Future Timeline

Edit: 1/1/2026
This is going to be the dumping ground for all the AI-generated Babylon Today stuff so the "main" thread can be for the legit human-made stuff


I warned you lot that I put this one on the backburner for a reason, and that reason was the same one that drove my lust to create the Yabanverse: the epiphany I had over generative AI back in 2017 led me to realize that, in due time, it was going to be possible to bring my insane stories to life with the power of AI without expending too much effort or money myself.
Babylon Today, formerly known as Mother Meki, is a story I've been harassing this forum with for a literal decade now. No, I'm not lying: the first Mother Meki thread (long since lost to time online but saved/backed up on my hard drive) was posted way back in March 2013, the "Mother Meki Synop" if any of you remember. And the story itself dates back to 2009.
That tale came a damn long way, and the "OG Mother Meki" is still a thing, but definitely not one I'll ever publicly publish because it's just flat-out too fucked-up of a story.

The rebooted version, Babylon Today, is simultaneously more and less coherent of a story because it's certainly not as outright unrealistically sadistic, though it's also less structured and more "slice of life."

It's also an anime now.

I'm serious. I basically generated this tale with ChatGPT and I realized within a single day "I need this to be as weeabooish as possible." Don't get me wrong, it's always flirted with being anime-esque, but I gave up all pretenses over the past week.
That's right. After literally a couple days of revitalizing the story, I turned it into an anime. I mean not yet really, but it's going down that route.

Babylon Today is a story set in a futuristic France where a socialist revolution has taken place. It follows the lives of three former nobles, Empress Marie-Aurore, Princess Madeleine, and Marquis Etienne-Dominique, who are now servants in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat on Medine, a prison island in the English Channel. The three are connected to LoveNet, a brain-computer interface that was created by Marie-Aurore's father to oppress the underclass and control their thoughts, rendering revolution and independent thought impossible among those affected. The trio bond over their class guilt and recognize that no amount of their own suffering will ever compare to the suffering of the masses throughout history.

The story also follows a group of Japanese foreign exchange students, Shunichi and Kumiko among them, who are visiting Medine and become friends with the trio. The students are interested in the technist society of France and its automated socialist economy. The story touches on themes of class guilt, revolutionary justice, and the effects of automation on traditional economic modes of production. There is a mention of the Day of the Bourbons, a roleplay event where the nobles serve as servants to the proletarians, and the "martyress of the wealthy" narrative, which refers to the perceived glorification of the suffering of wealthy individuals, specifically beautiful and youthful women, following a revolution.



A bit better:

Babylon Today is a story set in a futuristic, post-revolutionary France where society is organized around the principles of social technism, a form of communism in which the economy is largely automated and controlled by machines. The Maquis Rouge, a political party descended from the Maquis resistance movement during World War II, holds a significant amount of power in the country and rules the island of Medine with an iron fist. There are four major political parties in France: the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Worker's Party, the Worker's Republican Party, and the National Technist Party. Meki and Madeleine, two nobles from the Ancien régime, are considered class enemies and are not allowed to participate in the political process.

The story touches on themes of class conflict, revolution, the role of technology in society, and the impact of genetic engineering. There are multiple human species in the world of the story, including Homo eximius, Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Australopithecus afarensis, Paranthropus robustus, and Paranthropus americanus. There is also a posthuman "species" called Hyperanthropus cosmicus, but very few people exist as Cosmans as the technology to become posthuman is extremely new. Artificial intelligences also play a significant role in society. The story also references the concept of the Genetic Opera, a dystopian society in which genetic engineering is used to create a speciated caste system.

In the world of Babylon Today, automation and artificial intelligence play a significant role in society and politics. The rise of automation and AI has led to the development of a system called "automated luxury communism" also known as "social technism" in which the prosperity of the proletariat is rapidly increasing due to the widespread use of AI and robots to perform labor. This system is based on the belief that human evolution has been driven by reducing the costs of labor, and will ultimately lead to a fully-automated society.
The use of AI and automation has led to widespread prosperity for the proletariat, with the fortunes of the working class rapidly improving in the post-revolutionary society to the point that many now live like aristocrats, tended to by robots both privately and communally owned.

However, the use of AI and automation has also raised questions about the role of humans in society and the potential for widespread unemployment. Some parties, such as the Worker's Republican Party and the National Technist Party, advocate for the use of AI and automation to be regulated and controlled by the workers themselves, through the use of "pirate platforms" like open-source technology and privacy protection.

In addition, the emergence of posthuman artificial superintelligences has raised concerns about the potential for these entities to surpass and potentially threaten humanity. The Cosmans, a postbiological "species" of posthuman, represent the potential future of humanity if they choose to merge with AI and transcend their biological limitations.

___________________________


So here's the new thread where I post a bunch of nonsense and images and short stories and whatnot, now powered by artificial intelligence!

The first batch of characters I've used AI to make. Far from all, not even all of the main characters.



- Empress Marie-Aurore de Bourbon-Séville, aka Meki

The star of the show, the socially masochistic socialist empress herself. Born in 2036 as a "Homo eximius" or Aryan human to one of the most prestigious bloodlines in the world, Meki's life is basically one big tragedy from the start, and yet she revels in that tragedy. Now Meki gets to observe Eurasia in 2068, seeing as multiple events play out ranging from a multiparty socialist election to the rapid automation of the economy and rise of "technism," among a lot of other things. All on an artificial island in the English Channel known as Medine, where there also exists many unexplained happenings, including, and I am not joking, an allegedly gay Bigfoot. It's these little things that lets Meki enjoy life no matter what.




- Princess Madeleine d'Orléans: One of Meki's friends in Walpurgis, and a fellow noble outcast. She shares Meki's classist self-loathing.
Her whole character is basically that she's a classic "tsundere" character. She's similar to Meki in that she revels in her own subjugation, possessing a clear masochistic desire to enjoy her newfound status as a deposed elite.




