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A common trope in cyberpunk fiction is the balkanization of the USA in multiple states, generally for the purposes of having an independent techno California and some geopolitical edginess. Do you think this could ever realistically happen? Personally, I think that it is unlikely. Despite there being some serious irreconcilable splits in the US populace, I do not think the people there are divided to the point where they would ever decide the union can no longer function and must split up.

That's weird, I thought flag svgs worked here. Oh well.

Not a chance. The US military has bases all over every state and any seperatist movement will have to contend with the strongest military in the world, already in their own land.

It's very unlikely, despite what yesCalifornia and Texas constantly bitching about what unique snowflakes they are, and that they're culturally different from the US(there not btw). I do see a forcible future were a lot of these sovereign citizens and other radical groups (the base, 3%, others) become makeshift terrorist groups based on their beliefs and willingness to do something ( but if you ever have seen 3%, they're basically larpers with guns). Think current middle east, but in the US. However, even that chance is still unlikely. It is a fun idea to think about though, how will various states handle being independent of the larger union that is the US.

Maybe Alaska or Hawaii, but not the USA as a whole. Hawaiians hate the US government and view it as an illegitimate owner (something the US government itself admitted). Alaskans have a very strong dislike of the US fed for multiple reasons. Inuits hate them because they see them as the genociders of their people. The white ones hate them because they see them as a bunch of gun grabbing fascists. Both dislike how Alaskans have no say in US affairs while the US has the final word in everything Alaskan.

There are a lot of way it could happen realistically but probably not in our life times. Large amounts of people in powerful positions can be among a group such as a religion, a cult, or following someone with a cult of personality. Coups and separatist movements still happens around these in Asia and Middle East and happened in Europe even in the 20th century. United State's intelligence community have a history of creating stay-behind armies and allowing fringe groups to exist and operate, even in US soil, to counteract other groups. So yeah I don't think it's as improbable as some people think.

>>14765 I think I could see it happening if the staff in those bases stop getting paid (like they do during the now-periodic, "Government shutdowns," during which things like the congressional gym and spa stay open) for long enough. I can imagine a future where we're in that state indefinitely, and ten years into the shutdown the staff on military bases are basically a skeleton staff of well-armed warlords who are no longer responding to the government, at least in fiction.

>>14767 Less then 5% of Texans want independence. The ones who say Texas should "be free" are seccesionist Californians usually.

I don't see it happening in the near future apart from perhaps Puerto Rico, East Samoa and Hawaii splitting off. The US mainland has a universal American culture with some regional variation, and there isn't enough differences for them to consider separating from one another. However, we could see a growing sense of regionalism across the country in the future, one that will start to split the American monoculture into distinct varieties that see themselves as more different than alike to each other.

>>14763 It would take a lot of time and a lot to go wrong, if I had to guess maybe in the event of an economic collapse and a failure of the fed to address it properly could lead to the start of it, but that is pure speculation, the US is a very stable country and it would take a fever pitch of catastrophic events to kill it like rome.

bump

>>15084 > the US is a very stable country Doesn't seem like it from I'm looking, fam. Then again, I'm looking at it from outside so what do I know.

>>19464 Months of hindsight might be the issue. Though things on my city have been quiet aside from some demonstrators being nuisances. Homelessness has increased which is giving it a Great Depression aura, though obviously the US survived that. >>15084 >like rome Rome took ages to fall. The US might be collapsing now but the end of it would be beyond our lifespans, and even then it wouldn't be complete. California and Texas might be the Byzantine Empire of the US.

>>19470 >California and Texas might be the Byzantine Empire of the US. Dang, that's an interesting way to look at it. But yeah, the US is obviously in a state of serious decline and has been since 2007. Time will tell if it is a temporary thing, but based on how many factors are converging right now, and how little anybody in power seems inclined to do anything about them, I doubt it. We are living through the fall of a great empire. This is a very interesting time to be alive.

Hypothetically Hawaii could split from the US under the premise of Decolonization. Still pretty unlikely. Also there is a small portion of Florida that already isn't considered in the US due to stupid inland borders.

