#Communications Infrastructure

[ahb-writes]

Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions (Communication)

Communication Worldbuilding Questions:

What is the most widely spoken language in your world (and why)?

What are common reasons for miscommunication (e.g., faulty, decaying or glitchy communications infrastructure)?

Who has access to which forms of communication? Is everyone literate (and if not, why)?

Who controls communications, to what degree are they free, private versus surveilled?

Where did languages (or mysterious communication signals) originate? What is mysterious or surprising about language in this world?

Where is communication harder or riskier, and why?

When does each type of communication reach its addressee (does it take an instant or days, weeks, years)?

When people converse or meet, what are typical conversational gestures (such as shaking hands)?

Why is communication vital in this world?

Why have new words or terms entered this world’s lexicon (what economic, ecological, technological or other factors contributed)?

❯ ❯ ❯ Read other writing masterposts in this series: Worldbuilding Questions for Deeper Settings

[thererisesaredstar]

Bus stop murals of Pyongyang

[aroaceleovaldez]

i think the thing i'm most disappointed about with riordanverse fandom now versus like 2014 is not only has the fandom not gotten any less racist or queerphobic or ableist (in fact in some regards its gotten worse!) but now it's just boring too. like there's no fandom infrastructure anymore - the community these days is almost entirely source material-driven - and you deviate from canon even slightly people get weird about it. whatever happened to the post-HoO fanon boom. the fandom needs to get weirder again. and self-sufficient. and less offensive.

[dharmafox]

As anticipated, the state of the fandom after the movie's release:

[alwaysbewoke]

[anarchopuppy]

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is such a great organization, please send them your support so they can help people in New England affected by the floods

[heart-ghost-studyblr]

Normal night in the midnight.

[nando161mando]

You know we’re in a healthy, functioning society when people have to use a burger app to see if they have electricity because the local infrastructure doesn’t exist

[arc-hus]

Public Toilet Design, Chuancang Village, China - Fuyingbin Studio

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[ahb-writes]

Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions (News and Media)

News and Media Worldbuilding Questions:

What spreads information – newspapers, websites, pamphlets, word-of-mouth, a technologically advanced communications system?

What is considered newsworthy in this world?

Who owns each news platform (are they public or private, impartial or propagandistic/biased)?

Who are the public figures most often scrutinized in news networks (and why)?

Where do the most significant or newsworthy events happen in this world (and to where does their news reach)?

Where does the typical person go to find out what’s happening in their immediate community, or the wider world? Can they find this out?

When have investigative reports or rumor mills changed history, public sentiments or policies?

When do major news announcements or public addresses typically take place?

Why is the media either free, silenced or captured/biased?

Why might people in this world trust or distrust news media?

❯ ❯ ❯ Read other writing masterposts in this series: Worldbuilding Questions for Deeper Settings

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

friendly reminder that landlords nor real estate companies aren't your friends and that shelter is a basic human right, for the longest time real estate as a form of commerce is riddled to the brim with corruption and speculation that ultimately renders nothing but suffering and despair as they will gladly throw human lives under the bus just for a slight increase in profits. Millions of people are homeless and poverty striken with no way up as the system extracts every penny from the people on the bottom. Nothing short of comprehensive regulations or the dissolution of real estate as a commodity will save us, cause in the end never forget there are more of us than them and if need be their trillion dollar mansions would house dozens easily.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Nichols at The Nation:

Donald Trump has made no secret of his determination to govern as a “dictator” if he regains the presidency, and that’s got his critics warning that his reelection would spell the end of democracy. But Trump and his allies are too smart to go full Kim Jong Un. Rather, the former president’s enthusiasm for the authoritarian regimes of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Tayyip Erdoğan, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán suggests the models he would build on: managing elections to benefit himself and his Republican allies; gutting public broadcasting and constraining press freedom; and undermining civil society. Trump, who famously demanded that the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential voting be “recalculated” to give him a win, wants the trappings of democracy without the reality of electoral consequences. That’s what propaganda experts Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead once described as “demonstration elections,” in which, instead of actual contests, wins are assured for the authoritarians who control the machinery of democracy. The outline for such a scenario emerges from a thorough reading of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, which specifically proposes a Trump-friendly recalculation of the systems that sustain American democracy. The strategy for establishing an American version of Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” is not spelled out in any particular chapter of Mandate. Rather, it is woven throughout the whole of the document, with key elements appearing in the chapters on reworking the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Federal Election Commission (FEC). In the section on the DHS, for instance, there’s a plan to eliminate the ability of the agency that monitors election security to prevent the spread of disinformation about voting and vote counting.

