How do we fix the Jovian Republic (and also the Planetary Consortium, I guess)?

Why do people get so bent out of shape about this? Dictatorships that are hard to sympathize with the administrations of are something with ample historical precedent, as are major business empires doing horrific shit.

>But they're right. Make it abundantly clear they're right.
you don't even see the irony do you

It's because the devs are very open and forceful about their political leanings, so it leaves kind of a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths that the only factions that deviate from their worldviews are glaringly, one dimensionally evil stereotypes.

Make them more pragmatic and tone down the biocon/despotic tone the devs and memes have made them out to be.

I think it would be obvious that many Jovians would be using tech that isn't bleeding egde like a lot of the system but that would fit into their general belief that rampant use of tech lead to the Fall so they are simply slower to adopt rather than being techno luddites.

RIP Ultimates.

Why can't we never have a nice nietzschean faction?

But they're not terribly unbelievable. As I said, unsympathetic dictatorships are something with ample historical precedent.

Meanwhile on alternate Veeky Forums:

>Man that Pol-pot guy is so absurd
>He killed half his country, and executed everyone with glasses.
>I demand better writing in this setting!

Or hell, on the note of the hypercorps, just go take a look at the role of the East India Company in the Bengali Famine.

You don't. Because bio-conservatives in a transhuman setting is about as retarded as anti-space-travel cults in 40k. Or anti-dungeon crawling organisations in D&D. Or an anti-rocketlauncher demonstration in Quake. Or an anti-tiberium group in Tiberian Dawn/Sun/Wars.

Because the stuff everyone seems to latch on to of Nietzsche's work seems to be the stuff meant to encourage being a total dickhead. This goes for most of his followers as well.

The exceptions seem to be mostly the various post-modernists and post-structuralists that took portions of his work and ran with it, and pretty much all of them get Nietzsche's fanboys crawling out of the work to say they got it wrong (yes, even Heidegger).

Don't forget that Americans and American media (in all forms, from movies to videogames, and from left and right leaning media) pretty much ALWAYS get Nietzsche completely wrong.

It's like you have to be non-American to understand Nietzsche. As if having corn syrup in your diet makes you unable to properly metabolise Nietzsche's work.

It's something with well-established precedent. Since the whole bodyswapping thing requires that you have some sort of dualism at work to not just be killing yourself over and over.

Nobody understands Nietzsche. Nietzsche probably didn't.

Redpill me on Nietzsche.

I'm not too well versed in him, I've only read The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil.

As far as I can tell, his point seems to be encourage active pursuit of ideal driven goals in the world rather than otherworldly essences or slipping into despair at the apparently meaningless nature of reality. To this end he exalts struggle and overcoming, and considers this pursuit of self-realization and power (power in this case seeming to mean the ability to see your will realized, not necessarily temporal power) to be the fundamental impetus of the human condition.

Nietzsche asked a question "How do we make meaning if nothing has meaning?" and no one really had a good answer until the post-modernists dropped existentialism (nothing has meaning so make your own meaning) and absurdism (nothing has meaning so quit asking about what things mean).

What if the continuity of consciouness isn't real and you are dying with the end of each conscious focus or in your sleep? Or even the theseus ship?

>Not 3d printing a briefcase nuke and vaporizing the whole hab because nobody has enough rep to stop you

Bricolage vs verification is an debate that goes back to the start of the software age, user. Biocon is a label that represents one facet of a much larger faction: the idea of doing important and dangerous things right the first time.

Radiation damage and fucked up habitats aren't things the Jovians should have, in-theme. It's antithetical to their new-urbanism aesthetic, it's a big priority for them, and they have the tech to make perfectly function living space.

"Wew maintenance is for the weak"/"we can patch it on the fly for continual upgrades" is a transhumanist aesthetic, not a biocon one.

Once people start modifying themselves, they begin losing their humanity in a fundamental way. Every time a mind is broken down into digital signals and transmitted or uploaded, resolution is lost, and when that mind is entered back into a body the missing pieces are permanently lost, overwritten with a computer's best guess on what should've been there. Do it enough times, and this inhuman, computer-generated person takes more and more control.

The rest of transhumanity think they're independent free-thinking individualists. They're incapable of recognizing they've been programmed, because the program is who they are.

You know, I've never seen the Ultimates as particularly Nietchean. Mostly, they're just *normal*.