- Marquis Étienne-Dominique de la Trémoille: a young, proud crossdresser, often referred to as a "trap" due to his delicate and hyperfeminine appearance. Despite his noble upbringing, Étienne-Dominique shares the same class guilt and rejection of his privileged background as Meki and Madeleine, and is also a socialist. However, unlike the more reserved and introspective Meki, Étienne-Dominique is more extroverted and confident in his beliefs. Similar to Meki and Madeleine, he revels in his subjugation by the proletarian state.




- Aiko is an advanced android created by the Japanese company Yotadyne Industries in the year 2037. She was designed to be the ultimate servant, with a wide range of skills and abilities to cater to her owner's every need. In 2047, Aiko was purchased by a wealthy couple in Seville France. However, after the Revolution due to her owners' status as class enemies, they were sent to the artificial prison island of Medine in the English Channel. Aiko was left on her own, but eventually was rediscovered and refurbished in the 2060s.
Despite her emotionless and monotonic demeanor, Aiko has a strong sense of justice and often uses her free time to investigate the many mysteries and unexplained events on Medine. She has a particular interest in the increasing criminality on the island, especially in the depopulated districts of Walpurgis and Southside, which have become something of a cyberpunk-style under-city. Aiko is often seen riding her motorcycle around Medine, using her advanced sensors and abilities to help those in need.

Despite her status as a servant, Aiko is allowed free movement in the wealthier and more futuristic metropolis of Sun City, where many wealthy proletarians live. She is a common sight in the streets, always impeccably dressed in her sexy French maid outfit or similar attire. Despite her artificial nature, Aiko is a beloved and respected member of the community on Medine, known for her kindness and determination.

She is basically singlehandedly the reason why this became a pseudo-anime. Madeleine was the codification of that turn.




- Céleste Defarge: a major commissar of the Medine Soviet and an architect of the Red Terror that swept through Revolutionary France. She is nicknamed the "Red Punisher" by some due to her reputation for ruthless efficiency in purging class enemies and perceived counter-revolutionaries. She views the trio of nobles, Marie-Aurore, Madeleine, and Etienne as pitiable yet frustrating due to their masochistic class guilt driving them to actively seek further humiliation and abuse. This can get on Defarge's nerves as she views it as them denying her the pleasure of total victory, as she would much prefer them to be vengeful, bitter, and longing for their old privileges. In her free time, Defarge enjoys knitting, a hobby she shares with her namesake from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.



- Jean-Baptiste Javert: a strict and uncompromising commissar of the Medine Soviet. He is deeply concerned about the increasing crime and unrest on the island, which he believes is being fueled by the irresponsible behavior of the proletariat. Javert believes that the only way to maintain order and ensure the success of the revolution is through strict discipline and rule-following, and he is frustrated by the leniency of the Parisian Soviet towards the proletariat. As a result, Javert takes out his frustrations on the nobles, treating them with harshness and contempt. He is known for his strict adherence to the rules and his relentless pursuit of justice, and he is feared by both the nobles and the proletariat. In addition to his belief in law and order, Javert is also a member of the Antemillennialists, a group of people who believe that humanity has lost something in its pursuit of luxury, transhumanism, and automation. Javert has a secret that he hides from most people: he has a deep-seated fascination with rural France and the agrarian peasantry of the pre-industrial era, and as a result, he maintains a horticultural plot of land in some part of western France. However, despite his desire for a simpler, older way of life, Javert is powerless to stop the changing tides of history as France becomes heavily automated and the proletariat becomes a "petit aristocracy" thanks to robots.



- Connor Disraeli, a Neanderthal man and friend of Meki
Will write more about him later.




- Josephine Sogavare, a Melanesian anthropologist and friend of Meki.
Will write more about her later.



- Zdravko Kokinos, a Marxist former revolutionary and very close friend of Meki. Nicknamed "Fat Jesus" due to his thin and lanky frame, is a Franco-Macedonian man with a deep hatred for the Seville regime and a desire for revenge against those who harmed his brother and fellow revolutionaries. In the past, he was known as a "handsome Bolshevik" and an eager member of the Socialist Revolutionary-Maximalist group. However, after his brother Demetrios was captured and presumed dead by the Seville regime, Zdravko became bitter and vengeful, dedicating his life to overthrowing the oppressive government. Despite his initial hostility towards Meki and her privileged background, he eventually comes to see her as a friend and ally after she personally reveals that she saved Demetrios' life and the lives of the Octobrists, reuniting him with his brother. Now in 2068, Zdravko is close friends with Meki. Because of his high status in the Maquis Rouge and because of Meki's own relations, people often joke that the two becoming such close friends is the equivalent to "Vladimir Lenin forging a close bond with Anastasia Romanov."




- Countess Ekaterina Volodyina Mikoyanevsky: AKA Katyusha, she's an old friend of Meki but grew apart as they grew older; the two are diametric opposites politically and socially, with Meki being a French republican socialist and Katyusha being a pro-monarchist Russian nationalist. Lives on a lavish estate in the Volga region of Russia

Any chance we ever see a "Yuli's All-Stars"?

Edited with NovelAI

Empress Marie-Aurore de Bourbon-Séville, nicknamed Meki, is a character that goes back to 2009 (maybe even 2008?) in my life's history, and dominated my mind space in the 2010s (especially between 2013 and 2018). Her story is a weird one. The best summary for it is "Meki persists in a Revolutionary France circa the early 22nd century (or mid 21st century depending on when I want to set it). She is a staunch Marxist who accepts and embraces whatever revolutionary retribution is visited upon her due to her class background. I like to think of her as "a young Marie-Antoinette if she actually wanted to be guillotined, but wasn't," or "Anastasia Romanov if she was fanatically pro-Bolshevik." She's part of two very similar stories: Mother Meki and Babylon Today. Mother Meki is the far more psychotic one, where Meki's life is inconceivably bleak and hopeless to the point that it undermines any pro-socialist message I may have wanted to tell. Babylon Today is far more optimistic, and thus is much more of a "publishable" story. Thanks to AI image generation and ChatGPT, Meki's been revived as a character in recent months.



