Collapse Setting Riff

What if the dark future predicted a few months ago during the worst of the recession came to pass? A world with rapidly disappearing energy resources and a global civil war between hyperconnected netwar terrorists of a thousand different ideologies versus everyone else. A world where the open source platform applies to even the most dangerous technologies and to terrorism itself. A world where nation-states are on the verge of breaking down while new kinds of networks rise up to replace them in the world economy.

This is that world.

Collapse

The United States is in the middle of a new Great Depression and it's government is bankrupt. European nations struggle against each other to best survive the economic downturn and the effects of global climate change. Russia expands it's energy hegemony throughout Eastern Europe and Asia even as it's pipelines are attacked by a growing insurgency in the Balkans. China is being torn apart by a civil war between between pro and anti Russian factions. Many of the world's nations have become hollow and unable to control the events within their borders while others have spiraled into total collapse, dragging down the countries around them as they become havens of warlords and criminal networks.

Nets

• NeoFeudalists: Hyperwealthy Oligarchs are a constant even in the new Globalconomy. With the collapse of traditional business models, these Oligarchs typically employ personal retinues and bonded employees who owe them a kind of sociopolitical fealty.
• Net-Tribals: The disenfranchised and those unable to make it as individual open-source innovators in the Globalconomy often band together for mutual protection and survival. Their bread and butter is using open source technology to find ways to live outside of the Globalconomy, in the strange new techno-primitive lifestyle dubbed the Alterconomy.
• G-Militants: The open-source platform works for insurgent groups as well. Also called netwar militias, these are globally connected memetic paralitical/paramilitant organizations.
• Freelancers: There are many within both the Global and Alter economies who rely only on themselves, often having been those who abandoned the old system when they saw the collapse coming rather than hanging on to a transforming society. They range from Private Military Contractors to journalists and infomedia celebs to Alterconomic traders connecting diverse populations of tribals through the exchange of goods.
• Nationalists: Some still cling to the old power structure. These nationalists in some constitute their own tribes, in some places very powerful ones while in other areas their authority and well-maintained status may mean nothing.

Niches

• Networking: Networking is the skill at which one accumulates social currency and reputation ratings on the nets, and the deftness with which they can craft ad-hoc organizations using ubiquitous communications technology.
• Infowar: Infowar, also called netwar, is more than just electronic hack attacks. It also includes systems disruption, psychological operations, and memetic warfare.
• Systems: There's more to systems than just disrupting them. A fine-tuned systems expert can do more than network, he/she can actually organize permanent or semi-permanent institutions efficiently and interact with established organizations in a fortuitous manner.
• DIY: Do It Yourself is the maxim of the age when the latest technological innovations can be accessed with a portable suite of equipment and freely available information on the wireless. Also called hacking by some from the older generations.
• Warriors: Every tribe, every Oligarch, every paralitical and paramilitary organization has it's warriors. These are the soldiers of the new age with a substantially different mythos, code, and way of warfare attached to them than those of pre-Collapse soldiers.