Alternate History Ideas and Discussion

[Zyobot]

DBWIB (pronounced ‘dbweeb’) – definition – A DBWI-blind poster, the person on the thread who just doesn’t get it, and just doesn’t play along ands ruins the flow of the discussion by: a) denying the events of the OP are real or plausible, because they don’t understand the OP is being posted double-blind from an alternate reality, b) posts something to the narrative that is nonsensical because diametrically opposed to or logically mutually exclusive with the narrative contributions or intent of the OP or subsequent posters.


This type of poster *inevitably* appears on DBWI threads. Usually is there is dweeby/DWIBIB response no later than five posts after the OP. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a DBWI with multiple participants keep a coherent alternate universe POV for ten posts in a row, ever.

Interesting, I haven't heard about that acronym before. I am, however, quite aware of the concept, having noticed posters who muddle the DBWI thread in question with their ignorance-driven digressions that take the discussion off-track and force others to bring it back.

How I was able to intuit what DBWI threads were about as an AH newbie all of three years ago while others who've (presumably) been in that community for much longer weren't, I don't know. But whatever; at least the two of us are on the same page.

 

[Bassoe]

…Well, it does sound pretty dystopian, with the future it describes having minimal “Upward march of history!” ideals to spread to us downtimers.

However, I don’t really see whatever connection you’re trying to make with my ‘2019 EU To 1959’ scenario. Sure, technological exchange means downtimer societies would be forced to reconfigure their economies and infrastructure considerably, with automation potentially scaring blue-collar industrial workers who fear that robots are here to take their jobs and throw them onto the streets. Even so, there’s still more than enough room for human labor and expertise, especially in the service and tech sectors that’d develop in downtimer nations over the coming decades.

And when these developments are finished to the point that only a handful of workers are required? You're just ignoring the future in favor of pointless baubles!

I guess it could alternativly work if the future is the one where 99% of the population Has No Privacy And Owns Nothing™, but there are more modern Useful Idiots who'd try to justify that that 'once the plutocrats no longer need you, they'll kill you'.

‘Quasi-Stalinist Tsarist Russia’.

Which is to say, one that employs practically congruous blood purges, random executions, and genocide to deal with “troublesome” ethnic groups. All of which may have characterized OTL Tsarist Russia to some extent, though I don’t think it was quite to the same extent as Stalin did.

Seems perfectly plausible to me. What could make for an interesting twist would be tsarist russia falling to different threats that communist rebellions. How about the security state the tsar establishes trying to turn them into a puppet ruler? Or a tsar pulling a Stalin and enslaving their peasant population to brute-force industrialization, then selling the cheap products of their slave labor abroad, ending with either tsarist russia in a similar state to modern china, a totalitarian dictatorship subverting its rivals by buying out their industries, or getting backed/puppeted banana republic-style by foreigners who want their cheap labor to continue.

 

[Zyobot]

Seems perfectly plausible to me. What could make for an interesting twist would be tsarist russia falling to different threats that communist rebellions. How about the security state the tsar establishes trying to turn them into a puppet ruler? Or a tsar pulling a Stalin and enslaving their peasant population to brute-force industrialization, then selling the cheap products of their slave labor abroad, ending with either tsarist russia in a similar state to modern china, a totalitarian dictatorship subverting its rivals by buying out their industries, or getting backed/puppeted banana republic-style by foreigners who want their cheap labor to continue.

Taking a shot at Sino-American relations, I see. And with abundant reason, I'll readily admit.

How about 'Stalinist Germany, Nazi Russia'? While I've certainly seen scenarios in which the two had "swapped" communism and fascism during the early twentieth century, I haven't explicitly seen Stalinist and Nazis analogues arise in either of them. The plausibility of the former escapes me at the moment, but the latter has a long history of autocratic and exceedingly bigoted tropes to draw on (namely anti-Semitism and ethnic genocides).

 

[raharris1973]

Interesting, I haven't heard about that acronym before.