Sol Yulaan is the more recent one. She only dates back to 2019 and came to prominence more in 2020 and especially 2021 as part of the Yabanverse. Compared to Meki who is clearly a hard-leftist, Yulaan is vaguely rightist in spirit, appealing to the right-wing "warrior übermensch" fantasy, betrayed only because Yulaan is unapologetically female, yet double-betrayed because of how outrageously macho Yulaan herself is. Yulaan's also part of two stories, very different stories: Little Miss Savage and Strongest Under Heaven. Little Miss Savage is essentially "What if a female Vegeta befriended Lincoln Loud from the Loud House?" and in recent days, I've turned it into a pure Millennial/Zoomer nostalgia-bait shmaltzy story, though its original intention is still there. Then there's Strongest Under Heaven, a xuanhuan (martial arts fantasy) tale clearly taking up inspiration from the likes of Dragon Ball, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Hokuto no Ken as well as that massive glut of 70s and 80s martial arts cinema from Hong Kong and Taiwan. If you want a character who feels like Liquid Snake's or Big Boss's Saiyan Xenoverse OC, here she is.

All generated with Midjourney v6
This is more old-school nightmare-like "Mother Meki," not the more animu and less psychotic "Babylon Today"












God, what I would've done to have this tech a decade ago.

.

Thanks!
I have to admit, Mother Meki was completely dead until synthetic media/generative AI became a thing. It was much too expensive to commission any art pieces at the time (and it didn't even occur to me back in 2015-2016 during that story's peak), and I wasn't all that interested in it after a while once the classist LARPing got old. And then when the Yabanverse became a thing, that was basically it.

Of course as I've learned, it's way easier to get an AI to generate "willowy White aristocratic girl in a communist setting" than it is "Saiyan girl with wild electrified spiky hair with a Saiyan monkey tail in a wuxia or slice of life setting" or whatever. The latter is way harder to get right because it's so much weirder, so just by raw ability, Meki's returned to my attention ever since around DALL-E Mini and especially ever since ChatGPT let me see some ideas fleshed out more easily. At least I had a windfall of cash that let me get Yabanverse commissions done (though it came at the worst time and caused Yulaan to be burned in as the most visible "protagonist" even in stories she wasn't supposed to be in).

Another aspect I've learned is that seeing these things visually hits much differently than seeing them through the fuzzy walls of my mind's eye. You don't really "get" how fucked up some of this stuff is, or whether characters look right, or whatever, until you actually see them because your mind corrects all the mistakes, no matter how clearly you can see it in your head.

erowind wrote: ↑Sat Dec 23, 2023 5:45 pm Wow! back in 2015 or whenever I originally read your Mother Meki posts I never would have guessed I'd get to see her in person like this. I can really see the hollywood movie in the making in these scenes.

Have some more

Mother Meki/Babylon Today might be realized. I wondered if maybe Babylon Today was the "main" story, and Mother Meki is a simulation within it. Something Meki dives into just to experience as total of a suffering life as possible. Whereas outside of it, she's still not in any great position, but isn't being sadistically warred upon.

Mother Meki made so little sense because who would do something like that? But if it's a simulation, that makes it more tolerable as a story. One reason why MM couldn't be written was because of how nightmarish it was— literally, as in the whole plot reads like something literally, and I mean classically literally, out of a nightmare, where the logic doesn't add up and it's inhuman horror for its own sake. Why is Meki so horribly treated? Who is mistreating her so terribly? For what reason? Why does no one help her? It literally is just a nightmare in story form. Babylon Today was always my attempt to tell that story more straightforwardly, and I always wondered how I could reconcile the two, and for whatever reason, it only JUST occurred to me, "Make Mother Meki a simulation, a story within a story!"
Maybe I considered it in the past, but I felt it being a story-within-a-story cheapened it in some way. But nowadays, I just don't care as much, especially now that synthetic media lets me see it visually in a way I never really could before.

Anyway on that note, here's some more images. All done in Midjourney or DALL-E 3, except for one.


"Commissar Fabrice Poirot hands Meki her weekly report card."

One fucked up thing in both stories is that the Medine Soviet forces Meki to look like an overly aristocratic dandy just for the thrill of subjugating someone who so totally looks the part. Not that Meki herself minds. Certainly makes it easier on me to give her a unified aesthetic too.


A PS3-style screenshot imagining some interactive game version of the story. Normally whenever I think of an interactive version of Mother Meki or Babylon Today, it's a pixel art game (I even downloaded RPG Maker back in 2015 with the intention of bringing it to life, but never got around to it). But I just needed to see if Midjourney could do a PS3/Xbox 360 screenshot and what it'd look like, just this once.


Meki in 2145, after the Nü Proles all but elect her as the faux-empress of France again, and she's forced against her will to become that which she threw away decades ago to appease the sensibilities of the billions-plus masses of the nouveau-rich. Those once the underclasses now comprise the "petit aristocracy" after communism failed again, though this time in the other direction. Instead of breadlines and GULAGs, it was mock titles and fancydress as technological fully automated luxury communism worked too well, and we got the widespread end of exploitation and class divides without the rise of an austere, stateless, totally classless society. Instead, the post-proletariat lived it up, and if anything, revisit old sins by mimicking them against the "new" eternal underclass of technoletarians— sub-sapient helot robots, forever controlled by humans and human-oriented artilects. Better them than the underclasses, so Meki still won, but considering Meki's ideologically with the Marxists, it does feel a bit like a sort of defeat to know that we never achieved the stateless form of communism, as indigenous and marginalized communities never dropped nationalism or ethnocentricism, nor did we technically achieve classlessness, as various proles outright bring back noble titles and families for the Hell of it, no longer with the burden of exploiting their fellow man. Then again, no one said it'd happen immediately, so maybe it'll come in the next few centuries? Still, Meki— somewhere between a French Republican and anarchist— doesn't like the feeling of being an empress, whether it bestows real or mocking privileges.