Think about it: you've come out alive from losing a war against ASIs. Do you use your surviving people, technology and resources to:

1. Release branded products with planned obsolescence to milk the remaining people of "money"? (Planetary Consortium)
2. Spend it all on fucking each other and playing violent pranks that destroy scarce bodies while billions languish in cold storage? (Anarchists & Scum)
3. Try communism again with a stupid gimmick, hoping it'll work this time? (Titanian Commonwealth)
4. Create a mostly-low-tech police state, pretending that it prevents ASIs when it is a known fact that they can hack biological brains as well? (Jovian Republic)
or
5. Get the best people you can, put them in the best bodies you can, and train as hard as you can because the TITANs are not destroyed and could come back at any moment?

Only 5 makes a lick of sense. Sure, the Ultimates consider themselves better than the other factions, but that's just because the other factions are really bad.

Not a problem because your consciousness is not your self. Your brain is yourself, consciousness is just a product of your brain; people overestimate the importance of consciousness.

>communist factions
>ragingly retarded cartoon supervillains

Not far off, really. A lot of the stories of the witch hunts that took place in the Soviet Union sound straight out of a fictional villain's playbook, albeit often less coherent in their reasons for arrest/execution (i.e. just filling a quota), as tends to happen in massive government machines where things have gotten so bloated and convoluted that the left hand can't possibly communicate efficiently with the right hand, much less work with it.

Did they not teach you reading comprehension on reddit?

Fuck off back to the Shadowrun general, faggot.

It's been a while since I've looked at the books, I didn't think the Jovians were terrible, but they felt like a bit of a waste.

The game establishes that bioconservatives are ineffectual (which is reasonable). The problem is, why make them a major faction if they're more or less irrelevant? They're taking up prime real estate around Jupiter that could be used for something else.

First, I'd move them away somewhere else and make them a less important faction. Then, I'd treat them more like Space Amish than Space America. The major theme of the faction is that, despite rejecting transhumanism themselves, they rely on transhumans (like the players) to protect them and do the jobs they can't. The disadvantages of bioconservativism should be obvious without making them incompetent assholes. Instead, the Jovians would be a place where players, after dispatching of yet another transhuman horrorshow, might feel some nostalgia for a fading, less complicated way of life.

At the same time, you now have space around Jupiter for a faction I felt was missing: a genuinely totalitarian dictatorship that embraces transhumanism. Imagine the worst dictatorships from history with access to this kind of technology. Really crank up the Orwellian horrorshow, be creative about the methods of repression they could invent. Now imagine if that faction took over the role of being the biggest conventional military power in the Solar System, with the small but possible threat that they might one day take over the rest of the system. Show players that a possible end-game for the transhuman race is a "boot stamping on a human face forever". That faction would actually pose a credible danger, explore the themes of the game (anarchism vs control, use and abuse of technology, etc), and invoke the "transhuman horror" that EP is supposed to be about.

I'm actually stealing this for my head canon/future games. I love it.

Sorry for criticizing your magical transhumanist fantasy land. Sheesh.

I didn't make up some hokey 'soul' or anything. I posited a fairly reasonable unforeseen consequence of digitizing people's minds. OP asked for a way to make the Jovians less wrong, and one thing that would help us if they had at least somewhat of a point.

Nietzsche actively rejected nihilism as something for shitty teenagers and shittier adults. He still agreed that no one exists on purpose or belongs anywhere and that we are just the unwanted children of a likely absent god, but he saw that as our blessing. Existence without purpose is something inflicted upon us, but that curse is our birthright and the greatest (possibly the only) freedom in the world is the freedom to choose what we'll do with it.

When he talked about nihilism, it's worth noting that he was referring specifically to a rather Christian form of existential despair.

>implying people can't be needlessly backwards and petty and despotic
Have you not looked at the real world lately?

Yeah but give them some nuance so they're not just saturday morning cartoon villain evil.

Maybe give some creedence to the idea that they are acting in a reasonable way given that humanity is almost extinct and earth is all but unlivable at this point due to a cataclysm that no one fully understands.

...