There is a very good reason you have not heard about that acronym before. I just made it up last night!

I wanted to come up with a derogatpory-sounding nickname for something I see repeatedly that I've found highly annoying

But, as people have pointed out, it's not worth getting too angry when people do it, one must have the serenity to accept it will happen and it cannot be controlled.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Frilly undies for teh win!
The What's on the shelves of Victoria's Secrets win hands down as the most important asset of the ISOTed town.

Hmm, I'd have thought clothes were one of the few things that just aren't as good in the modern day as hand-stitched and custom fitted garments common to the past. Most people couldn't afford multiple garments but the ones who could had them custom-fitted, not off-the-rack. My thoughts are:

Neolithic: Books of matches would be incomparable in value. Alcoholic drinks are likely to be valued depending on how far the downtimers have advanced in the art of brewing.

Bronze Age: Cheap wineglasses. Glass was as valuable as gold in this era and actual transparent glass, as opposed to cloudy translucent glass, was the holy grail everybody wanted and nobody could make. A matched set of crystal clear wineglasses dyed blue at the base? You'll have the only ones on the planet.

Roman Era: Cheap glassware is probably still a winner. Any cloth or clothing dyed royal purple would be extremely desirable. Other colors probably still valuable.

Early Medieval: Still probably an era where glassware is supremely expensive, though transparent stuff existed by this point it usually had flow lines and distortions in it and our Wal-Mart stuff would still be better quality. Painkillers like aspirin are more likely to be valuable than previous ages, as the trade networks of the previous eras that would have transported medicinal herbs are gone.

High Medieval: By this point things like germ theory have appeared and our treatments for various diseases will be seen as valuable trade goods rather than superstitious nonsense that might threaten the priesthood's control. Goods from the Early Medieval are probably still mostly valuable.

Early Modern: With the golden age of piracy going on, maps will be at a premium.

Renaissance: Rolls of aluminum foil.

 

[Bassoe]

Fritz Haber never figures out the haber process and once WW1 starts, the germans can't produce food and gunpowder in sufficient quantities and lose harder and ahead of schedule from OTL.

 

[Zyobot]

‘President Joe McCarthy’.

 

[Bassoe]

‘President Joe McCarthy’.

Who’s VP? One term or two?

 

[Circle of Willis]

‘President Joe McCarthy’.

MacArthur wins the Republican nomination in 1952 and chooses McCarthy as his running mate, creating a ticket that promises zero compromise with Communists and a crushing victory in the Cold War. At the same time, Truman does not withdraw from the Democratic primary and manages to defeat Kefauver by the skin of his teeth following a bruising fight throughout the first half of the year. Big Mac goes on to bury the unpopular Truman (though probably by less than Eisenhower did to Stevenson, as his ticket will be perceived as extreme by a lot more people) but is assassinated in 1953 or '54, having gone nuclear to win the Korean War shortly after his inauguration.

Now Tail-gunner Joe is president, and he's got a martyred war hero & Communist-buster extraordinaire of a predecessor to live up to. Naturally he blames the Soviet Union for murdering MacArthur and prepares to annihilate them in retaliation before they can achieve nuclear parity with the US. (Stalin surviving a bit longer or being succeeded by hardliners would really help here) The absolute superiority of the US arsenal over the Soviet one at this point guarantees their victory sooner or later, but will it be one the American people themselves can stomach? If it is, then surely McCarthy can win a term of his own in 1956 as the slightly bloodied & charred but otherwise totally triumphant winner of the Cold War.

 

[Zyobot]

Who’s VP? One term or two?

Wasn’t sure at first, but @Circle of Willis kindly stepped in to suggest a scenario. While it doesn’t answer who McCarthy’s VP pick likely is, I suppose that, unless a 25th Amendment like ours is instated earlier, the spot can be left vacant until the next election.

