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Description
"I don’t do (phreaking). I don’t do that anymore at all. And if I do it, I do it for one reason and one reason only. I’m learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that’s my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer."
— John Draper , Secrets of the Little Blue Box, Esquire Magazine (October 1971)

This was based on an alternate history idea I've had floating around for some time, but its rather nebulous premise made it difficult to adapt into a map. I had previous done a very rough sketch of my idea - a broadly OTL map showing the world divided into the spheres of influence of different hacker gangs or 'cliques'. Some further research revealed that the level of influence I envisaged the hackers themselves having in Captain Crunch's World was probably unrealistic, so instead I produced the above; a map showing the world situation and showing the locations of influential cliques and the hacker 'popes' (the powerful pseudonymous or semi-pseudonymous figures who own and operate the major online services ITTL, the corporate web having proved a crapshoot). The format of the map was intended to recall an ATL web browser, though I'm not entirely sure it's successful. Still - pretty; or at least it would be if I wasn't using the bloody worlda map again I also tried to subvert a few brainbugs while I was at it, though no doubt people'll let me know I've stumbled into a whole set of new one. Quite pleased with the B_Munro -style annotations - worth noting that what I haven't annotated is as telling as what i have annotated - e.g. the Near East (which got onto a successful peace plan ITTL and is now humming along smoothly), West Sahara (a perfectly viable, established nation-state, albeit Morocco still isn't totally convinced), the Mali-Mauritania war (old history, man) and North Korea (Kim Il Sung died on schedule, then things got messy - Seoul seized the initiative and finished the Korean War in a couple of months).

The map should be broadly self-explanatory, but for further information, my notes:

- The establishment fails to get to grips with the reality of a growing hacker counterculture until it's too late. The PoD is that the old telecoms giants are not broken up, allowing a pseudonymous counterculture to get its genesis in the phreaking movement, which ITTL is allowed to incubate in the bellies of slow-reacting, dinosaur monopolies. By the time they're taken seriously as a threat they're laying their own cable and have their own alternatives to most of the government-controlled infrastructure. Today the cliques control a considerable chunk of the world economy, intellectual property has been undermined to the point where the conventional creative industries have been liquidated, and the concept of the nation state is being increasingly undermined as tax revenues plummet.

- In America, the federal government is basically defunct and exists largely on its own say-so (the G-Man gets laughed at a lot these days if he tries to claim jurisdiction).

- The decision by the first world to cut back on foreign aid turned out to be a huge mistake. Many African and South-East Asian nations collapsed altogether. UN peacekeeping forces did their best to stabilise the regions until the UN itself fell apart. Nowadays the only ones still giving a damn are the British, whose Royal Family now virtually bankroll the Armed Forces (the Crown Estate proved one of the most resilient possessions in the world).

- The Soviet Union is still gamely limping on, although the 'proletarian economy zones' (read: we give up) now cover the entire country and only Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad remain bastions of the planned economy. Oddly enough this seems to be working quite well. The Soviets had their own far more rigidly policed version of the Internet, which in 1999 joined up with the rest of the world, almost immediately resulting in the formation of Russian hacker cliques and popes.

- Britain itself has given into the inevitable and is devolving as fast as it possibly can - the local economy is proving a lot tougher than the national one after all. The British Bobby still patrols the streets and the court system is still operational, although most of its time is taken up defending innocent targets of misdirected clique 'justice'. Europe is a little sniffy about the fact that the Queen is once again exerting a worrying degree of influence around the globe - especially now the word 'protectorate' is being thrown around with regard to some of Britain's peacekeeping zones in Africa and Asia...

- South Korea saw which way the wind was blowing a long time ago (Seoul is home to one of the oldest non-Anglo hacker cliques) and realised if it couldn't defeat the enemy within it had better defeat the enemy without in short order. North Korea is now a military occupation zone of the South with decidedly unambitious deadlines for political integration milestones. There's a pretty good reason for this - namely that the South is rapidly disintegrating into the digital cloud and the heavy levies on the still mostly unwired North are the only thing keeping the government together.