I don't think it'll balkanize without a very serious all-out domestic war or generations of economic decline, but we definitely might just get Mega-City One someday. No other states, just desertification

>>19474 I mean something like that on the books is like one of those old laws saying the mayor has to give three pigs to the governor each year or whatever. If Hawaii tried to secede, they would immediately experience another Pearl Harbor... but the planes would be coming from the opposite horizon. Hawaii knows this.

>>19476 They could get away with it in a hypothetical Civil War/collapse scenario. But they probably would prefer to be under someone's nuclear umbrella.

People are so unimaginative in their secession / federal breakdown scenarios. People think that the only way that balkanization can happen is through the establishment of Westphalian borders and written constitutions. Retarded. There are just so many ways that this could go down that don't involve muh "independent" CA or TX or whatever. Just look at marijuana law for a stupid example. It's stupid because it doesn't take hardly any money out of the federal government's pocket. But half the states are completely ignoring a federal law, and their complete disregard of it would be almost unthinkable even 15 years ago. Muh gun rights? Congratulations, New York has been completely ignoring all federal legislation and SCOTUS case law on firearms for forever, and not just in a token way, in the throwing people in jail for years way. In this case, the increasingly ineffective federal government issues poorly enforced diktats that nobody gives a soykaf about until an example needs to be made of a political enemy in 1 of 10000 cases. Number two scenario, look at our brother country to the south, Mexico. First stop and skim the Wikipedia of the Mexican Revolution, which only happened 100 years ago. It makes no sense! There aren't just two sides fighting over a single thing like in the US Civil War! It's complete chaos for decades on end, with everybody switching sides, and nobody can tell you what it's even about until after the textbooks are written. In the middle of all this a Catholic vs Protestant war erupts with over 100k dead, and that's just a footnote in the whole thing! Thankfully Mexico has now overcome this confusion and is now a well-governed state that doesn't have large swaths of its territory governed by multi-national drug trafficking organizations.

>>19464 At this point a large part of the stability of the US comes from their control of USD. If USD became less important, which is historically inevitable (unfortunately for me), it would be a serious problem.

>>14763 Not only is it possible, it's inevitable. Most of the posters itt are delusional. We're approaching a time where republicans will never win another election again because of demographic shifts, pic related. In the near future the coastal states and cities will have total political hegemony, some weird soykaf is going to follow.

>>19507 that would be nice if it weren't for the fact that it is completely meaningless, the Democrat and Republican parties are just ways for the ruling class to appeal to plebians (as well as to provide something for talking heads to talk about)

>>19507 >Hispanics at 31% I could actually imagine Hispanics going Republican if border tensions with Mexico become less of an issue. Lots of Republicans are basically apolitical and are just voting against abortions or gay people, both issues that Hispanic Catholics are largely on the same side of.

>>19509 Kennedy was the only Catholic president for a reason.

>>19507 Couldn't be any weirder than 20 years of rule by the beverly hillbillies.

>>19507 This is too simple of a conclusion in my opinion. Both parties internalized the "demographics is destiny" line, but I think it will only temporarily be true. The Democratic party line is not very popular and it only gets voted for because of an awkward coalition of people who hate Republicans even more. The GOP will probably die because they are seen as the "white man party", but the USA cannot become a one party state because of its electoral system. A new party will inevitably show up to bring it back to two parties. I imagine this will be a new conservative party without the history that scares Hispanic people away from the Republicans. Probably more paleoconservative because the Clintonite Democrats crushed the Bernout insurgency and solidified the party's future as the woke wall street party and now the GOP is losing their corporate friends (outside of a few big institutions like oil and weapons).

>>19509 Depending on the type of hispanic, they'll probably end up assimilated into "whiteness" after a generation or two. After which they'll vote whichever way the others do. Some second gens (hell, even the younger first gens) I know don't even understand spanish.

>>19509 Every single Mexican and Honduran immigrant I'm neighbors with is a trump guy. I think people misunderstand that. And I'm in Texas, not far from the border.