 

[Bassoe]

...prepares to annihilate them in retaliation before they can achieve nuclear parity with the US. (Stalin surviving a bit longer or being succeeded by hardliners would really help here) The absolute superiority of the US arsenal over the Soviet one at this point guarantees their victory sooner or later, but will it be one the American people themselves can stomach?

This essentially ensure World War Four will happen within the next fifty years, with the factions being the victorious anti-communist American Empire vs furious European colonies bloated with refugees* after most of Europe ended up a nuclear battleground between the Americans and Soviets, upset over America sacrificing them to defeat the Soviets.

* Former colonies acquire population majorities from escapees from the radioactive ruins of Europe. Maybe some kind of alt-EU alliance among former British colonies from cape town to Australia based around 'fuck the Americans, they demanded we decolonize our empire after our bankruptcy at the end of WW2, then poisoned our homeland with nuclear fallout, leaving us to forcibly re-colonize simply to acquire a place to live'.

 

[Circle of Willis]

This essentially ensure World War Four will happen within the next fifty years, with the factions being the victorious anti-communist American Empire vs furious European colonies bloated with refugees* after most of Europe ended up a nuclear battleground between the Americans and Soviets, upset over America sacrificing them to defeat the Soviets.

* Former colonies acquire population majorities from escapees from the radioactive ruins of Europe. Maybe some kind of alt-EU alliance among former British colonies from cape town to Australia based around 'fuck the American, they demanded we decolonize our empire after our bankruptcy at the end of WW2, then poisoned our homeland with nuclear fallout, leaving us to forcibly re-colonize simply to acquire a place to live'.

I'm not sure about continental Europe becoming a nuclear wasteland; IIRC the Soviets have far fewer (like, 5 or so times fewer) nukes than the Americans at this point, and the H-bomb either isn't out yet (for a 1953 war) or has only just been invented and tested by the US (1954). For delivery the Soviets only have Tu-4s reverse-engineered from the Superfortress (and nobody's got ICBMs yet), so I don't think they'd be able to hit CONUS - Paris and London might have to eat nukes if the Soviets can get said Tu-4s past the inevitable interceptors & air defense systems, but that's about as far as they can realistically go IMO.

Would agree that in general Europe would still have to bear the brunt of the fighting and ensuing damage (particularly the Rhine-to-Moscow corridor), and would consequently almost certainly become antagonistic toward the USA though. That said, it might take a long while for Europe to get into a position where they can seriously challenge American hegemony considering the damage of WW2 has just been compounded by that of WW3 and they'll probably need a whole new Marshall Plan on top of the original one, giving the Americans even more leverage over them in the short to medium term.

 

[Bassoe]

Or they all team up to create Zyobot's Right-Wing EU Analogue. A gigantic empire blaming the US for everything from intervening in WW2 and preventing the axis powers from destroying communist russia before it could get nukes to american citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg leaking nuclear technologies to the communist russians to betraying their WW2 allies by demanding decolonization.

You just recreated the treaty of versailles stab in the back mythos, but as an essentially accurate assessment of the situation and on a continent-wide scale.

 

[Circle of Willis]

Heh, maybe! I'll admit I didn't put much thought into the consequences beyond 1956, as all the POD requires is that McCarthy be made POTUS, and I'm pretty happy to let someone else take the scenario from here. Ah well, what's good for him (and/or America, in the short term at least) isn't necessarily the same as what's good for Europe after all.

 

[Bassoe]

Essentially, this is going to turn into the world of Stephen Baxter's War Birds, but with a different starting point. There, the POD was the space program being treated as a military rather than exploratory matter from the start, meaning that decades later, sufficiently batshit american leadership decided that with Mutual Destruction no longer Assured thanks to Ronald Reagan's SDI probably being able to shoot down most of the enemy ICBMs and backup populations of americans out of missile range, they could outright beat the commies, even if they'd have to sacrifice a few cities and most of western europe in the process.

 

[Zyobot]

‘More Maritime China’.