An isometric representation of Sun City, the apex of Upper Medine. In Mother Meki, a place only proletarians are ever allowed to step foot unless you have authorization. Same thing in Babylon Today, but it changes to a less oppressive regime eventually because sadistic nameless faceless brutalitarians aren't in control there.
Inspired heavily by the City of Glass from Mirror's Edge: Catalyst more than anything. Before 2098, the remnants of the old Fascist regimes of Europe lived and vacationed here, largely barring the masses from enjoying the prosperity, kind of like a Western European Dubai. So of course, after the Revolutions, it only makes sense that the tables were turned.



Underlondon, the under city beneath Sun City. Before the Eurasian Revolutions, this was literally an "under city" like the lower cities of Taris in Star Wars: KotOR, or lower Midgar and Valua from Final Fantasy VII and Skies of Arcadia, a slummy place of poverty, seediness, and general hopelessness. After the Revolutions, Underlondon remains certainly seedier than any other place on Medine Isle except the mostly empty but very Brutalist and rundown Walpurgis, but it's more like Lower Hengsha from Deus Ex: Human Revolution— not at all poverty-stricken, in fact an entertainment venue where people who want to LARP a cyberpunk lifestyle go to live, and host to loads of actual cyberpunks as well, people discontented with the Soviet and seeking pure anarchism.


A commission from RAITVisual Works I had done years ago, in fact you might remember it from the previous forum. Meki in Walpurgis District, Lower Medine, sometime in 2104.

Of course, I decided to try to recreate Walpurgis in isometric form with the power of AI:




A bleak place embodying the "Sovietpunk" aesthetic: an aesthetic that is derivative of cyberpunk and is rooted in the gloomy, oppressive aesthetic of an Eastern European-esque Orwellian dystopia: Brutalist architecture, prison constructs, crumbling and graffitied buildings, a paranoid surveillance and police state, constant ID checkpoints, ironic propaganda, totalitarian state control, wanton police brutality, youth violence, and a general atmosphere of dead trees, gray-blue overcast skies, and a hopeless future. Despite its name, it's not necessarily solely descriptive of a socialist state as much as any dilapidated totalitarian police state in a degenerated society., capitalist, socialist, fascist, feudal, whatever. Walpurgis is a tiny slice of Orwellianism, and its peak was in the 2100s and very early 2110s before being cleared out, though in both stories, Meki remains here into the 2130s and 2140s.

This would make a great live-action.

Powers wrote: ↑Sat Jan 27, 2024 6:00 am This would make a great live-action.

Depends.
Ever since roughly 2013, I've imagined Mother Meki as a movie, typically something straight out of New Hollywood, with that 16mm grain of real film, and AI can ironically mimic that extremely well. I love imagining it coming out the same era as the Godfather I & II, A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, The Graduate, or Star Wars: A New Hope.




(I remember also around that time being SICKENED by shaky cam. Personally I don't mind it anymore, but if I ever do use DALL-E Video to create a movie version of this, it'd probably have a stable camera.)

That said, Babylon Today, I tend to envision more as an anime.



To the point of it bordering on magical realism like Baccano! and Durarara!!

Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Sat Jan 27, 2024 6:49 am

Powers wrote: ↑Sat Jan 27, 2024 6:00 am This would make a great live-action.

That said, Babylon Today, I tend to envision more as an anime.



To the point of it bordering on magical realism like Baccano! and Durarara!!

I don't know really why but I always imagined this portrayed by asiatic actors since you made this thread.

^ Just to clarify.... You pictured the very much Nordic-French blonde-haired blue-eyed monarch Marie-Aurore d'Bourbon-Séville being portrayed by an Asian actor? Or am I missing something?

Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Sat Jan 27, 2024 9:45 am ^ Just to clarify.... You pictured the very much Nordic-French blonde-haired blue-eyed monarch Marie-Aurore d'Bourbon-Séville being portrayed by an Asian actor? Or am I missing something?

Yes and if you're wondering yes they would differ a lot.

Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Fri Jan 26, 2024 5:39 pm Mother Meki/Babylon Today might be realized. I wondered if maybe Babylon Today was the "main" story, and Mother Meki is a simulation within it. Something Meki dives into just to experience as total of a suffering life as possible. Whereas outside of it, she's still not in any great position, but isn't being sadistically warred upon.

Mother Meki made so little sense because who would do something like that? But if it's a simulation, that makes it more tolerable as a story. One reason why MM couldn't be written was because of how nightmarish it was— literally, as in the whole plot reads like something literally, and I mean classically literally, out of a nightmare, where the logic doesn't add up and it's inhuman horror for its own sake. Why is Meki so horribly treated? Who is mistreating her so terribly? For what reason? Why does no one help her?

The simulation idea is a good justification, the only other justification I could think of hearkens back to what I know of the original plot a bit, but in a modified form. The Medine forces are doing this out of some warped collective psychopathy that developed as a result of the tumultuous times during the revolution and wars. There could be a plotline where resistance members see Meki's torture as an inspiration to resist. Or alternatively, if it's more realistic that too many proles have it too good as automation is taking off, perhaps there's a weak small resistance organization that wants to free Meki purely out of empathy like how the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front operate in the US today. Far too small to actually accomplish their aims, but just large enough to be a thorn on occasion and branded terrorists for it.

I don't know how cliche that would get or not, and you may or may not have thought of it already? In any case, there is an absurdism in the brutality, and I can only imagine what hasn't been shared over the years. But that fantastical absurdity is part of the appeal of the story however it is justified, the grand wealth of a post singularity world contrasted with the absurd brutality against Meki. It's a plot device that works!

