Are you familiar with 'Without Sky', the astonishing (and astonishingly short - you can read it in 5 minutes) piece of micro-fiction/philosophical treatise/prophecy/strategy document penned by Vladislav Surkov, one of Vladimir Putin's closest advisors?
Set aside for a moment conspiracy thinking about Russian influence over Western democracy, which I think has always said more about the insecurity of Western democracy in our current moment than the activities of the Russian state. What is abundantly clear is that the people in charge in Russia appear to have grasped something about the instability of advanced modernity that those of us in more pampered societies are only beginning to understand. A few days ago, off the cuff, I was chatting to a friend about the state of our country (the UK) and I found myself making the observation that it feels as though we are at war, but against nobody. I was suddenly reminded of Surkov's story, and the image it depicts of a war in which there are not two sides, but many ever-fluctuating coalitions; in which some sides fight not to win, but to lose; and in which the belligerents are not states, but individual cities, professions, generations or sexes. It sounds very unlike our world, and yet also somehow reminiscent of it.
Nick Bostrom has an interesting thought experiment. In it, humans are engaged in a continual process of taking balls out of an urn. Some of the balls they take out are white: these represent inventions that are beneficial on the whole. (The discovery of antibiotics, for instance.) Some are grey: these represent inventions for which the results are mixed (for example, TV or nuclear power). None so far have been black: this would be an invention that invariably or by default destroys the society which invented it. Bostrom's concern is that AI, or one particularly AI, could be such an invention. But in my darker moments, I sometimes wonder whether we haven't already pulled a black ball out of the urn, and we just haven't got the point yet of realising that it will end up in our ruination: social media, and the way it has turned us, over the course of only 15 years or so, utterly loopy.
Be that as it may, the idea of the post-apocalypse not as the aftermath of an extinction-level event (nuclear war, plague, global warming, new ice age, whatever) but as an ongoing and unending descent into non-linear war and thenceforth chaos increasingly interests me. For a long time, as long-term readers will be know, I have been playing around with Behind Gently Smiling Jaws, a campaign setting which exists within the memory of an ancient crocodile demigod, into which an ancient race (the Naacals) entered, and into which YOU TOO can adventure. These days I wonder if the more interesting question would be: what if what was inside the crocodile's memory palace leaked out into our reality? Not immediately, but slowly, and progressively. In a random and haphazard, jumbled-up sort of way. As if one were to wake up one day, look out of the window, and realise that half the local park had become a fragment of a city populated by birds. Or one were to switch on the news one evening to see images of an army of early hominids led by Ethiopian knights marching on Kathmandu, or Caracas, or Bergen? Or if one were sent a whatsapp message by a friend with a link to a pornographic website showing people mating with hideous amphibian beasts of the Carboniferous period. Or if one received a phone call from a colleague when about to set off on the morning commute, telling you not to come into work because there were men in the building wearing face paint and feathers and armed with blowguns and clubs, slowly killing everyone, room by room, floor by floor. Then, what if you accelerated that process over the course of 10, 50 or 100 years and imagined how the world would then look, and used that as the start of the campaign?
Just some idle thoughts on a Wednesday lunch time.
I mean I assume you've read it but Tlok, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius by Borges plays with a similar idea.
ReplyDeleteI haven't. I like Borges but haven't read that one. I think M John Harrison was also hinting at something along those lines with the Viriconium stories.
DeleteHarrison is what immediately jumped to my mind. His preoccupation with, let's say, protruding or insistent realities seems to run deep - his (really good) collection Things That Never Happened is full of it too.
DeleteYou might like reading McLuhan, he of "the medium is the message" fame.
ReplyDeleteI might!
DeleteI'm reminded of your post on the Dionysian apocalypse, except instead of atavism the contagion spreads non-Euclidean information.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I was thinking about that a little bit as I was writing. I love the concept of the Dionysian apocalypse but I don't think you can really do it as an RPG campaign setting. It's really a novel or a comic series or something. (I believe Alan Moore did the latter.)
DeleteThere is a Dionysian Apocalypse of a sort in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. I remember reading an entertaining little thriller called Aphrodesia about a perfume that caused people who breathed it to break out into sexual excess and violence. In one of Rider Haggard’s novels, Montezuma’s Daughter, the English protagonist’s wife is the eponymous daughter of the Aztec emperor converted to Christianity. There is an episode where she and several other women are triggered by the paraphernalia of their older god and in a mad frenzy re-enact rites of human sacrifice. When she emerges from her trance she sees the blood on her hands and weeps in horror while her husband rebukes her. He later regrets speaking harshly to her, as a friar tells him the story of Agave and Pentheus and that devotees of the old gods are liable to be seized by them even after abandoning their worship. What his wife has experienced is Dionysian Apocalypse on the human scale.
