo, should that happen. Ironically, a trending fashion in the Federation, given the sorry state of the world, is a form of augmented reality plus memory alteration that makes the user believe that Britain is the run-of-the-mill region in a Federation that encompasses the globe.