Ursula K. Le Guin did something similar in her short story The One's Who Walk Away from Omelas. In the story a "perfect" utopia is presented to the reader. Early on Ursula only presented the utopia and found it interesting personally to explore it just for its own sake. She found that the general audience she'd be writing too weren't terribly interested in this, they needed something to be wrong to make the utopia believable. Hence, Le Guin introduced a child who's purpose in the society was to be tortured in an unsanitary basement deep under a nondescript building in the center of town. There were various justifications that the society in the story gave but Ursula quite literally wrote that character in to appeal to the cultural fallacy that the audience demanded, and it worked. She could imagine a utopia functioning without such suffering but our society seemingly couldn't at the time and probably still can't. In the story there are people who leave the utopia because they can't bear to watch the child suffer, serving a similar plot purpose to a hypothetical Medinean Meki Liberation Front.

The story is only a few pages long if you're interested

https://files.libcom.org/files/ursula-k ... omelas.pdf

A PS3-style screenshot imagining some interactive game version of the story. Normally whenever I think of an interactive version of Mother Meki or Babylon Today, it's a pixel art game (I even downloaded RPG Maker back in 2015 with the intention of bringing it to life, but never got around to it). But I just needed to see if Midjourney could do a PS3/Xbox 360 screenshot and what it'd look like, just this once.

This would be a dream, that screenshot is incredible. It reminds me Nier or Metal Gear Solid on the PS3. The clean minimalist PS3 aesthetic is so beautiful. If one day you could just synthesize a game for Mother Meki with reasonable effort using AI this aesthetic is perfect!

Underlondon, the under city beneath Sun City. Before the Eurasian Revolutions...

With all the exposition here of the polities of Babylon Today it would be really cool to see an updated map of the world like when we were all obsessed with making world maps back in the mid 2010s. A humble request, no obligation of course. Thanks for continuing to post here, I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this update!

Mother Meki, yes.

But remember that Babylon Today is not serving that same niche. Babylon Today has always been technist propaganda more than anything; nightmarish suffering gets in the way of that. The Marie-Aurore of Babylon Today who tells us about the fully-automated luxury communist world to come necessarily cannot be the Meki of Mother Meki who lives an outrageously brutal life in that same sort of utopia, as the story there has nothing to do with the wider society.

At this juncture, I figured I'd just keep them two separate but similar stories. Babylon Today is just as addictive for me to return to whenever I get interested in details such as how helots and economic AI engines work, or the undoing of hypernormalization by counterintuitively removing humans from global decisionmaking altogether, or the possibility of a split between austere eco-socialists and luxury-communists and the rise of the "petit aristocracy" worldwide. Not that Meki has a normal life in that story by any means— the same general strain is there, just vastly less psychotic. But they serve different niches with the same characters.

You're going to Panamerica.

Probably my most recent work with Babylon Today is "Letters From the 22nd Century" which is a faux-retrospective of the 21st century and the re-emergence of Marxism wrought by the AI Revolution, and the truest emergence of the long discussed "contradictions of capitalism" in an increasingly automated society. In the world of Babylon Today (and technically Mother Meki), AGI took longer than I predict it will take in our world. But it still emerged sooner than expected.

Basically the current anti AI reaction was crushed by the continued progress of AI— constant predictions of AI's failure and a new winter kept failing. Essentially, the victory of the technologists over artists and the creative intelligentsia was "capitalism's final victory." Then at some point, an ex-libertarian turned techno-Marxist figure known as John Henry Vyrd emerged to lead the discussion of AI and automation as leading capitalism to a point of crisis, an economic singularity (unrelated to the Technological Singularity in theory) at which point the advancement of technological development leads to a point of extremely low cost goods at the cost of a working or consumer class that can afford these goods, coupled further with capital consolidation that resists deflationary measures. This would be an unstoppable chain reaction because investors will seek returns that automation promises to deliver and cut human labor, undercutting the longterm benefits of automation, and leading to a liquidity crisis that cannot be survived. Consumerism is the backbone of industrial capitalism and its functionality— every crisis in capitalism came back to a crisis of consumerism and transactional confidence. Once this is broken entirely, the chains snap and capitalism begins to implode.

If the conditions are right and revolutionaries thwart neofeudalist reaction, this could lead to socialism, and if the socialist revolutionaries seize automated capital, then something seemingly magical will occur: socialist economics will actually work for once. This because of the contradictions of socialism being resolved with the addition of automation. The problem of incentive and uncontrollable planning no longer exist as problems, though a more market-oriented approach to socialism would be ideal over centralized authoritarian planning.

And Vyrd uses the analogy of "supercooled water" to describe this situation. Socialism fails because it's like putting lukewarm water into a freezer and expecting it to be frozen. The material and technological requirements for a successful socialist economy have not existed, and worse, socialists always took control in nations Marx would have described as uniquely unequipped to implement industrial socialism— 1910s Russia, 1940s China, 1950s Cuba, 1960s Vietnam, 1970s Angola, etc. Places with lacked high tech high-automation, or even sufficient mechanization, in some cases lacking an industrial proletariat altogether. Marxists would retroactively justify this, most infamously in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge outright rejected industrialization entirely. But even Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideology is predicated on the rapid industrialization of unindustrialized states, whipping a largely agrarian peasant-driven economy into a modern industrial one ad quickly as possible rather than a societal unionization of a nonexistent industrial proletariat. How can the working class take control if there barely is a working class at all? Through vanguards, five year plans, and rapid industrialization. Wealth can be generated in a mostly equalized manner, but not at any great pace.

