World-building notes for the story I'm working on. None of these are to be considered canon until they make it into a chapter.
It is really important to understand this when reading both the story and these notes:
This is not a utopia and the views of the characters are not the views of the author.
In many ways the society described is better than ours. In many ways it's worse. Some of its behaviours are really quite scary and oppressive. They would feel the same about ours.
This is an experiment in considering a society that is:
- Mostly egalitarian
- Spends a substantial proportion of its time extremely resource constrained
- Has grown up very intertwined with countless generations of legacy software that are more or less inextricable from the society itself
It is in many ways a dystopia: Deviation from the norm is punished and surveillance is total beyond the wildest dreams of an authoritarian Earth government.
They do also have a high trust society, extreme levels of social support and care, and ubiquitous democracy.
The point of the society is not to describe how anything should be, but to provide an interesting and self-consistent world that provides a useful mirror on our own.
So, if you hate any particular aspect of the society described, don't blame me. There's a decent chance I hate it too.