>>19521 I think when people see something like "61% of Latinos voted for Clinton, 35% for Trump" they just take away that "most Latinos voted Democrat" and beeline on that, ignoring that 35% is a ton of people. A lot of "majorities" should be scrutinized more often and not taken for granted. Interhispanic relationships are honestly a bit complicated.

>>19521 >>19523 Isn't it something like 90%+ of blacks for example who always vote Democrat? American politics are really fuarrrked up.

>>19521 Its a surprisingly standard thing in first and second generation immigrants who arrived legally. You see the same with the UK with a solid chunk of immigrants having voted for Brexit. They generally seem to view newcomers as undermining their acceptance and not working as hard to assimilate.

>>19529 Yeah, exactly. The democrats are some of the most utterly incompetent campaigners in history and they seem to treat Hispanics as a monolithic bloc, but there's a huuuuge difference between urban and rural, professional and laborer, immigrant and third-generation. All of the immigrants around me vote for Trump because they are voting in their own interests. It's weird how Americans as a whole seem to have forgotten that that's a thing you can do: just vote for the party that will provide some immediate, tangible gain to you. A lot of Americans seem to think that voting is exclusively about making the right moral choice or being personally virtuous and correct. No, dumbass—vote for your own interests! >>19528 Basically what this macro says. But I don't even think that's necessarily true. I think people who just got here and are economically precarious still do vote with their economic interests and override race and most ideology. Because they're new to the game, haven't learned all the shibboleths yet, and need the fuarrrking money. And arguably Trump says and does lots of things that are against their interests, but if one looks at it without the derangement syndrome I think one can see that he actually hasn't done much different at all. He's a pretty bog-standard president; he actually makes few significant changes that aren't just symbolic PR moves. People who think Latinos will reject Trump for reasons that might seem obvious to other Americans probably just don't really understand what it's like to be an immigrant. But Biden can play despacito on his phone lol. Absolute imbecile. It's not just pandering, but it's so condescending to even imply that people wouldn't see that it's pandering. How retarded would you have to be to not understand what was happening there? Apparently that's what they think about that demographic's intelligence.

>>19534 >but if one looks at it without the derangement syndrome I think one can see that he actually hasn't done much different at all. He's a pretty bog-standard president; he actually makes few significant changes that aren't just symbolic PR moves. Can't remember the last time a president made it clear they wouldn't respect the results of the election...

>>19521 But then they send their kids to public school, which they have no idea about or how to deal with, and their kids end-up as insane "Latinx" types (how do you even say that word in Spanish?) Unless they are unusually religious or go out of their way to maintain their language and culture, their kids assimilate, but they assimilate to the wrong thing.

>>19534 I mean, Trump's dumb but for reasons beyond hurr hitler hurr russia reasons. Being not that different from any other president isn't a ringing endorsement, so there's valid reasons to find him objectionable without thinking he'll literally destroy the country (like we're told about every candidate in every election cycle by the parties). >>19536 That's still assimilation, SJW-ism and cultural posturing is a pretty American phenomenon. In a few decades their families will be the Hispanic equivalent of Plastic Paddies regardless of who they vote for. I don't think I've heard anyone pronounce it. Honestly you could just use Latines or Hispanoparlantes (or just Hispanics since this is English) rather than that garbage word. Or just use the countries' denonyms.

>>19537 Its not a fuarrrking word in spanish Latinx = Latin* for latino or latina

>>19536 >"Latinx" types (how do you even say that word in Spanish?) it's not a pronouncable word in any language, including Azteca. >>19537 >Being not that different from any other president isn't a ringing endorsement, so there's valid reasons to find him objectionable without thinking he'll literally destroy the country indeed, he is merely yet another in a long line of looters who don't give a soykaf.

