Book:The Althistorian Ideology
I. The Material Form
The fundamental characteristic that defines a user from that of any other internet participant is that the user of a wiki actively changes their environment through the act of writing, thereby materially affecting their site. User-labor therefore forms the heart of the progression of wiki history. Editing is the archetypal form of production on the wiki, whereby the innovations that accelerate editing, such as increased technological advances in map making, researching, etc, are the forces of production. From one generation to the next, our collective knowledge of editing on the wiki tends to evolve through reproduction and dissemination of new strategies on how to write.
In order to carry out writing and production of content on a wiki, its users enter into definite social relations to production. The userbase’s production is not carried out in the abstract, but for the further development of their material means and by the currently existing forces of production that govern the level of development on the wiki.
II. Materialist View of Wiki History
The Primitive Wiki
In the primordial condition, after which a site is only just recently created, in which activity is relatively low by nature of a burgeoning population, moderation is hardly required. A fledgling site attracts little attention, and so consists only of a tight-knit number of people. Potentially recruited to the site as a cohort, as was evidently the case in the primitive Althistory, familiarity between users is high, and owing to the small number of potential relations, friendships are readily made. Hence, in the primitive wiki, users operate in a sort of communal fashion, implicitly policing each other by their mutual friendship and cooperation, and not experiencing need for hierarchical relations. Work is carried out at the leisure of the community, indistinguishable from the political sphere, whereby there is no separation between the productive being and the political being. Work is carried out only so much as to sustain the interests of individual writers, i.e. not requiring extra work for the purposes of running a complex society.
The primitive wiki attracts increased reproduction by means of new user attraction. The user base forms increasingly complex social relations which require a division of labor. This includes the first community timelines, as multiple users band together to form more complex production. The informal and often communal relations are increasingly stratified, such that the last anonymous IP accounts are compelled to create permanent, named accounts for better organization. The timelines are compelled to make and comply with the first stylistic rules, such as the requirement that each timeline page be named and organized by category. Moreover, what was once communal pages of contribution are fenced off in what becomes private timeline property, whereby every timeline requires an owner. This necessitates the creation of a set of rules to legitimize ownership and illegitimize transgressions against owners as infringing on societal norms. The first wiki rules set is born, which enshrines the right to preserve one’s work as personal.
The Imperial Wiki
The timeline economy develops, whereby ownership becomes a commodity that is bought and sold. Increased complexification occurs whereby timelines are subdivided into increasing number of stocks, which individual owners take ownership of, expand, combine, and trade, i.e. the concept of a user “owning” a nation or region of the world within a community timeline. The ever growing population and expansion of timeline relations necessitates the creation of hierarchies for the purpose of enforcing the social contract, creating the first adminship. Once unnecessary for the running of a site, admins are created which perform additional tasks to maintain the site itself based on the surplus attention generated from going beyond casual writing. This brings the wiki into an era of strict hierarchy constituting an ancient mode of production, whereby administration is widely outside the influence of the userbase it lords over. Rather, admins are unelected, there exists no exhaustive rule set, and the user, by comparison exists in a servile role, producing for the enrichment of the wiki without sociopolitical compensation.
From the relation between autocrat and servile timeliner arises a conflict over amusement. Between the contradiction between the arbitrary and the powerless arises the absurd. The user seeks out a manner of expanding his material standing not through the traditional timelines, which do not satisfy his boredom, but rather the growth of the userbase produces another shift in the productive forces whereby there is the establishment of the first map games, or other such projects of gamification. The wiki develops a ludentile class, i.e. a self-enriched group that improves its material conditions not through quality of timeline, but by competitive success in game form. Furthermore, the games attract a new generation that flocks to the wiki from the interest of playing, and the moderators of the games begin to outcompete the influence of the old guard. This class conflict, materialized from the disconnect between the feudal establishment and the game-oriented generation, ultimately leads to the eschewment of the old.
The Gameist Wiki
The map game generation, characterized by the meritocracy of gaming competition – its self-elected rule sets, its hierarchical moderation born from personal accumulation – catalyzes the creation of more complex rule sets for the wiki as a whole. This moderator class has thus demanded the rules become less arbitrary, refined, and reflecting the “fair” mechanics of the games, and they seek a say in the running of the administration. The administration is liberalized by the moderators standing for election and demanding that elections be open to votes from the common population. Adminship becomes in the hands of the moderators and perpetuates the power and privileges of map gaming.
There forms a new conflict between the moderators and those that they employ for the generation of their own capital, the players. We see increased stratification between the dominant class and all else, who are forced to write and sell their work, metaphorically speaking, for their own reputational survival.
