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Description
This one's been in the works for a while. I wanted to make a solarpunk world, but I also wanted to make a dronepunk world. I decided to kill two birds with one stone by doing both and setting them against each other. For those of you who don't know, solarpunk was coined on tumblr and is focused on renewable energy, local communities, Asian and African cultural elements, etc. I was inspired a bit by Mattystereo 's Earth 2150 for the solarpunk elements. Dronepunk is my own creation, and is pretty much the opposite. It's the sort of fiction based on fears of today, revolving around the surveillance state, extreme state and corporate globalization, everything is online, etc. I think of science fiction like the recent Call of Duty games, Elysium and Edge of Tomorrow as examples. In a nutshell, solarpunk is a nice and bright future, dronepunk is just the opposite.

The Trans-Oceanic Defense Association is, naturally, the dronepunk faction. The North American Union and the People's Republic of China are pretty equal with regard to power here, and while they are allies, they also have a lot of rivalries. The North American Union is outwardly a democratic union of states, but it's really just a corporatocracy where big business and big government work hand in hand. In fact, it's gotten to the point that corporate leaders, particularly banking executives, are listened to more than congressmen when it comes to policy. The other big element is the surveillance state: the three-letter agencies of the United States have more or less merged together under the Department of Homeland Security, and they run the sort of Orwellian thing through modern technology. Just about everyone has chips in their brains that help them interface with everything, and while they cannot read thoughts directly, everything the chip sends out is monitored. The Chinese have practically the same system, and many corporate leaders in the NAU are Chinese citizens and vice versa. The Communist Party is powerless. Other TODA states are similar. The Visegrads do have a tinge of traditionalism and Eastern European nationalism to them, but otherwise are just the same. The European Technocracy is actively trying to create a pan-European identity, and have largely succeeded. The North Africans are very secular, and most people are just Muslim in name only; in fact, being overly religious is frowned upon. The Azanians started out as Maoists, and went the same way as the Maoists in China. The wealth divide in the TODA states is massive, with masses of impoverished people dependent on the dole and, sometimes, crime, lorded over by wealthy elites that live in space stations.

What's fun with the TODA is their technology. Everything is connected through the Internet, which has been partitioned between the blocs. The TODA Internet is much better and faster than its solarpunk counterpart. People are encouraged to put their entire lives online, and with mind imprinting technology being developed in Japan, it may even be possible to literally upload a personality online. This is part of a scheme to find a way to immortality in paradise, naturally a technology that will only be available to the elites. Censorship is common, all anonymity online has been destroyed thanks to mandated universal accounts, and speaking out against the state is a great way to get a visit from the cops. AI has advanced to the point that AI are almost indistinguishable from humans online, but they still lack free will and must be ordered around by humans. There are secret projects to create advanced surveillance AI, but they are still too primitive to be trusted with the massive surveillance state. Drones are everywhere. Cars drive themselves, planes fly themselves, even pets have been replaced with drones. Anything, from pizza to groceries, can be ordered online and delivered anywhere via drone. Militaries have mostly been replaced by drones, and tanks have been replaced with armored, walking sentries. Police departments mostly rely on drones, both on the ground and in the sky, to patrol the streets. That being said, there are human operatives who mostly wear exoskeletons and are cybernetically modified to some extent. Cybernetic enhancements are available to civilians, but require special drugs, and only the well-off can truly benefit from them. There is space travel, but apart from a few bases on the Moon established by the NAU and China, most activity is in orbit. A few space elevators transport goods to space stations. The richest people in the Solar System live in massive orbital habitats, where the environment is pristine and untainted, and where they can rain mass drivers and nuclear missiles down on the poor masses. Solar collectors in space beam down energy to Earth.