One weird thing I just noticed reading thread and the current climate is how the fuarrrk cyberpunk missed so bad with the "mega-cities" - I mean, looks like we're going in the opposite direction right now, and it's kinda obvious that with such high speed communication technology the average salaryman would do everything via remote calls. Dystopian nightmare, high tech, low life, I get that, but this realization just made me a bit let down about the predictive quality of cyberpunk literature. Still, products still need to be made so there will be some industrial zones throughout the country, with service personal to serve them, but the financial/biz/tech/advertising conglomerates "by the coastal states" (like >>19507 predicts) seems every day much closer to science fiction than reality right now, for me. White collar workers are so much freer to come and go as they please because of the damned zoom calls, so now they can be zombies anywhere they please! This may or may not help with balkanization, considering the current political climate. Or I might be wrong and all the yuppies that are moving to Austin and finish its transformation into Neo NYLA, the only mega-city in America and all cyberpunk authors will laugh at me because they're right, who knows.

>>19572 You gotta look china. Tencent is building a mini-city to house all their workers in a closed community with everything from food&housing to offices in one spot. It makes sense economically, even if you can work remote, food&other deliveries still benefit from a compact structure. Piping for canalization and wiring for electricity&fiber is likewise expensive. If you run the numbers and consider living really remote getting it laid to your home can cost more than the house itself.

>>19572 Gibson's megacities were based on the idea that nearby cities would eventually grow into eachother forming one huge sprawling megacity. Iirc "the sprawl" is the Boston-Baltimore economic corridor. He just over estimated how quick it'd happen but it still probably will go that direction. I live in Massachusetts and we're already seeing a ton of population growth in the towns around Boston. Cities that used to be fairly independent (New Bedford, Lowell, Worcester) turn into commuter towns and eventually effectively suburbs. New Jersey is even more like this. The area between Philadelphia and New York is basically entirely urban. Realistically megacities in the US grow out rather than up. So you're not going to get entire communities living most of their lives in the upper floors of interconnected highrise buildings like in some cyberpunk works, but the cyberpunk trope of a vast seemingly endless city that is so big it crosses state lines is still fairly realistic (and in my reading this is closer to what Gibson was talking about).

>>19507 >>19507 > because of demographic shifts, pic related. In the near future the coastal states and cities will have total political hegemony What are you talking about. If Mexicans come here and change the vote, it won't be the coastal states running the show. All the Mexicans will be in the middle states so the middle states will get exactly what they want.

>>19507 >We're approaching a time where republicans will never win another election again because of demographic shifts, pic related Mexicans don't always vote blue. Plenty are pretty hardline conservative. Anyway if the Republican party becomes truly unable to win an election I think we'll just see the Democratic party, already an uneasy alliance, fall apart into multiple competing factions. Unless of course the federal government goes full fascist dictatorship and all pretenses of democracy are dropped. >In the near future the coastal states and cities will have total political hegemony, some weird soykaf is going to follow. as it is they have a vastly larger population and economic base but less representation proportionally. Really the problem is that fundamentally the idea of a large central government in the US makes no sense. Florida and California are very different places and it doesn't make sense for both of them to be under the thumb of the same increasingly tyrranical federal government.

>>19534 > I think one can see that he actually hasn't done much different at all. He's a pretty bog-standard president; he actually makes few significant changes that aren't just symbolic PR moves. This is so wrong that I have a difficult time believing that it's how you actually feel. https://www.cnsnews.com/article/national/melanie-arter/mattis-trump-1st-president-my-lifetime-who-does-not-try-unite

The only way California or Texas or Alaska or whoever else is ever getting independence from the US of A is if the US collapses so thoroughly that the federal government just ceases functioning entirely and powers just revert back to the states anyway. Or alternatively if someone just openly treasonous to the idea of the USA got elected and their intention was the disbanding of the country (see 1991 Yeltsin russia)

>>19576 > I live in Massachusetts and we're already seeing a ton of population growth in the towns around Boston. Cities that used to be fairly independent (New Bedford, Lowell, Worcester) turn into commuter towns and eventually effectively suburbs. It hasn't gotten that bad out in Worcester, that's still a decade or so away. Right now, the dividing line looks to be I-495 edging into the -boros until you get to the Plymouth area. I can totally believe that Lowell and New Bedford have been suburbanized, though, it makes complete sense given their location. Out of curiosity, what town do you live in? You seem MetroWest-y to me, if only by the overestimation of Greater Boston's size. t. North County user

>>19928 >Alaska As a Canadian, I would welcome the addition of a fourth Territory. Balkanization of the US would merely be the start of our state conquests. But then, that's always been our long-term goal. Once Canada conquers the world... you'll all be sorry.

