9,401, an SF thriller

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Rupert

If not, get up to speed on the protests - who's doing the protests, who's organising them, what they want, why they're protesting to us (the Imperials), and so on.

The people protesting are mostly recipients, which is to say second-class citizens who have no jobs. They are protesting partly because they resent being excluded from the political process, partly because they resent the fact that members get a much larger share of the surplus of the commune than they get, partly because the contributors are on strike (so that many of the usual services have been cut), and largely because they like to heckle, throw rocks, and break things.

They are being organised, as far as anyone can tell, by several hundred influential bloggers, most of whom are at cross-purposes to one another, and all of whom claim to represent the view of OPLOC or ODLOC or the credible alternative to OPLOC and ODLOC. Over the last couple of days three memes seem to have caught hold: the colour red as a symbol of revolutionary affiliation, the slogan 'Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood', and an old song The Internationale.

What they want varies enormously, from the implementation of some fairly sensible reforms suggested by the Executive Chief Commissioner a few years ago, to an increase in the dole, to payment of the dole in cash instead of in kind, to the abolition of the distinction between member and ward, to votes for all, to fire and bloody revolution. There is no scheme so brilliant or so hair-brained, so visionary, or so rooted in the history of reform and revolution, that there is not somebody championing it.

So far as you can make out, they are protesting at the Empire because they have no idea whatsoever: either they think that the Empire is the force behind the Commune, or they think that the Empire could be persuaded to overthrow or reform the Commune if it understood their plight, or they don't really know that the Empire and the Commune are different things, or they have seen footage of protests outside the Imperial Enclave from disturbances on other planets, and just think that besieging the Residence is the thing to do, or they want a chance to heckle The Man, or they are going along with the mob.

Things are all pretty chaotic at the moment, and it hasn't yet been settled what all this is going to have been about. The moment of decision will be soon, though.