How serious a threat to democracy would that pose? Think back to November 2020, when Trump was developing his Big Lie about the election he’d just lost. Trump’s false assertion that the election had been characterized by “massive improprieties and fraud” was tripped up by Chris Krebs, who served as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the DHS. The Republican appointee and his team had established a 24/7 “war room” to work with officials across the country to monitor threats to the security and integrity of the election. The operation was so meticulous that Krebs could boldly announce after the voting was finished: “America, we have confidence in the security of your vote, you should, too.” At the same time, his coordinating team declared, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” This infuriated Trump, who immediately fired the nation’s top election security official.

In Mandate’s chapter on the DHS, Ken Cuccinelli writes, “Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinformation efforts. The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth.” Cuccinelli previously complained that CISA “is a DHS component that the Left has weaponized to censor speech and affect elections.” As for the team that worked so successfully with Krebs to secure the 2020 election, the Project 2025 document declares that “the entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One.” The potential impact? “It’s a way of emasculating the agency—that is, it prevents it from doing its job,” says Herb Lin, a cyber-policy and security scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

This is just one way that Project 2025’s cabal of “experts” is scheming to thwart honest discourse about elections and democracy. A chapter on public broadcasting proposes to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of a larger plan to upend NPR, PBS, and “other public broadcasters that benefit from CPB funding, including the even-further-to-the Left Pacifica Radio and American Public Media.” More destabilizing than the total funding cut that Project 2025 entertains is a parallel plan to end the status of NPR and Pacifica radio stations as “noncommercial education stations.” That could deny them their current channel numbers at the low end of the radio spectrum (88 to 92 FM)—a move that would open prime territory on the dial for the sort of religious programming that already claims roughly 42 percent of the airwaves that the FCC reserves for noncommercial broadcasting. And don’t imagine that the FCC would be in a position to write new rules that guard against the surrender of those airwaves to the Trump-aligned religious right.

[...]

While project 2025 seeks to rewire the FCC to favor Trump’s allies, it also wants to lock in dysfunction at the Federal Election Commission, the agency that is supposed to govern campaign spending and fundraising. Established 50 years ago, the FEC has six members—three Republicans and three Democrats—who are charged with overseeing the integrity of federal election campaigns. In recent years, however, this even partisan divide has robbed the FEC of its ability to act because, as a group of former FEC employees working with the Campaign Legal Center explained, “three Commissioners of the same party, acting in concert, can leave the agency in a state of deadlock.” As the spending by outside groups on elections “has exponentially increased, foreign nationals and governments have willfully manipulated our elections, and coordination between super PACs and candidates has become commonplace,” the former employees noted. Yet “the FEC [has] deadlocked on enforcement matters more often than not, frequently refusing to even investigate alleged violations despite overwhelming publicly available information supporting them.”

John Nichols wrote in The Nation about how Project 2025’s radical right-wing wishlist of items contains plans to wreck and subvert what is left of America’s democracy.

See Also:

The Nation: June 2024 Issue

[thererisesaredstar]

Power by Grigory Likman (1964)

[aroaceleovaldez]

thoughts on the current state of pjo fanart and/or how the fandom interacts with art? sorry if this question is so vague HAHAHHAHAHA i mean we've talked a lot about this in the TA server, specifically how a huge chunk of fandom being a community is lost due to fanartists basically just doing their own thing and the audience largely crowding around fanartists that are more or less established already... i also feel that, same as with fic writers, reception (i dont want to use the word 'engagement,' nor am i sure on if it's the right word to use lol) has drastically decreased compared to before, even though the fandom is reasonably large

Oh i have so many thoughts about this. I actually went on a tag rant on my main blog the other day adjacent to this exact topic.