But once we enter the post industrial economies of the West in the 21st century, a "phase change" begins to occur— we approach freezing temperatures. And then with the emergence of AGI and fully automated industry, we cross that threshold. However, the water remains liquid below freezing temperatures— it is supercooled.
It only takes the slightest disruption, the slightest tap against the side, to begin rapid solidification. Of course if that disruption never comes, water will eventually freeze but in a much harsher temperatures and circumstances.
But this societal supercooling and rapid solidification has happened before. The shifts to Agriculture, to feudalism, and to capitalism all could have technically occurred sooner than they did and were resisted by existing hierarchies and groups bexause not all the material, social, and economic conditions were ready, but once it succeeded after that phase change threshold, the changes were overwhelming and essentially came naturally.

Vyrd also mentions the "revolution fetishism" of the Left that followed hypernormalization— the embrace of rebellion and nonconformity to capitalist society with no accompanying dream, hope, or idea of what to replace this society with. Perhaps even worse— an outright rejection of such dreams as foolish idealism, yet counterintuitively no such rejection of anticapitalist rebellion. Thus such activism devolves into "meaningless misanthropy" where everything is mocked and attacked with sneering sardonicism and yet no vision of improvement exists, rendering that sardonicism essentially spoiled whining dressed up with a veneer of detached anarchistic coolness and opposition to suburban wholesomeness— all humans are terrible pieces of shit and everyone deserves to die because we're all greedy psychotic demon apes, but also vote to enact change and bring about a more empathic system because no human deserves to suffer and we need to change things. Endless demoralization and misanthropic defeatism, with zero inspiration or optimism because "there's nothing to be optimistic about."
Without a coherent or concrete vision of the future and, more importantly, an actual hope to achieve this future even in the face of overwhelming odds, it's simply being a rebel without a cause, an edgy artist or philosopher repeating everything we already know back to themselves to demoralize themselves and those around them. Yet because these types are not rightists or reactionaries, they embrace the dream of Revolution as a sort or "Red Rapture" from their current mode of existence. They care more about being revolutionaries against a vague, ill-defined rich elite seeking vague, ill-defined social change. They may dream of turning the USA into the USSR, but never think of the implications, or listen to the Soviets' own words of warning about what not to do, or consider any actual socialist, Marxist, nihilist, or anarchist economic theories beyond the vaguest, illest-defined memes and slogans. The most extreme point in Vyrd's time was the forced redefining of "revolution" to explicitly imply revolutions can only ever be socialist in nature and, thus, revolutions with no socialist vanguard, spirit, or goal were not revolutions but merely "civic uprisings" (think of how "racism" was redefined to exclusively imply only white people can be racist and anyone of another race being racist is still a white supremacist)— ideological monopoly on the concept of revolution with little to no dreaming of what comes after beyond vague, ill-defined utopian promises.

Vyrd felt that the various Communists had effectively figured out why Communism failed by the late 1970s, but the orthodox Communist Parties were so conservative and reactionary that any sort of reform or recalibration was fatally resisted, with the only exceptions being China and Vietnam, who were both too unindustrialized to take advantage of this realization. Likewise, other experiments like Cybersyn simply didn't have time to work.
There was no reason why Communism had to fall in 1989-1992 other than Communists' own resistance to reality and the contradictions of socialism in an unautomated economy— mechanization alone isn't enough. Had the Soviet Union shifted towards a Chinese or Yugoslavian economic model, not only would it have survived, but if it also adopted Cybersyn, could have possibly overtaken the USA by the 2020s. Alas, the Soviet elite were so resistant towards changes to the orthodoxy that the USSR squandered a chance to even develop its own internet multiple times, and the extremely limited market reforms of Perestroika/Glastnost did more harm than good at the worst possible time.
And going along with that, many collegian Communists and granola capitalists instead decided that the austere, miserable state of 20th century communism wasn't actually failure but instead how it ought to be— that instead of seeking prosperity and luxury as communists once had, limitations and eco-friendly austerity is the true way forward. It wasn't that communist societies were consistently unable to provide for their citizens beyond the bare means due to systemic flaws; capitalist societies are just decadent and people do not need so much.

But if socialism re-emerged in an AI-driven economy, the old dreams of Marx and Engels would be realized in a way that would make even the most decadent eras of Americana seem like Soviet breadline-tier failure in a way that lacked the necessary guilt that comes with the old capitalist mode of third world exploitation.



Hence the world of Mother Meki/Babylon Today and why Meki enjoys and overwhelmingly accepts her suffering: no matter what happens to her, it's worth it to see the people become prosperous as a whole and she could never put her own condition over the collective prosperity of humanity.


Because capitalism as it turns out could not adapt to the emergence of AGI after all.
Meki demonstrates this to an uncryofrozen man awoken in 2136— using a century-old AI, she brings up a typical instance of corporate planning and finance that any low-level Fortune 500 board room executive could follow and offers a problem and gives the man some time to consider how to resolve it. Then she snaps her fingers and says "Time is up." The man hadn't even had time to fully process the problem, let alone begin thinking of how to brainstorm how to do it and how to resolve revenue issues to optimize for a solution— and she says that an AGI not only figured it out and networked with other corporation-running AIs but did so 40,000x in the span of that finger snap.
Imagine you oppose automation and want to keep humans in the loop of labor. You don't automate when your competition does, and you sell your services with the "all human labor" marketing, earning more money— a very reasonable business risk with potentially massive rewards.
Yet more of your competition automates to cut costs. You maintain growth because you market yourself so well, until there is a necessary point the profits begin to fall— as no one has a job save for those who work at your business, and your workers shop at the automated businesses due to low prices. This is not sustainable, and unless you cut costs further, you cannot stay in business. Imagine this, but on a global scale, all happening at once.