- The People's Republic of China is not having a good time of things, but you can't blame the hackers. The PRC basically rules Beijing these days, with the countryside a mess of quasi-Maoist, Marxist, Leninist, Apocalyptic Buddhist and Millenarian regional authorities, mostly backed by Red Army splinter groups. The Republic of China made quite possibly one of the most thunderous comebacks in political history when it sent troops to the mainland in the 1970s to secure alleged PRoC nuclear facilities currently in the hands of rogue leaders. Nowadays the Republic of China Armed Forces are firmly esconced on the south coast with pockets of control elsewhere. The PRoC has declaimed the occupation zones, but isn't willing to start a nuclear war over the bits of its own territory the Taiwanese are keeping more or less civilised.

- There's no equivalent of ICANN, so the Web is much less user-friendly than OTL. Numerous competing official and non-official registrars exist, with the result that depending on which one your browser is set to ping, entering a *domain name might bring up a completely different site to the one the person who gave you the link intended. Most modern web browsers ITTL get around this with addons that ping a list of registrars and display a list of search results if more than one address resolves. America does NOT have enough critical hardware under its jurisdiction to shut the Internet down worldwide - and any attempt to do so would result in a counter-attack by several cliques simultaneously.

- In Captain Crunch's World, there are equivalents of Google, Facebook and Myspace, but their owners are closer to 4chan's m00t than Google's Eric Schmidt: faceless hacker 'popes' who have carved out (relatively) safe spaces for the common man to use ... for a price. The web looks very 90s, with a heavy emphasis on messy backgrounds, animated image files and flashing bits (think the old layout of YTMND, and that's the classier bits).

- Video gaming (ironically, still using some of the last commercial games, now over a decade old) is recognised as a legitimate sport in dozens of countries, with the big names being considered sports stars (this has also led to a revival in high-publicity strategic tabletop gaming, such as chess tournaments and even tabletop wargaming).

- One interesting aspect of this TL is that MMORPGs have never developed into a significant cultural force: the closest thing in Captain Crunch's World is rather primitive-looking Second Life-ish sandboxes where users are encouraged to code and add their own content. There are certainly no games where real money exchanges hands for in-game items (at least, as an in-game mechanic - there are almost certainly more than a few pro tinkerers who charge for mods and hacks to 'improve' the experience of games or gain an unfair advantage, as in OTL).

Description
"I don’t do (phreaking). I don’t do that anymore at all. And if I do it, I do it for one reason and one reason only. I’m learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that’s my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer."
— John Draper , Secrets of the Little Blue Box, Esquire Magazine (October 1971)

This was based on an alternate history idea I've had floating around for some time, but its rather nebulous premise made it difficult to adapt into a map. I had previous done a very rough sketch of my idea - a broadly OTL map showing the world divided into the spheres of influence of different hacker gangs or 'cliques'. Some further research revealed that the level of influence I envisaged the hackers themselves having in Captain Crunch's World was probably unrealistic, so instead I produced the above; a map showing the world situation and showing the locations of influential cliques and the hacker 'popes' (the powerful pseudonymous or semi-pseudonymous figures who own and operate the major online services ITTL, the corporate web having proved a crapshoot). The format of the map was intended to recall an ATL web browser, though I'm not entirely sure it's successful. Still - pretty; or at least it would be if I wasn't using the bloody worlda map again I also tried to subvert a few brainbugs while I was at it, though no doubt people'll let me know I've stumbled into a whole set of new one. Quite pleased with the B_Munro -style annotations - worth noting that what I haven't annotated is as telling as what i have annotated - e.g. the Near East (which got onto a successful peace plan ITTL and is now humming along smoothly), West Sahara (a perfectly viable, established nation-state, albeit Morocco still isn't totally convinced), the Mali-Mauritania war (old history, man) and North Korea (Kim Il Sung died on schedule, then things got messy - Seoul seized the initiative and finished the Korean War in a couple of months).

The map should be broadly self-explanatory, but for further information, my notes:

- The establishment fails to get to grips with the reality of a growing hacker counterculture until it's too late. The PoD is that the old telecoms giants are not broken up, allowing a pseudonymous counterculture to get its genesis in the phreaking movement, which ITTL is allowed to incubate in the bellies of slow-reacting, dinosaur monopolies. By the time they're taken seriously as a threat they're laying their own cable and have their own alternatives to most of the government-controlled infrastructure. Today the cliques control a considerable chunk of the world economy, intellectual property has been undermined to the point where the conventional creative industries have been liquidated, and the concept of the nation state is being increasingly undermined as tax revenues plummet.