Basically my current theory is the current widespread-fandom "environment" that exists is a result of a combination of two things: 1.) Widespread social media purges of nsfw material leading to large swaths of fandoms moving to different platforms and a loss of old fandom history and means of communicating that culture to the simultaneous large new wave of younger folks coming into fandom for the first time, and 2.) fandom becoming more mainstream and the way "fandom" as a concept was marketed and presented versus fandom practically.

Cause the way fandom was marketed in the mainstream sense was "This is a subculture surrounding a media. It's all about the media. Fanworks exist but they're just a natural part of fandom - they just kind of spawn or spontaneously appear." There's no acknowledgement of the community that is the actual foundation of fandom (and how some fandoms don't even have a source material!), and implies that fanworks are something guaranteed that you can take for granted and only exist for consumption like the source material itself. It's commodification of fandom.

There's also the secondary aspect of that mainstream marketing of fandom which is the sanitization of fandom, particularly painting large swaths of the community as "those icky weird parts of fandom" and something to be ridiculed, rather than an actual foundational aspect - which is where we see a lot of the purity culture in fandom arise (between that attitude being fostered and the dwindling resources to be able to educate new fans across fandoms). And this once again leads me to my usual spiel of encouraging folks to watch The Fandom documentary by Ash Coyote on youtube - particularly from the 1:03:27 timestamp - because learning pan-fandom history is very important especially right now when we're in a fandom climate where we're seeing a lot of these exact topics and talking points coming up again in different spaces. I seriously cannot stress enough how much I need this documentary to be like base-level fandom education, it's so so useful and important to know general pan-fandom history and major experiences of other fandoms.

Aside from all that though, I totally agree that we've seen a lot more of fandoms - particularly Riordanverse fandom - rarely straying away from BNFs who already have an established presence. I again think that's part of how the lack of community in modern fandom spaces makes it difficult for new fanartists and writers and such to get a lot of traction or footholds, because nobody is actually going out and having discussions or sharing work. The BNFs a lot of the time have old fandom presence and that established audience is how their work continues to travel. But also in modern fandom enviornments they're often treated as secondary source material - which is really terrible for them! Because it's such a rude and entitled attitude to have towards fancreators! And it is absolutely worse for fanfic writers I think particularly because of how when the media presents fandom as a whole in the mainstream, fanfiction very often gets the short end of the stick and is mocked, so new fandom folks don't appreciate it as much or even understand how to properly engage with it.

Especially also given how, because new fans are lacking a lot of fandom cultural knowledge that used to be passed on, a lot of them don't know how to navigate fandom sites like Ao3 and the language and structures used (like tagging systems - most new fandom folks are more used to tagging structures like on instagram or tiktok which is to say, completely nonfunctional) and are struggling with that since the resources to learn about it are difficult to find if you aren't already familiar with fandom - which is exactly why i'm working on my riordanverse fandom infrastructure project.

[jrmilazzo]

For the internet to be the truly global service that it is, many of these wires—most of them no thicker than a garden hose—are sunk full fathom five across the bottom of the ocean, where they lay alarmingly vulnerable to fishing nets, ship anchors, currents, shark bites, scuba divers with saws, earthquakes, and, of course, volcanoes. These slender strands of mega-charged fiberoptic cables moving terabits per second account for 95 percent of all international data and voice transfers—volumes that blow satellites out of the sky.

What is more shocking than having the vast bulk of non-physical human interaction carried by something that looks like it comes from the lawn care section of a hardware store, is how comparatively rare disconnection calamities like the one that befell Tonga really are. According to the folks who lay them and fix them, the 870,000 miles of submarine cables invisibly meshing the world together under each of our planet’s oceans demand only about 100 repairs per year—far fewer than their wind- and rain-swept terrestrial cousins.