>>20042 We'll all be sorry like how Canadians are always "sorry"

>>20042 >Pax Britanica >Pax Americana >Pax Maple Syrup God help us when Australia takes over.

>>20052 Pax Americana is a myth, they've been at war for the better part of the last two centuries.

>>20030 >Out of curiosity, what town do you live in? Lowell, but I recently moved from RI

>>20054 >Lowell, but I recently moved from RI Makes sense. How's the sprawl like up there?

Hi, idiot here. What's balkanization?

>>20187 Splitting off a country/region into smaller countries/regions. E.g. each state in the US would be a country in its own right.

>>20187 >Hi, idiot here. What's balkanization? It's basically when a nation-state fragments into numerous smaller nation-states during a chaotic multi-sided civil war.

>>20066 The worst part is just that there's a lot of traffic because the roads weren't meant to support this many people, and options for public transportation are limited because it isn't an actual part of Boston. You can bike if you're going somewhere in town but you do sometimes have to drive. I actually like this part of the state though. You're close enough to the city that it's easy to find things to do, but you're also only like 20 minutes away from "live free or die" NH so its a lot less claustrophobic than the south shore (although traffic isn't nearly as bad down there). I also like these old new england cities because they feel post-industrial but in a really remote way. Like I lived in eastern Pennsylvania at one point and the old steel towns just felt like hollow shells. On the other hand, the industry than once characterized somewhere like Lowell or New Bedford or Salem hasn't existed for over a hundred years. It kind of feels like living in the ruins of the colosseum or something. We don't have people holding out hope that some day the whaling or fur trading jobs will return like the grandchildren of miners in depressed black hills coal towns, but we're also not in a floating world of eternal present like the metropolitan parts of the west coast. It feels like there's an honest to god historical legacy here that isn't so common elsewhere in the "new world".

>balkanization is... Oh, regional fragmentation. Seems kinda strange to mention balkans..

>>20249 >Oh, regional fragmentation. Seems kinda strange to mention balkans.. The word comes from the fragmentation of the Balkans during the long breakup of the Ottoman Empire.

>>20252 So? There are persons who aren't aware of every little historical fact. If you can say ``fragmentation,'' don't say balkanization. There's nothing inherently balkan about fragmentation.

>>20258 Both words are reasonably well-known in my country even among people who don't know the etymology. Maybe not the best choice on an international tech forum, but not worth getting mad about.

>>20194 >The worst part is just that there's a lot of traffic because the roads weren't meant to support this many people, and options for public transportation are limited because it isn't an actual part of Boston. Ugh, tell me about it. The state highway system is horrible out west because they just designated main streets as state routes, so you have massive amounts of traffic cutting through the hearts of small towns. I can't even walk to our town center despite living maybe a half hour by foot away from it. >You can bike if you're going somewhere in town but you do sometimes have to drive. I actually like this part of the state though. You're close enough to the city that it's easy to find things to do, but you're also only like 20 minutes away from "live free or die" NH so its a lot less claustrophobic than the south shore (although traffic isn't nearly as bad down there). Aye, if you go too far out west you start to see the sort of blight that you talk about below. Most of the rural towns in Western Mass just never recovered after '08 because all the growth went to cities and suburbs and they're too far out. I personally think Central Mass is the happy medium between Western Mass's desolation and Eastern Mass's cramped Boston-centric feel. Most of the inner suburbs are Boston's lackeys and imitators, which is plain annoying. >I also like these old new england cities because they feel post-industrial but in a really remote way. Like I lived in eastern Pennsylvania at one point and the old steel towns just felt like hollow shells. On the other hand, the industry than once characterized somewhere like Lowell or New Bedford or Salem hasn't existed for over a hundred years. It kind of feels like living in the ruins of the colosseum or something. It's a strange feeling knowing that most of the buildings in town are a good bit older than you are. Our library, church and town hall are older than several states. >We don't have people holding out hope that some day the whaling or fur trading jobs will return like the grandchildren of miners in depressed black hills coal towns, but we're also not in a floating world of eternal present like the metropolitan parts of the west coast. I think that feeling is more acutely felt in the farming towns. Nowadays you just can't make a living doing small-scale farming in an area like New England unless you market to tourists with U-Pick stuff, so folks either sell their land to be pieced out for homes or try to scrape by, depending on how close they are to a city. My town got lucky with that because the state razed the mills to build the Wachusett at the same time suburbs started to become a thing, so people were forced to jump ship early (Also the reason why we dislike Boston at best). >It feels like there's an honest to god historical legacy here that isn't so common elsewhere in the "new world". All of New England definitely has a sort of "historical" feeling to it, there's a story to every building and it's probably older than you are as well. I used to live in a lower-middle-class "tract homes and apartments" type suburb and the lack of an identity was shocking. There was no sense of community, no sense of a connection to the land. Even locals never talked with the area's accent, they just talked in the Californianized speech so common in the media. Indeed, there was little culture other than media and consumerism. I'd call New England the last bastion of that sort of local culture in the United States, though it's dying here as yuppies slowly push townies out of Boston and the inner suburbs. Soon they're gonna start spilling outside of I-495, and that's the end of Boston culture. Once they bring their Californian bullshit here and start fuarrrking with local government then Massachusetts will be deader than a doornail. goddamit Lain I'm trying to effortpost here, not bot around