The protagonist faction Firewall is autonomist leaning, and their operatives talk shit about their rival organizations, OZMA and TAHI, and their parent organizations, the Consortium and Jove. OZMA has the space commies' grudging respect, as does the consortium, but both them and the Hyper Capitalists talk shit about Jove because its opposed to both of them, and economically weaker than both. There isn't even a lack of horrible people and places on the autonomists' side of the system, there's tons of shady shit and a higher incidence of AI yog-sothot attacks, but because its not the sole fault of the administration (just like when bad things happen everywhere else) it's author favoritism.

It's like having a Cold War game where the sourcebooks are from the KGB's perspective, only allude to USSR crimes and rub NATO's in their face, but the CIA gets a decent rap, and the entire third world is bundled into a single shitty faction that both the USSR and NATO shit on.

they're given their due in the newer books, but their due isn't nearly as great as they make it out to be. Luna is like them but more reasonable, and with more risks that they actually deal with, and while there's lots of potential in the gravity well, Jove is stuck there, and the other factions aren't. Jupiter isn't the hole it seems to be initially, but it's not the only precautionist faction, and it's a bit of a dead end if it stays isolated and slow to advance.

>capitalism created the TITANs
Except it was the overwhelmingly powerful paranoid nation-states and the Exsurgent Virus that made them, ain't it?

This is supposed to be a faulty in-universe perspective, right?

I thought it was secretive factions within the national security state...

Jovians are Brazilian-mulatto neoconservative Catholic fundamentalists. The only way to improve that is to radically change everything about it.

The PC isn't even portrayed that villainously, aside from the straight up retarded artificial scarcity they maintain, which is kinda their whole schtick.

Capitalism exploits scarcity.

Hypercapitalism exploits artificial scarcity.

RL examples of hypercapitalism are digital distributors like Steam, esp. as regards things like trading cards and hats. The commodification of things which are not genuinely scarce.

A good in-setting example is 'designer food', which is just food grown by hand rather than fabricated by nanomachines. The latter can perfectly replicate the former for free, and requires no labor to produce. But the former costs a lot of money.

Good fictional example of hypercapitalism: the Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits.

I think part of the problem boils down to the Jovians and the PC encounter logistical problems they probably shouldn't have while the anarchists don't.

Humanity's been in space for at least 100 years in EP. The Jovians should be able to build habitats that aren't prone to sepsis.

Then you've got snippets like your average anarchist citizen being wealthy compared to the inner system and during the fall they didn't have to turn away any refugees. Just... how?

In the outer system travel times are long, solar power's inefficient and message lag time is high because of that pesky speed of light.

The inner system has abundant power, abundant resources and abundant planetary surfaces to live on. Jupiter's got that neat magnetosphere to harvest energy from and can be mined for volatiles. Both should be industrial powerhouses compared to the anarchists.

But FUCK WHITE PEOPLE AND FUCK DRUMPF

>average anarchist wealthier than infugee prole
No shit. The PC economy is completely stratified and immobile, most of its people are worker drones/literal slaves who spend all their earnings on subscriptions to necessary amenities like food, water, air, energy, simulspace etc. Anarchists spend 100% of their labor on themselves or their community and they make or pirate all the nanofab blueprints that wagies pay to get access to.

Technically, yes, the PC should directly outcompete anarchists by resources and manpower, but the only reason the PC even exists is because a handful of gerontocrats want to keep everyone else down, and their main mechanism for that is squandering everything, because free access to nanofabs for their citizens would collapse their power bubble instantly.

...

The Ultimates are not and never were Nietzschean. The Nietzschean Overman explicitly rejects asceticism, for one thing.

Anyone who uses Ultimates and Nietzsche in the same sentence - except to say "the Ultimates were not Nietzschean" - has never read Nietzsche.

Yeah, but those nation-states were built on capitalism, and this person presumably doesn't know about the Exsurgent virus.

The Jovians are meant to be bullshit hypocrites. As someone once put it:

Your house has just burned down. While standing in front of the ruins, the ideas of various members of your family mostly range from "Everyone should have access to as much fire as they want - they'll surely not do anything immoral and/or stupid with it" over "Hey, we could build a new house by selling fire to those who can afford it!" to "I think the problem was that we didn't have enough fire!"

However, the Jovians (or, to be more precise, their leaders) are all 'Fire for me but not for thee!', while pretending to be 'Only we can protect you from fire!'.

My favourite take on that was the Exhumans - "I want to become the fire!"