- In America, the federal government is basically defunct and exists largely on its own say-so (the G-Man gets laughed at a lot these days if he tries to claim jurisdiction).

- The decision by the first world to cut back on foreign aid turned out to be a huge mistake. Many African and South-East Asian nations collapsed altogether. UN peacekeeping forces did their best to stabilise the regions until the UN itself fell apart. Nowadays the only ones still giving a damn are the British, whose Royal Family now virtually bankroll the Armed Forces (the Crown Estate proved one of the most resilient possessions in the world).

- The Soviet Union is still gamely limping on, although the 'proletarian economy zones' (read: we give up) now cover the entire country and only Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad remain bastions of the planned economy. Oddly enough this seems to be working quite well. The Soviets had their own far more rigidly policed version of the Internet, which in 1999 joined up with the rest of the world, almost immediately resulting in the formation of Russian hacker cliques and popes.

- Britain itself has given into the inevitable and is devolving as fast as it possibly can - the local economy is proving a lot tougher than the national one after all. The British Bobby still patrols the streets and the court system is still operational, although most of its time is taken up defending innocent targets of misdirected clique 'justice'. Europe is a little sniffy about the fact that the Queen is once again exerting a worrying degree of influence around the globe - especially now the word 'protectorate' is being thrown around with regard to some of Britain's peacekeeping zones in Africa and Asia...

- South Korea saw which way the wind was blowing a long time ago (Seoul is home to one of the oldest non-Anglo hacker cliques) and realised if it couldn't defeat the enemy within it had better defeat the enemy without in short order. North Korea is now a military occupation zone of the South with decidedly unambitious deadlines for political integration milestones. There's a pretty good reason for this - namely that the South is rapidly disintegrating into the digital cloud and the heavy levies on the still mostly unwired North are the only thing keeping the government together.

- The People's Republic of China is not having a good time of things, but you can't blame the hackers. The PRC basically rules Beijing these days, with the countryside a mess of quasi-Maoist, Marxist, Leninist, Apocalyptic Buddhist and Millenarian regional authorities, mostly backed by Red Army splinter groups. The Republic of China made quite possibly one of the most thunderous comebacks in political history when it sent troops to the mainland in the 1970s to secure alleged PRoC nuclear facilities currently in the hands of rogue leaders. Nowadays the Republic of China Armed Forces are firmly esconced on the south coast with pockets of control elsewhere. The PRoC has declaimed the occupation zones, but isn't willing to start a nuclear war over the bits of its own territory the Taiwanese are keeping more or less civilised.

- There's no equivalent of ICANN, so the Web is much less user-friendly than OTL. Numerous competing official and non-official registrars exist, with the result that depending on which one your browser is set to ping, entering a *domain name might bring up a completely different site to the one the person who gave you the link intended. Most modern web browsers ITTL get around this with addons that ping a list of registrars and display a list of search results if more than one address resolves. America does NOT have enough critical hardware under its jurisdiction to shut the Internet down worldwide - and any attempt to do so would result in a counter-attack by several cliques simultaneously.

- In Captain Crunch's World, there are equivalents of Google, Facebook and Myspace, but their owners are closer to 4chan's m00t than Google's Eric Schmidt: faceless hacker 'popes' who have carved out (relatively) safe spaces for the common man to use ... for a price. The web looks very 90s, with a heavy emphasis on messy backgrounds, animated image files and flashing bits (think the old layout of YTMND, and that's the classier bits).

- Video gaming (ironically, still using some of the last commercial games, now over a decade old) is recognised as a legitimate sport in dozens of countries, with the big names being considered sports stars (this has also led to a revival in high-publicity strategic tabletop gaming, such as chess tournaments and even tabletop wargaming).

- One interesting aspect of this TL is that MMORPGs have never developed into a significant cultural force: the closest thing in Captain Crunch's World is rather primitive-looking Second Life-ish sandboxes where users are encouraged to code and add their own content. There are certainly no games where real money exchanges hands for in-game items (at least, as an in-game mechanic - there are almost certainly more than a few pro tinkerers who charge for mods and hacks to 'improve' the experience of games or gain an unfair advantage, as in OTL).