>>20249 As someone from the balkans, I find it strange that you find the term balkanization strange to describe this.

Even if both terms are well known, a person who doesn't know either will be able to understand ``fragmentation'' simply because the word is compositional, while ``balkanization,'' compositionally suggests only that it's some process that makes something balkan, so then the question is what the hell the balkans have to do with the discussion. Of course, if a person looks in the dictionary, or understands the historical context of the term (this is where it starts looking like jargon, albeit adopted by some laypersons), the misunderstanding will be cleared up, but that extra work could be avoided by using ``fragmentation.''

I wonder how many years it would take for Boston sprawl to reach New Hampshire. There's already many who drive up sometimes for tax purposes. As you are all aware, the Free State Project is bringing 20,000 anarchists to New Hampshire. I think there's some danger about statism crawling up to New Hampshire along with the Boston sprawl. (Is there a Boston-specific anonymous messageboard? I have more to say about Boston than would be appropriate anywhere else.)

>>20299 >I wonder how many years it would take for Boston sprawl to reach New Hampshire. >I think there's some danger about statism crawling up to New Hampshire along with the Boston sprawl. It's far too late to ask when or if statism will infect New Hampshire, it already has. Just look at the shift in voting patterns, especially in the suburban counties. Pretty soon the Boston retards will get a majority in this legislature, push through an income tax and other soykaf, and it'll all be over. Welcome to your future as the unholy bastard child of Vermont and Massachusetts. >There's already many who drive up sometimes for tax purposes. I'd say that tax purposes are the worst reason to move to New Hampshire, actually, you'd be paying New Hampshire property taxes and Massachusetts income taxes, which is a hefty chunk of money. >(Is there a Boston-specific anonymous messageboard? I have more to say about Boston than would be appropriate anywhere else.) I was actually thinking of making one a while back, but if there's interest I'll definitely look into it.

>>20258 Balkanisation is a common word used to describe the break up of a country, it even has dictionary and encyclopedia entries. Its not some niche fact its just a word you haven't seen before, the correct response to not recognising a word is to learn it for the future. Not to promote some newspeak style reduction of language to a subset of words that everyone knows.

>>20258 >"little historical fact" >word comes from breakup of Ottoman Empire >massive empire that lasted six centuries and dominated geopolitics throughout the mediterranean and beyond >end of empire was result of "the war to end all wars" which scarred a continent and killed about 7% of humanity from war and war-exacerbated pandemic >"little historical fact"

>>20714 listen that is NOTHING compared to this most recent American presidential election. /s

>>20714 For most people ww1 was just germany being cunts and ww2 was germany being bigger cunts and turkey has always been turkey.

>>20715 >recent American presidential election You mean the recent Wall Street Party primary?