“Culture is when people share the same beliefs, ideas or interests. Community is when people in the same culture find a place to hang their hats together. Civilization is when you have enough communities to make the whole thing a habit.”
—Ramos Santayamos
Ideation and Alternative Culture
2029
—Ramos Santayamos
Ideation and Alternative Culture
2029
In the world of the Universal Century EX, culture has mutated into a new form— a form without distinct boundaries and lacking the historical forces of kings, laws or edicts to give it shape. This is the world of the Altcult; the ubiquitous banding together of people with common goals, beliefs and dreams, which transcends the need to share a location or even a defined territory larger than a city block.
Elements of AltCults
EVERY ALTCULT HAS THREE ELEMENTS
1) The first is the Altculture's Foundation. This is how it got started—its founders and leading lights. In UCEX, the world is much like being alive in 1776—the Founding Fathers of the newborn American Revolution are still alive and many of the basic principles of America are being formulated right around you .
2) The second is the Altculture's Technology. Each culture has its own technical specialization, which is the foundation of its economy. For example, in 1776, America was known for making fast sailing ships. In UCEX, Desnai produces mentally controlled mecha, Rip produces bioengineered lifeforms, Evoluder (Corpore Metal) produces immortal artificial bodies and Zoanoids (Reef) creates DNA changing transform viruses.
3) The third and last element is the culture's Meme. This is the philosophy that guides it and shapes it. You might say that in 1776 DeToqueville's essays on the typical American—a rugged idealist, rough-hewn and separate of his European roots, were that culture's meme. UCEX has its own memes; for example; Evoluder (Corpore Metal) believes that technology should make man immortal, while OLYMPUS-POSEIDON believes hat machines are designed to serve Man.
Altcults are the bastard child of the age of the Net; the vast consensual communication web that made Culture non-geographic. Linked by instant communications and shared resources, you no longer needed to be in the same place in order to have a community based around a culture. With the end of the Fourth World War, the Altcults were inevitable; serving to tie the raveled a bloody threads of the blasted planet Earth back together again in a new and strange world.
First Roots
The alt (from the term alternative) Internet boards on Usenet (a nearly text-based internet communications system) were the first Altcults. They centered around topics, such as hobbies, entertainment, politics or sex. These alts created their own values and rules of behavior (memes). When two groups disagreed on a topic, they had cultural wars (kulturekampfs), usually fought through trolling the offending newsgroup or flaming them with hostile posts.
The Corporate and Cyberpunk cultures of the 2020 period were the two dominant Altcults of their times. The Corporates prized conformity, money and obedience. The Cyberpunks valued individuality, self-sufficiency and rebellion.
World Wars III through V and its aftermath nearly wiped out the Megacorporations and with them, their stranglehold on culture. Freed from Corporate repression, the survivors were able to expand and diversify, evolving into many different cultures that valued the same basics as their forbears, but with different common roots. Spreading out into the ruins of a world decimated by internal war, various bands came together around shared ideas, technologies, and the need for mutual support.
The Seminal Six
While there are many Altcults scattered around the UCEX universe (with more being founded every day), five stand out in particular as the most visible and well-established: Solos, Zoanoids (Reef), Rolling State, Rip, Olympus-Poseidon (Desnai) and Evoluder (Corpore Metal).
Megastructural nanotech allowed the altcults to create the colony environments they are most comfortable in, while new advances in genetics, cyberware and weapons technology only raised the ante on the self-reliance aspect.
Solos
Of all the new Altcults, the Solos (Edgerunners) have stayed closest to their original Cyberpunk rebel roots, centering on self-reliance, renegade technology and the big guns needed to keep any who would seek to rule or harm them at bay. Megastructural nanotech allowed the Solos to restore the dense blasted urban environments they once built survivalist fortresses in, while new advances in cyberware and weapons technology made possible a new level of self-reliance. These hardcore survivors of devastated war-zones have difficulty adapting to peaceful living and often come to prefer living in the developing regions of the war-torn earth. Very few venture out into space.
Zoanoids (Reef)
As survivors of the massive flooding decimating the coastal United States, the founders of Reef soon realized that the only way to avoid drowning was to become one with the water. Advances in gene splicing led to viral DNA transformation systems, allowing the new-formed Reefers to survive in the ocean depths, or to adapt themselves to other forms as needed. And the harsh fallout of fighting wars, pirates and deadly elemental forces helped foster a strong, warrior meme that joined even the most individualistic submariners and colonists together. When the founders moved out into space during and after the One Year War, the movement changed it's meme slightly to accommodate an outlook that adaptability to environments and space is paramount to moving forward into the new human era. Termed "Aquagenesis" originally by the founder Neptune, it has since morphed into a philosophy of mutable and adaptable survival in not just aquatic but all environments.
OLYMPUS-POSEIDON (Desnai)
In some ways, OLYMPUS-POSEIDON was a natural extension of the MegaCorp cultures in the same way that the 'Edgerunners' in the previous century carried on the Cyberpunk meme. As a worldwide corporate-government already accustomed to conformity, obedience to a managerial class and working with technology, it was a short step for this Altcult to form into self-contained reconstruction-towns where everyone was part of the same workforce. Developing OLYMPUS-POSEIDONs already advanced social planning and robotics technology simply enhanced this Altcult's knack for shaping environment to its whim.
Rolling State
Concerned with traveling on the open roads of a war-torn Earth, and the inter-colony space-ways of the Earth Sphere. Rolling State's gypsies built their Altcult around two basic elements; maintaining their tribal structure at all costs, and keeping their society mobile. Access to the megastructural building techniques allowed them to expand their nomadic vehicles to immense sizes, while mastering advanced nanotech allowed them to stay alive under even the most hostile conditions of toxic wastelands and the vacuum of space. As an amalgamation of caravans, Road Cities and the like, Rolling State is unique; the first entirely mobile nation-state.
Riptide
As a loose group of floating cities on Earth and independent colonies in the Earth Sphere, survival was the main core around which the Riptide Confederation formed. Pirates, hostile national and corporate navies and the perils of the open ocean and open space threatened to wipe out these individual cities and colonies during the One Year War, so by banding together as an aquatic/orbital "nation," the Rip Altcult was able to exploit the powerful biotech capacities that were being developed in its labs and that captured by the AI crypto-corporation MAPPO. The fact that many of the floating cities were originally part of the Kanto Drift Cities of southern Japan also gave Rip similar cultural memes as well as a common language, Japanese.
Evoluder (Corpore Metal)
The full body cyborgs of Corpore Metal set out to find a space where they would not be exploited by the government and militaries and last of the megacorps, shunned by a fearful populace, or forced to undergo painful and humiliating suppression by governments using the excuse of controlling public safety. Banding together in the remote open desert accomplished the first goal, then moving to occupy by popular majority their own colony sealed their place in history. The discovery of LiveMetal also allowed the new Altcult to fully integrate cyborging in all aspects of its society and helped to build their meme of cyborgization as the next step to man's movement into space.
Six cultures, Six ways of life, Six nations sometimes living in the same territory, often separated by a mere street. Often at odds, sometimes working together, the Altcults are the new alternative to the future envisioned by Poseidon-Olympus. They are the future’s new civilization. And its next hope.
