The British Bobby still patrols the streets and the court system is still operational, although most of its time is taken up defending innocent targets of misdirected clique 'justice'. Britain itself has given into the inevitable and is devolving as fast as it possibly can - the local economy is proving a lot tougher than the national one after all. The Soviets had their own far more rigidly policed version of the Internet, which in 1999 joined up with the rest of the world, almost immediately resulting in the formation of Russian hacker cliques and popes. Oddly enough this seems to be working quite well. The Soviet Union is still gamely limping on, although the 'proletarian economy zones' (read: we give up) now cover the entire country and only Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad remain bastions of the planned economy. Nowadays the only ones still giving a damn are the British, whose Royal Family now virtually bankroll the Armed Forces (the Crown Estate proved one of the most resilient possessions in the world). UN peacekeeping forces did their best to stabilise the regions until the UN itself fell apart. Many African and South-East Asian nations collapsed altogether. The decision by the first world to cut back on foreign aid turned out to be a huge mistake. In America, the federal government is basically defunct and exists largely on its own say-so (the G-Man gets laughed at a lot these days if he tries to claim jurisdiction). Today the cliques control a considerable chunk of the world economy, intellectual property has been undermined to the point where the conventional creative industries have been liquidated, and the concept of the nation state is being increasingly undermined as tax revenues plummet. By the time they're taken seriously as a threat they're laying their own cable and have their own alternatives to most of the government-controlled infrastructure. The PoD is that the old telecoms giants are not broken up, allowing a pseudonymous counterculture to get its genesis in the phreaking movement, which ITTL is allowed to incubate in the bellies of slow-reacting, dinosaur monopolies. The establishment fails to get to grips with the reality of a growing hacker counterculture until it's too late. The map should be broadly self-explanatory, but for further information, my notes: the Near East (which got onto a successful peace plan ITTL and is now humming along smoothly), West Sahara (a perfectly viable, established nation-state, albeit Morocco still isn't totally convinced), the Mali-Mauritania war (old history, man) and North Korea (Kim Il Sung died on schedule, then things got messy - Seoul seized the initiative and finished the Korean War in a couple of months). Quite pleased with the B_Munro-style annotations - worth noting that what I haven't annotated is as telling as what i have annotated - e.g. Still - pretty or at least it would be if I wasn't using the bloody worlda map again I also tried to subvert a few brainbugs while I was at it, though no doubt people'll let me know I've stumbled into a whole set of new one. The format of the map was intended to recall an ATL web browser, though I'm not entirely sure it's successful. Some further research revealed that the level of influence I envisaged the hackers themselves having in Captain Crunch's World was probably unrealistic, so instead I produced the above a map showing the world situation and showing the locations of influential cliques and the hacker 'popes' (the powerful pseudonymous or semi-pseudonymous figures who own and operate the major online services ITTL, the corporate web having proved a crapshoot). I had previous done a very rough sketch of my idea - a broadly OTL map showing the world divided into the spheres of influence of different hacker gangs or 'cliques'. This was based on an alternate history idea I've had floating around for some time, but its rather nebulous premise made it difficult to adapt into a map. John Draper, Secrets of the Little Blue Box, Esquire Magazine (October 1971) The phone company is nothing but a computer." A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. And if I do it, I do it for one reason and one reason only.
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