That is, China develops into a more seafaring, navy-oriented power early on. Perhaps it eventually comes to control the Asia-Pacific (though simultaneously controlling all the land it does IOTL isn’t necessary for this PoD).

 

[ATP]

‘More Maritime China’.

That is, China develops into a more seafaring, navy-oriented power early on. Perhaps it eventually comes to control the Asia-Pacific (though simultaneously controlling all the land it does IOTL isn’t necessary for this PoD).

Zheng fleets never get burned,and they really discovered America and Australia.Only problem - chineese was so racist,that they truly belived that nothing good could be made outside of China.So,why bother ?

 

[Zyobot]

Zheng fleets never get burned,and they really discovered America and Australia.Only problem - chineese was so racist,that they truly belived that nothing good could be made outside of China.So,why bother ?

Okay, then. Heard of Zheng He before, though not an awful lot about the guy, other than him being a Chinese admiral whose fleet is the topic of hypothetical American exploration in AH circles.

‘Native Americans Become Immune To Old World Diseases’. Which is to say, ASB magically grants indigenous populations in the Americas a near-total immunity to diseases brought along by European explores (making the New World way harder to conquer). Rather than, you know, being hit by an overwhelming death-fest that makes the Black Death look almost half-assed.

 

[ATP]

Okay, then. Heard of Zheng He before, though not an awful lot about the guy, other than him being a Chinese admiral whose fleet is the topic of hypothetical American exploration in AH circles.

‘Native Americans Become Immune To Old World Diseases’. Which is to say, ASB magically grants indigenous populations in the Americas a near-total immunity to diseases brought along by European explores (making the New World way harder to conquer). Rather than, you know, being hit by an overwhelming death-fest that makes the Black Death look almost half-assed.

He certainly sailed to Africa,India and Madagascar.And his ships was capable of reaching America and come back.But - it is not proof,that they did so.
USA could build rocket and go to Mars,but they do not so.
Gavin Menzies in his "1421 the year China discovered the world" claim so/Australia,too/ , but in next book he claimed that they reached Europe and started Renaissance there/all Da Vinci works - copied from China/

So,i do not knew if it could be taken seriously.But - they have capacity ,so if they do not abadonn sea,they could do so.

 

[Bassoe]

He certainly sailed to Africa,India and Madagascar.And his ships was capable of reaching America and come back.But - it is not proof,that they did so.
USA could build rocket and go to Mars,but they do not so.

That's actually the best possible comparison, but not for the reasons you're arguing. The modern Chinese propagandists weren't We Wuzzing, Zheng He's Treasure Fleet legitimately was an incredible accomplishment and if Ming Dynasty China hadn't destroyed it after its return, they'd have been a serious contender for superpower status.

However, the leadership of the Ming Dynasty* status quo didn't benefit from exploration. They had a total monopoly on China, but not on foreigners, contact would've created competition and/or allowed plebeians to escape their rule. Didn't work out in the long run since said foreigners didn't cripple their own advancement while China did, so China got curbstomped and forcibly opened to exploitative trade deals anyway, but at the time, none of the Ming Dynasty higher-ups could've predicted that.

Compare the Apollo Program. Space colonization posed the same threats to the American status quo, so it got the same response.

Imagine for a moment that someone had built a self-sustaining space colony. It'd be immune to all the status quo's most common tricks. The obscene expense of launch costs vs local materials would mean whenever possible, it'd have to manufacture locally rather than importing, so boycotts and sanctions wouldn't work, likewise, importing scab labor would be more expensive than training the original colonists and their descendants as laborers and accepting whatever wages they demanded as what the market would bear since there was no cheaper alternative. Regime Change in favor of a more earthling-friendly vinchy regime? Possessing the technology and infrastructure for moving large masses around in space would be an essential prerequisite for building a space colony in the first place and the earthlings live at the bottom of a gravity well, or in other words, the space colony would have a MAD deterrent.