The Solarian Community is, unsurprisingly, the solarpunk faction. Power is a bit more imbalanced here, with the Indians being the head honchos, but the Africans are catching up. The Solarian states are far more decentralized, but in practice that means they just bicker with each other more and suffer from more internal strife. The Solarians are deeply anti-globalist and pro-tradition, albeit through a warped lens. The Solarians believe that their cultures should be preserved, but at the same time that they should defend the cultures of other states. Of course, they conveniently forget all of the nastier bits of their history, which were all the fault of external influence, like the Chinese or the West. The Solarians reject democracy as being too detrimental to cultural cohesion, so they need the state to protect culture and direct the lives of the people according to culture. In practice, the Solarian states are dictatorships with major internal division. The message of cultural cohesion is good, but many Solarian states have significant minorities which want their own state; these minorities are considered illegitimate, and must be made to bend to the greater cultural zeitgeist for the good of the whole. Decentralized government has limited the state's reach in theory, but in practice, it has merely divided communities against one another as they fight for resources, allowing the central government to act as a power broker and thus maintain its supremacy. The Solarians also suffer from a major problem with new religious movements, which were encouraged in order to fight "globalist secularism." Some of these movements have become very extreme and detrimental to the social cohesion the Solarians claim to protect, as they create insular cults that often encourage drug use...and worse. Some cults have gone into human sacrifice territory, because crazies will always pop up and, for many places, human sacrifice is "traditional." Then there are the race riots; those are always fun.

Solarian tech focuses more on biological modifications and "green" technology. This means a lot of genetic engineering, some of which does not go as planned. A lot of diseases have come out of the Solarian camp, some of which are intentional, or so TODA claims. The Solarians reject nuclear technology of all sorts, preferring solar power. This has severely limited Solarian economic expansion, as electrical power is becoming a scarce commodity. The arms race with TODA is creating a lot of power shortages, despite increasing efficiency of solar power. Due to corruption and poor infrastructure management, many people even in India do not have access to electrical power. Another, mostly successful, Solarian technological branch is the idea of the city-farm. Many buildings have gardens which grow food for their inhabitants, and this is turning out to be a good model. However, the population of these cities remains high enough that factory farms and genetically modified crops are still necessary. The environmental cleanups the Solarians are engaging in are not going well; the scars of Indian industrialization are still there, and the TODA states aren't helping as they continue to pollute the air and the oceans. Evidently, with a virtual future in orbit ahead for them, the TODA elites don't really care about the rising sea levels or anything else on Earth.

Description
This one's been in the works for a while. I wanted to make a solarpunk world, but I also wanted to make a dronepunk world. I decided to kill two birds with one stone by doing both and setting them against each other. For those of you who don't know, solarpunk was coined on tumblr and is focused on renewable energy, local communities, Asian and African cultural elements, etc. I was inspired a bit by Mattystereo 's Earth 2150 for the solarpunk elements. Dronepunk is my own creation, and is pretty much the opposite. It's the sort of fiction based on fears of today, revolving around the surveillance state, extreme state and corporate globalization, everything is online, etc. I think of science fiction like the recent Call of Duty games, Elysium and Edge of Tomorrow as examples. In a nutshell, solarpunk is a nice and bright future, dronepunk is just the opposite.

The Trans-Oceanic Defense Association is, naturally, the dronepunk faction. The North American Union and the People's Republic of China are pretty equal with regard to power here, and while they are allies, they also have a lot of rivalries. The North American Union is outwardly a democratic union of states, but it's really just a corporatocracy where big business and big government work hand in hand. In fact, it's gotten to the point that corporate leaders, particularly banking executives, are listened to more than congressmen when it comes to policy. The other big element is the surveillance state: the three-letter agencies of the United States have more or less merged together under the Department of Homeland Security, and they run the sort of Orwellian thing through modern technology. Just about everyone has chips in their brains that help them interface with everything, and while they cannot read thoughts directly, everything the chip sends out is monitored. The Chinese have practically the same system, and many corporate leaders in the NAU are Chinese citizens and vice versa. The Communist Party is powerless. Other TODA states are similar. The Visegrads do have a tinge of traditionalism and Eastern European nationalism to them, but otherwise are just the same. The European Technocracy is actively trying to create a pan-European identity, and have largely succeeded. The North Africans are very secular, and most people are just Muslim in name only; in fact, being overly religious is frowned upon. The Azanians started out as Maoists, and went the same way as the Maoists in China. The wealth divide in the TODA states is massive, with masses of impoverished people dependent on the dole and, sometimes, crime, lorded over by wealthy elites that live in space stations.