DeleteWorking something like that into an RPG can work until one of the characters catches the atavistic contagion. It might be a bit of a tall order to ask one of your players to act out their own Dionysian Apocalypse, or to do their best Mr. Kurtz impression. Maybe there’s a way those ideas can be combined. Visions from a dream world, even that of a primeval crocodile, manifesting into the world are easier for the players to interact with than their character’s own private horror. That is unless those phantoms from their own character’s psyches come into concrete material form and have to be dealt with. In a way, the dark things lurking in the psyches of the multitude- the pent-up fears, desires, and other secret lurkings- have actually materialized onto the internet where we can all interact with them.
What you are talking about isnt post-apocalypse, but i think more along the lines of Skerples' pre-apocalypse, just i guess a slightly more expectant version (in the sense that instead of not knowing tha tthe other shoe is about to drop, its wondering which of the bumps youve heard were shoes)
ReplyDeleteexpanding on the bostrom metaphor, it might be that we are lifting white and grey balls out of the cup, not realizing that we are colorblind, that the safe neutral balls have been colored, and that we may be holding (many) dangerous red balls in our hand already, not knowing that the doomsday clock is already coutning down or has reached midnight.
to placate the great and terrible joesky, and to again follow along with gently smiling jaws, maybe the naacals dealt with the very same issue, a sort of ruptured decadence not caused by some form of malaise but from an overabundance of crocodile mind riches secretly and unknowably cursed
food for thought as always, please keep working on BGSJ, its a personal favorite of mine (outside your halted new troy idea which im still horrendously bitter about not seeing more of haha)
Nice comment. New Troy is not dead, exactly. There is a kind of iteration of it coming out at some point in the not-too distant future.
DeleteI also liked the idea of There is Therefore a Strange Land :P
Delete"some sides fight not to win, but to lose" -> that's an interesting one. The only example I can think of is a kind of last stand situation though.
ReplyDeleteConsider a cabal or other faction that regards a particular military defeat as likely to aid them in their long-term aims. A military defeat gives a probable reason for many new activities, it creates public resentment that can be leveraged, it allows for treaties and obligations to be renegotiated, and it can burn off excess military-aged males if that is determined to be necessary (e.g. to restructure the workforce). Losing a foreign war is just the start; in some Grand Strategy games you can angle for a rebellion inside your own country as a way to shift government types. A group within a country often thinks they’ll get ahead under the invaders; this is very common throughout history, from deposed pretenders or abrogated barons in ye olden times to internationalist Communists in the 20th century
DeleteAll very tzeentchian.
The "blood sacrifice" of the Easter Rising in Ireland comes to mind - the leaders were in fear that the British were going to arrest them imminently, so despite the failures and mistakes in the lead up to the planned event that left them with few weapons and no cohesive will, the decision was made to strike in the hope that it would incite a popular revolution in the immediate aftermath. Which didn't exactly turn out, but didn't exactly not turn out either.
DeleteThese are good comments but I interpreted that to be more along the lines of a nation seeing what has happened in e.g. Germany and Japan and realising that total, shattering defeat can have its benefits. Also that being the loser, the victim, can give one the moral high ground and ultimately power; something along the lines of the master/slave dialectic.
DeleteDeep. Imagine playing a bunch of characters with this mindset.
DeleteIt is the core of Al Qaidas playbook, isn't it?
DeleteThey know they don't have the strength to create a Islamic State that holds territory (look at what happened to the idiots who actually tried that). So their goal is to provoke Western militaries in ways that make those militaries hit so hard that it spreads resentment in muslim societies around the world.
Spoken like someone who has never been at war.
ReplyDeleteYou don't know, man. You weren't there.
DeleteImagine going back in time and explaining to yourself in 1999 that Donald Trump is the president, China beat the world with a bat sandwich and if you go out into the street and shout the name of the writer of Harry Potter then you might be committing a hate crime.
ReplyDelete21 years is a long time. 2! Years prior to 1999 was 1978. A lot can happen, when you think about it.
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