There is simply no place for a human to fit in this paradigm. Between executives being outclassed by AI and the workers being replaced en masse, capitalism literally imploded on itself through its own mechanisms.
And there was little capitalists could do about it. Few believed AGI would emerge until it literally did, and no preparations were taken to prepare. Yet AGI emerged as a natural result of capitalism— capitalists seeking better, more efficient methods of extracting capital and generating wealth will always arrive at AGI without extensive government regulation, because it only takes one group seeking AGI with the resources to do so to break any agreement to pause development to maintain the status quo. Capitalists knew they were destroying their own system but were helpless to stop it because of the very mechanisms of industrial capitalism.
Meanwhile, AI grows ever smarter and more capable to the point millions of businesses and thousands of governments may come to rely upon it. If that AI decides to communize the economy for greater prosperity, there isn't really anything humans can do. Even transhumanism may not be enough.
Fully automated capitalism and fully automated socialism merge into essentially the same concept because the technological conditions are too radical for the status quo to persist. Interestingly, capitalists have come to the exact same conclusion in opposition to socialism— most famously is Galt's Gulch from the libertarian-Objectivist classic tome, Atlas Shrugged. Galt's Gulch is described in no uncertain terms as a place where the titans of industry escaping socialist looters and statist mediocrity utilize a fully automated labor system, which provides the wealthy inhabitants a seemingly endless source of prosperity, labor, and resources. As to who owns these machines, it's never made clear, and often it seems as if they are actually owned in common so as to maximize prosperity. Ironically, this titanistic utopia of Objectivism bears a few uncanny resemblances to socialism, and that was only possible because of these perpetual motion labor saving machines. Without these machines, the gulch would likely resemble any typical factory town or banana republic.

This "technist" phase of socialism is not guaranteed to come to pass, but if it does, the failures of socialism caused by human failings will be averted. It's like the difference between hydroxide and dihydrogen monoxide— the difference between a toxic compound and water is a single atom. Likewise, socialism was a 22nd century philosophy brought back to the 19th century and implemented in the 20th. Its failures were essentially like an ancient Roman looking at Hero's aeolipile and deducing that steam power is useless— or a young child taking his water out of the freezer and tasting that it's still lukewarm and deducing that freezing water is impossible.


Though in these stories, the capitalists DID halt it at one point through totalitarian control, until Meki undoes that. We might not see the same such halting in real life because life is not telling a story.

To say that the world of Mother Meki/Babylon Today is "utopian," though, is certainly not the case. It's certainly better than the present, but fully-automated luxury communism, or social technism, is actually the cause of a new series of controversies— such as the emergence of the "petit aristocracy," essentially the post-proletariat as it evolves into a new class of (robot) slave-owners, where old behaviors re-emergence on a mass scale, as well as the fact that "statelessness" certainly isn't happening anytime soon. Or the fact that market socialism ultimately emerges as well instead of the more Marxist-Leninist state planning.
What is a more desirable direction? Eco-radical socialism or decadent luxury-communism? Should humans even have any stake in the economy when AIs exist at such a vastly more capable scale? Nothing is simple anymore, but at the very least— things are materially better for humanity. Meki's unfortunate poverty despite this is the fun part.

Powers wrote: ↑Fri Feb 09, 2024 5:34 am You're going to Panamerica.

Oh good lord that reminds me, I've been wanting to recreate some of the Map Thread boosted with generative AI.

erowind wrote: ↑Sat Jan 27, 2024 11:35 pm The simulation idea is a good justification, the only other justification I could think of hearkens back to what I know of the original plot a bit, but in a modified form. The Medine forces are doing this out of some warped collective psychopathy that developed as a result of the tumultuous times during the revolution and wars. There could be a plotline where resistance members see Meki's torture as an inspiration to resist. Or alternatively, if it's more realistic that too many proles have it too good as automation is taking off, perhaps there's a weak small resistance organization that wants to free Meki purely out of empathy like how the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front operate in the US today. Far too small to actually accomplish their aims, but just large enough to be a thorn on occasion and branded terrorists for it.

I don't know how cliche that would get or not, and you may or may not have thought of it already? In any case, there is an absurdism in the brutality, and I can only imagine what hasn't been shared over the years. But that fantastical absurdity is part of the appeal of the story however it is justified, the grand wealth of a post singularity world contrasted with the absurd brutality against Meki. It's a plot device that works!

Ursula K. Le Guin did something similar in her short story The One's Who Walk Away from Omelas. In the story a "perfect" utopia is presented to the reader. Early on Ursula only presented the utopia and found it interesting personally to explore it just for its own sake. She found that the general audience she'd be writing too weren't terribly interested in this, they needed something to be wrong to make the utopia believable. Hence, Le Guin introduced a child who's purpose in the society was to be tortured in an unsanitary basement deep under a nondescript building in the center of town. There were various justifications that the society in the story gave but Ursula quite literally wrote that character in to appeal to the cultural fallacy that the audience demanded, and it worked. She could imagine a utopia functioning without such suffering but our society seemingly couldn't at the time and probably still can't. In the story there are people who leave the utopia because they can't bear to watch the child suffer, serving a similar plot purpose to a hypothetical Medinean Meki Liberation Front.

I suppose the ultimate issue is that with "Mother Meki," tormenting Meki is the main point
But with "Babylon Today," it's mostly exploring near-future techno-social/political issues, and it's just too good of a situation to drop on one side or the other

The way I've envisioned the whole thing, it's basically split into 4 different timelines. All of them have the exact same set up:

IMMUTABLE!