>Why do people get so bent out of shape about this? Dictatorships that are hard to sympathize with the administrations of are something with ample historical precedent
Why? Because
>/pol/ likes to troll other boards into talking about their bullshit
>EP, and particularly the Jovian faction is a perfect excuse to make a /pol/ shitstorm thread with just enough veneer of legitimate Veeky Forums relevance that mods will never have an excuse to delete it, because such things DO matter in setting.
>many in /pol/ unironically ARE sympathetic to those dictators who are being blatantly and unsubtly parodied by the Jovian faction, so these troll threads have an element of genuine political vigor from those stragglers present.

Open up the archive and search for this topic, then read the dozens of threads we've had on the subject

I know this, like every other version of this thread, is really just a /pol/bait, but beyond all this, there atually is an argument that The Federation is basically as bioconservative as the Jovians. They literally ban genetic modification and cybernetic enhancement except in the case of extreme disability, they literally refuse to help, much less uplift, any species, until said species reaches a specific and arbitrary technological benchmark, and they are even so squeamish about copies, that whenever they replicate a humanoid, they disintegrate the original, even though there's literally nothing but hang-ups stopping them from using transporters to make an army of Soong-Type androids.

Now personally, I think all of their bioconservative hang-ups are one of the glaring flaws in the Federation ideology, but when people say "what's the best way that the Jovians could be portrayed" the answer is actually "the federation"... If they stopped imposing artificial scarcity on their populace, but kept imposing limits on what constitutes humanity, they could, in theory, be no less villainous than the Federation.

The Ultimates did nothing wrong except be a larger faction.

It has always irked me that unmodified, baseline humans are susceptible to hacking. The TITANS have more than enough other nastiness to cause the Fall and menace the players with. "To look upon the face of your code-God is death" because fuck you for not being all-in on transhanism is some bullshit.

You, know, it could just be that the game fucking sucks.

>do dictators and their fans suck
>no, they're fine, its the things that disrespect them that really suck

>Accept the body forms that Our Eternal Leader gives you
>Accept the thought forms that Our Eternal Leader approves
>Do not false-think
>Do not false-speak
>Do not false-live
>Hail to Our Glorious Leader

There's definitely no way the total collapse of our civilization and our near extinction could call for authoritarian measures right? I mean it's much better to just hope a bunch of disparate groups with no organization pull the solution out of their asses while pursuing their own selfish goals. The main problem with how the Jovians are depicted is not that their "evil" but that their point of view is not given the respect it deserves. It might not be the "right" choice but it would be more dramatically interesting if it was at least seen as a choice instead of it just being because "people are dumb" so they believe this.

Our Eternal Leader defeated the TITANS. Only in his wisdom did Jupiter survive and only through his genius do we remain.
Do not think of the Outer, for it is decadent and weak. They do not listen to Our Eternal Leader and his benevolent warnings. They are corrupted by the TITANS-
++NEW TRUTH UPLOADING++
Thanks to the wisdom and mercy of our Eternal Leader, more and more of transhumanity is seeking refuge in the embrace of Jupiter! It won't be long before the Outer collapses, as Our Eternal Leader has planned and we shall attain our total victory!
[NOTICE: Citizen of the Republic, you must complete fabrication of 15 Liberation Rifles to earn today's ration. Keep Our Eternal Leader in your heart and you shall know no failure!]

Don't see a problem. If you are trying to balance your ecology on an orbital and are reluctant to use nanotech (understandable because if anyone hacks the nano hives they will eat your face) then it will be hard to avoid ecological problems. Everyone gets bent out of shape over the anarchists, but everyone fails to realise 2 points: 1) These are the anarchists own words and they aren't going to say that they suck. 2) the anarchist settlements rimward are teeny tiny compared to the Jovians, Titan, Luna, Mars, Venus and Mercury. Its easy to be an anarchist in a tiny settlement.

The Jovians have legitimate concerns and are arguably a villain of the setting. They have their reasons but their methods are problematic. So what?

>pretty much ALWAYS get Nietzsche completely wrong.
You know, what i hate most about Nietzsche is his fanboys going, "nigga, you just don't understand the german autist's philosophy"
It's always him or Marx, and it happens everytime.

Besides, any philosophy in which fucking Azariah Kyras is a rolemodel to follow trips me over badly.

By not playing Eclipse Phase.

Fuck off commie shit

>moonlets

When will they ever learn.