What's fun with the TODA is their technology. Everything is connected through the Internet, which has been partitioned between the blocs. The TODA Internet is much better and faster than its solarpunk counterpart. People are encouraged to put their entire lives online, and with mind imprinting technology being developed in Japan, it may even be possible to literally upload a personality online. This is part of a scheme to find a way to immortality in paradise, naturally a technology that will only be available to the elites. Censorship is common, all anonymity online has been destroyed thanks to mandated universal accounts, and speaking out against the state is a great way to get a visit from the cops. AI has advanced to the point that AI are almost indistinguishable from humans online, but they still lack free will and must be ordered around by humans. There are secret projects to create advanced surveillance AI, but they are still too primitive to be trusted with the massive surveillance state. Drones are everywhere. Cars drive themselves, planes fly themselves, even pets have been replaced with drones. Anything, from pizza to groceries, can be ordered online and delivered anywhere via drone. Militaries have mostly been replaced by drones, and tanks have been replaced with armored, walking sentries. Police departments mostly rely on drones, both on the ground and in the sky, to patrol the streets. That being said, there are human operatives who mostly wear exoskeletons and are cybernetically modified to some extent. Cybernetic enhancements are available to civilians, but require special drugs, and only the well-off can truly benefit from them. There is space travel, but apart from a few bases on the Moon established by the NAU and China, most activity is in orbit. A few space elevators transport goods to space stations. The richest people in the Solar System live in massive orbital habitats, where the environment is pristine and untainted, and where they can rain mass drivers and nuclear missiles down on the poor masses. Solar collectors in space beam down energy to Earth.

The Solarian Community is, unsurprisingly, the solarpunk faction. Power is a bit more imbalanced here, with the Indians being the head honchos, but the Africans are catching up. The Solarian states are far more decentralized, but in practice that means they just bicker with each other more and suffer from more internal strife. The Solarians are deeply anti-globalist and pro-tradition, albeit through a warped lens. The Solarians believe that their cultures should be preserved, but at the same time that they should defend the cultures of other states. Of course, they conveniently forget all of the nastier bits of their history, which were all the fault of external influence, like the Chinese or the West. The Solarians reject democracy as being too detrimental to cultural cohesion, so they need the state to protect culture and direct the lives of the people according to culture. In practice, the Solarian states are dictatorships with major internal division. The message of cultural cohesion is good, but many Solarian states have significant minorities which want their own state; these minorities are considered illegitimate, and must be made to bend to the greater cultural zeitgeist for the good of the whole. Decentralized government has limited the state's reach in theory, but in practice, it has merely divided communities against one another as they fight for resources, allowing the central government to act as a power broker and thus maintain its supremacy. The Solarians also suffer from a major problem with new religious movements, which were encouraged in order to fight "globalist secularism." Some of these movements have become very extreme and detrimental to the social cohesion the Solarians claim to protect, as they create insular cults that often encourage drug use...and worse. Some cults have gone into human sacrifice territory, because crazies will always pop up and, for many places, human sacrifice is "traditional." Then there are the race riots; those are always fun.

Solarian tech focuses more on biological modifications and "green" technology. This means a lot of genetic engineering, some of which does not go as planned. A lot of diseases have come out of the Solarian camp, some of which are intentional, or so TODA claims. The Solarians reject nuclear technology of all sorts, preferring solar power. This has severely limited Solarian economic expansion, as electrical power is becoming a scarce commodity. The arms race with TODA is creating a lot of power shortages, despite increasing efficiency of solar power. Due to corruption and poor infrastructure management, many people even in India do not have access to electrical power. Another, mostly successful, Solarian technological branch is the idea of the city-farm. Many buildings have gardens which grow food for their inhabitants, and this is turning out to be a good model. However, the population of these cities remains high enough that factory farms and genetically modified crops are still necessary. The environmental cleanups the Solarians are engaging in are not going well; the scars of Indian industrialization are still there, and the TODA states aren't helping as they continue to pollute the air and the oceans. Evidently, with a virtual future in orbit ahead for them, the TODA elites don't really care about the rising sea levels or anything else on Earth.