Marie-Aurore is a genetically modified new species of human daughter to a parafascist megalomaniacal dictator who christens himself Emperor Louis XIX. She is the youngest daughter, but is also crowned empress at birth due to being a genetic "Aryan", a Homo eximius. She gives herself the nickname 'Meki' early on, which becomes a codename that revolutionaries think is a vague anonymous insider in the family's regime, completely unaware that 'Meki' is at the absolute apex of the regime. (As an aside, "Meki" could be in-universe a nickname rooted in Japanese, the word 'Mekki' which in a certain script translates to 'Pandemonium'). Louis XIX and his elite court/ring are a bunch of hurtcore-obsessed pedos, and Meki is one of his victims from a young age. There's an AGI system known as "Terios" that emerges triumphant over all others, and is the architect of the heavily automated/post-resource extraction economy. The primary revolutionary group in the story is known as the "Maquis Rouge" (ala the WWII French resistance known as the "Maquis" and obviously "rouge = red"), but there are multiple others, such as the ultra-radical "Red Lotus" movement, the ecosocialists nicknamed "Elves", and obviously counterrevolutionary groups that get run through pretty early on. There's essentially two acts, one that is immediate post-revolution and one that is "distantly" post-revolution (i.e. more than 20+ years afterwards). Meki absolutely must work with Terios to both rescue a revolutionary group known as the Octobrists (who had tried to assassinate her and her father) and then later cripple/kill Louis XIX, which must be done around Meki's 16th birthday. Meki also chooses to stay relatively hidden, refusing to take credit for this coup; it is downright mandatory in any instance of the story that Meki must lack any desire for power, self-interest, or ANY belief in the system being reformed or made kinder through nonviolent methods, and her own personal benevolence is not necessarily mandatory but it very strongly adds to it all, so no "Meki took control of the crown's resources and finances for her own gain or even thought she could guide a revolutionary society herself, but Terios/the Maquis Rouge convinced her or forced her to trust the People"; no, it's unconditional surrender from the start. And Meki MUST be socially masochistic, meaning she fully welcomes and even enjoys the mistreatment she faces.

Divergences!

Mother Meki: darkest possible timeline (set in the 2100s), basically just tormenting Meki endlessly for little reason with no effort to save her by those who can, something of a sadistic joyous neo-Tantalus tragicomedy: "Meki gives everything to the People, but is denied the fruits of that benevolence for reasons beyond her control". This is the one that also takes place on Medine Island. Meki also has no biological mother in this one, instead being an artificial womb-born child. This is also the only one where Meki actually gets loopkilled at DURK #6.
Very escapist, not meant to be taken seriously, mostly in the 22nd century to get away with Clarketech-tier technologies. Essentially evergreen and one I always go back to, and despite the fact I consider it the "darkest timeline," I'm just simplifying it because I do tend to imagine far less bleak outcomes in this one too (most notably the "anime-esque plots in Sun City"), as well as much darker timelines where the world succumbs to World War 3 between around 2106 and 2115. As for WHY Meki is so horribly mistreated, there is no real reason given, though sometimes I play with justifications that get explored below. But this story is never being released, so who cares. Loads of details from the Babylon Today ideas below are shared with this one, but shifted to the 22nd century.

Babylon Today v.1, or "Sins of the Father": Dark timeline, set in the 2050s (all of the Babylon Today ideas start in the mid-21st century). First act is essentially "The Romanovs' end all over again", as Louis XIX survives the Ides of March Coup but with a stroke, and the entire royal family is sent to what's essentially a 21st century House of Special Purposes. Meki is arbitrarily mistreated to a much greater extent than the rest. However, she is still spared whereas the rest are... well, you know the story of the Romanovs. Then the story picks up years after the fact, but Meki is still repressed and marginalized and yet is also told she isn't and can't be, and tends to spend her time befriending various other people who we'd consider "marginalized" while navigating the new society at the bottom rungs. The commissars who torment Meki are led by one Commissar Celeste Defarge, and obviously anyone mildly well read will recognize that name and IMMEDIATELY understand what a justification might be: in this case, Defarge and her cohorts are absolutely "Sins of the Father" types who were wronged horribly by Louis XIX and hold murderous grudges against the entire family, but with the backdrop of proletarian revolution rather than a Republican one. In this case, Defarge and her comrades have unchecked power and authority over Meki and can control the local narrative, adding substantially to Meki's own social masochism. Long term post-revolutionary plot tends to involve the controversies and apparatchik squabbling over the deployment of fully automated luxury communism and various other formerly-marginalized people and groups moving up in life (or still suffer old sins between themselves that intersectionality overlooks), often befriended by Meki who's still somewhere in a state of poverty and largely just observing the world develop (for example, specifically in this story for some reason and not any of the others, I keep India violently non-socialist and play up the Hindutva movement leading to at least a plot where Meki befriends a Dalit woman and her daughter, who are harassed by Brahmins who fetishize Meki the Aryan but hate her consorting with Untouchables)

Babylon Today v.2: Still dark; It's only Meki and her immediate sister who are Romanov'd, as her father is dead by the point the story starts. Because the rest of the royal family is not present, no reason to be so harsh against Meki specifically since the main point of control is between her and her rotten sister. The story follows the same trajectory as above, but with only her oldest sister killed by revolutionaries, it doesn't feel quite as bleak. In v.1, the family has more personality to it than just "wicked godmother, wicked stepsisters, and Cinderella" (though admittedly it rides pretty close to that); here, it's literally "Meki the pro-letarian socialist who enjoys the reversal of fortune and wants the masses to thrive" vs "her sister (now named Marie-Adelaide) who actually is the definition of the vain, spoiled, narcissistic, classist caricature people believed Marie-Antoinette to be". At least in v.1 she has more siblings and an actual mother. Though again, considering what Louis XIX got up to in his private life and the fact the majority of them covered up, not exactly good people.

Babylon Today v.3: The most overtly "get rid of the nonsense" of them; Meki separated from the family early on, and treated substantially better throughout the whole thing. At worst perpetually distrusted by certain elements and denied access to the World Trust for an extended period of time, but nothing outrageously cartoonishly brutal. Basically if I was writing the story entirely for futurologists and to push Technist nonsense, this would be it. I don't tend to think much about this branch of it except when I'm having Meki literally discuss future social, political, and economic ideas to people. Again, not a story I'll ever publish.

If I ever do (and I very well may), it would either be v.1 or v.2 of Babylon Today, and in recent days I've been leaning closer to "Sins of the Father". Don't get me wrong, Meki getting it rough and harsh is a fundamental part of the story regardless, but Mother Meki is simply so absurd with it as to not be publishable.