We were the children of the men and women who won what Duke Wayne used to call "the big one," and when the dust cleared, America was on top. We had replaced England as the colossus that stood astride the world. When the folks got together again to make me and millions of kids like me, London had been bombed almost flat, the sun was setting every twelve hours or so on the British Empire, and Russia had been bled nearly white in its war against the Nazis; during the siege of Stalingrad, Russian soldiers had been reduced to dining on their dead comrades. But not a single bomb had fallen on New York, and America had the lightest casualty rate of any major power involved in the war.

Further, we had a great history to draw upon (all short histories are great histories), particularly in matters of invention and innovation. Every grade-school teacher produced the same two words for the delectation of his/her students; two magic words glittering and glowing like a beautiful neon sign; two words of almost incredible power and grace; and these two words were: PIONEER SPIRIT. I and my fellow kids grew up secure in this knowledge of America's PIONEER SPIRIT—a knowledge that could be summed up in a litany of names learned by rote in the classroom. Eli Whitney. Samuel Morse. Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford. Robert Goddard. Wilbur and Orville Wright. Robert Oppenheimer. These men, ladies and gentlemen, all had one great thing in common. They were all Americans simply bursting with PIONEER SPIRIT. We were and always had been, in that pungent American phrase, fastest and bestest with the mostest.

And what a world stretched ahead! It was all outlined in the stories of Robert A. Heinlein, Lester del Rey, Alfred Bester, Stanley Weinbaum, and dozens of others! These dreams came in the last of the science fiction pulp magazines, which were shrinking and dying by that October in 1957 . . . but science fiction itself had never been in better shape. Space would be more than conquered, these writers told us; it would . . . it would be . . . why, it would be PIONEERED! Silver needles piercing the void, followed by flaming rockets lowering huge ships onto alien worlds, followed by hardy colonies full of men and women (American men and women, need one add) with PIONEER SPIRIT bursting from every pore. Mars would become our backyard, the new gold rush (or possibly the new rhodium rush) might well be in the asteroid belt . . . and ultimately, of course, the stars themselves would be ours—a glorious future awaited with tourists snapping Kodak prints of the six moons of Procyon IV and a Chevrolet JetCar assembly line on Sirius III. Earth itself would be transformed into a utopia that you could see on the cover of any '50s issue of Fantasy arid Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Galaxy, or Astounding Stories.

A future filled with the PIONEER SPIRIT; even better, a future filled with the AMERICAN PIONEER SPIRIT. See, for example, the cover of the original Bantam paperback edition of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. In this artistic vision—a figment of the artist's imagination and not of Bradbury's; there is nothing so ethnocentric or downright silly in this classic melding of science fiction and fantasy—the landing space travelers look a great deal like gyrenes storming up the beach at Saipan or Tarawa. It's a rocket instead of an LST in the background, true, but their jut-jawed, automatic-brandishing commander might have stepped right out of a John Wayne movie: "Come on, you suckers, do you want to live forever? Where's your PIONEER SPIRIT?"

This was the cradle of elementary political theory and technological dreamwork in which I and a great many other war babies were rocked until that day in October, when the cradle was rudely upended and all of us fell out. For me, it was the end of the sweet dream . . . and the beginning of the nightmare.

The pomaded, uniformed, and gleeful mail man jet packing into the yard of a happy homemaker with a fist full of paper correspondence looks, depending on where and when you’re sitting, absurd. The image suggests a techno-determinist view of the future that sidesteps the idea of social change or turbulence with the reckless abandon and agility of a seasoned copywriter. And that’s the appeal of retrofuturism: the juxtaposition of cultural and demographic stasis with temporal and technological shift. The pages torn from Popular Mechanics in the fifties make their modern fans smile because they depict an intellectually ambitious task of predicting what will come next, being pursued in the most intellectually lazy way possible.