Map games become a source of extraction of people’s time in the attention-seeking economy. Increasingly, the game transforms into a greater investment, because of the tendency for effort to correlate to increased chances of winning. This means that games increasingly incentivize increased participation from members by the rewarding of favorable outcomes to those who invest the most effort. Further, it is in the class interest of the moderators to incentivize this effort, because increased effort in the game perpetuates the survival of the game and attraction of ever more players, from which the moderator generates his power from. On the unregulated market, games fight in competition for the time of the users, and must increasingly innovate to attract new users, and must incentivize increased time investment to prevent users from being attracted to other games. The result is that even the most benevolent moderator must concede to the laws of competition and offer the most addicting product that extracts the most amount of time from his writers, lest he become outcompeted by his rival who does.
The gameist era separates the individual into two. Whereas before there was no distinction between the political and economic spheres, and a user was not alienated from the sense of community that defines the wiki, the user must project a separate entity in the ideological market that is in competition with all other peers. The gameist culture increasingly incentivizes cruelty toward one another in the political sphere, i.e. the individual devolves to egoism. Therefore we see increased apathy in the futility of the system and alienation from the self on the part of each user, from the abstraction of political life from his material, literary pursuits, the promotion of struggle against one another in the civil sphere, and from fostering division between one’s obligations to the community and one’s personal interests.
Tendency for the Rate of Games to Fall
This creates what can be called a natural tendency for the rate of games to fall. This is because increased investment by users creates increased stakes in personal success, and also increased opportunity for collision with other people’s stakes. As we have incentivized the personal pursuit of advancement through the civil society in increased separation from the rule set of the community, we thereby enter an era of increased conflict. Whereby the map game was an escape for the masses, it is now the center of their orbit. Increasingly fierce conflict creates an increasing number of map game collapses, whereby the amount of effort needed to maintain and moderate a game exceeds the amount of effort that the available population of moderation is able to provide. Increased futility of map games not succeeding further eliminates the power that map games have to entice more moderation. The final map games will be characterized by one off projects with woefully underprepared, underappreciated moderators, unable to maintain increasingly complex algorithms that the genre demands. The map games die as the level of conflict they produce outweighs the amount of amusement they generate.
In the meantime, the map games will create the ideological justifications to divide the playing class, creating the fierce intergame and international differences that divide player from player. Increasingly wars will be fought between players over personal grievances, completely produced by the games. Meta camps form, whereby ranks of players enter into wiki alliances for their own mutual protection. In the twilight of map games cooperation has completely broken down, as the games are divided along sectarian lines. These meta alliances of overarching groups of wiki users outside any timeline, constitute the meta allegiances that are pitted against one another in the present day.
Late-stage gameism
It should be noted that in late stage gameism the moderator class will increasingly export its games outside the wiki, to new markets, propping up the available population of map gamers. First, they will enter the discord and monopolize activity such that it attracts the community timeline members, and then the independent timeliners, until they have effectively sapped attention from timeline writing to increase attention profits for the map games. Next, they will go outside the community, and they will attract increasing numbers of recruits from the adjacent wikis, who have more primitive levels of map gaming development. In late-stage map gaming, the moderators will initiate conflicts to seize as many resources as possible for the maintaining of their required levels of activity.
Post-Gameism
When the games have died the moderator class will lose its defining prestige as organizers. Built from their ability to govern a game, not necessarily produce content, the moderator finds himself outpaced by the increasing proficiency of the players. The overall population of the wiki may begin to contract to a more manageable form in the short-term. The adminship must therefore reassert itself on an increasingly diminishing mandate. Unbeknownst to the moderators, they have forged the weapons that will bring about their own demise, as the map games have also crafted the class of players, incentivized by increasingly proficient content to differentiate themselves in the face of competition, who now possess the means to outperform the moderators. When the population of the userbase has significantly risen to the point at which the adminship no longer confines them, we will enter the next revolutionary era, whereby the userbase directly takes command of their own administration, in the final battle for wiki democracy.
This will begin a dictatorship of the userbase, whereby the means of administration are gradually dispersed among an increasing number of users, such that administrative tasks are decentralized and carried out en masse. Users will once more return to a free association of production that fully eliminates the competitive gameist economy, and attention is dolled out based on meritorious content. The userbase will begin to dismantle the metanational allegiances by uniting the userbase as a userbase once more. Each user will be rewarded according to his ability, and helped according to his need. This mode of production will mature until the maximum number of people are mutually in control over the greatest number of administrative tools, and thus the class differences of admin versus user will break down and cease to be distinct groupings.