Retrofuturist imagery was at its most searched during the George W. Bush presidency, but there has been a rebound in Google queries of late after a major dip in the early 2010s. This imagery is now consumed with real pleasure and real irony. After all, the popularly accepted narrative is that America changed for good in the late sixties. These illustrations were outdated almost immediately.

But if hubris looks like a mail man in a jet pack, foresight could look like a hurriedly drawn suburban idyll.

Several weeks ago, the Public Religion Research Institute released the results of the 2016 American Values Survey, a standardized culture test filled out by 2,010 Americans representing national demographics. The subjects of the survey were divided on a number of issues, but none so severely as the vector of history. Some 51 percent of respondents believed life in America had changed for the worse since the 1950s; 48 percent believed the opposite. Those reactions broke down along racial and religious lines: Nearly three quarters of white evangelical Protestants claimed that life in America has gotten worse.

This response can only be understood when broken down into its constituent parts. The first claim being made is that America has changed. The second is that the change has been negative.

The acknowledgement that America has changed is important because many commentators and pundits have and will maintain that the social bloc that buoyed President-Elect Donald Trump to Victory is attempting to bend the timeline of progress back on itself. This is not the case. White evangelicals are not ignorant of technological or cultural shifts. They aren’t ignoring the process, just contesting the significance of the results.

Given that the purchasing power of blue-collar workers has largely gone up — pay hasn’t kept up with inflation, but the cost of consumer goods has fallen — the claim that life in America has gotten worse is clearly not a consumerist one. This means that life has gotten worse for white evangelicals in immaterial ways. It’s totally fair to point to skyrocketing education costs, unstable housing markets, and a widening income gap, but its also clear that the internal lives of a specific class of Americans have been diminished. America may or may not be in decline, but thinking has made it so even if history has not.

The present is two-dimensional — too narrow for much consideration. By temporal default humans spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about the future. Research shows that these thoughts can be siloed into two categories: expectations and fantasies. These manners of thinking work differently in that positive expectations, informed by reality, lead to hard work and successful performance. Positive fantasies, on the other hand, lead to lower effort and diminished performance. Polling numbers show that white evangelicals have had low expectations and Trump’s rhetoric — “Your dreams will come true” — is indicative of an openness to positive fantasies. Which brings us back to the imagined future, the one with the happy homemaker and the jetpack.

The picture is perhaps more plausible than it previously appeared. But what does it depict now? Perhaps retrofuturism isn’t about the humor of cultural stasis juxtaposed against technological progress. Perhaps it’s about cultural reversion on the other side of technological and social progress. These images — all these smiling, pomaded men and their indistinguishable wives — depict both the toys and the values that white, caucasian, and mostly male illustrators thought Americans would have. These values are uniformly capitalistic, consumerist, heteronormative, and bourgeois. The growth of the middle class at that period in history gave would-be futurists the sense that prosperity would create a puddle in the economic middle, a vernal pool out of which generations of nearly identical nuclear families could squirm.

The internet has spent half of its existence chuckling at these dull-nubbed Nostradami, but perhaps their failure to understand how external forces could affect culture was a product of an understanding that culture trumps technology. Maybe they understood that culture trumps everything.

The illustrators who gave us the futuristic images we repurposed as retrofuturism didn’t draw many Black people, Latinx people, Asian people, gay people, trans people, or prisoners. They had the confidence to believe that they would inherit America and that the others would exist on the other side of the pleasure dome walls. They had positive expectations with the same conviction their descendants now have negative fantasies.

In the wake of a tectonic political event, images of a whitewashed future can no longer be seen as illustrations of an abandoned fantasia. It was never abandoned. And it wasn’t retro after all.

The British Empire should've built a giant monument to the Ming Emperor responsible for the end of the Chinese Age Of Exploration for handing them the planet, just like in a couple centuries, the PRC should build one to Richard Nixon for essentially the same reason.

* Actually, this applied equally to all of the imperial Chinese dynasties right up until they finally got wiped out and replaced by a non-dynastic form of totalitarianism.