Revolutions - 11.9- Too Little Too Late

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

When you have to make a change, it's important to wait too long... Pateon: patreon.com/revolutions Merch: cottonbureau.com/mikeduncan

Hello, just so you know, this will be the last new episode of the year before we take a two-week break for Saturnalia season. We will be back after the new year with even more new hashtag content for your listening pleasure. In case you haven't alerted your friends, family, or yourself, if you need a last minute Saturnalia present, lots of cool things are available at Cottonbiro.com slash Mike Duncan. That again, Cottonbiro.com slash Mike Duncan, they're the best Saturnalia presence imaginable. I also want to thank everyone out there who has become a patron at patreon.com slash revolutions, where you can get the entire back catalog of revolutions ad-free, plus bonus content that will only be available to patrons. Thank you so much. Your support means everything to me. And if nothing else,

$5 a month means I'll keep pumping out new episodes of revolutions, whether that revolution is in the future or whether we're in the future and our revolutions are once again in the past. So, merchandise is available at cottonbrew.com slash Mike Duncan, and the Patreon is Patreon. patreon.com slash revolutions. Thank you so much for your support. Happy Saturnalia and on with the show. Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 11.9, too little, too late. There had been multiple opportunities for Timothy Warner and the Mars Division authorities to avoid what became known as Bloody Sunrise. Had they changed course just a little bit, they could have maybe avoided all the big things now hurtling at them at the speed of history. So much could have been avoided had Warner listened

more and insisted less. But instead, he stubbornly clung to a plan that wasn't working just because it was the plan. Timothy Warner had his plan, and when reality didn't align with his envisioned result for that plan, he demanded reality change, not his plan. And that, my friends, is never going to end well. But in just a minute, Timothy Warner is finally going to be forced to bend, to change his plan, a little bit. But before he did that, he had one last fling with total denial before he got there, just for old time's sake. Warner's first response to Bloody Sunrise was to cover it up as much as possible. Warner didn't want anyone who wasn't directly involved to know what had happened, and he ordered very tight censorship controls to stop the story from spreading. He didn't want the news spreading to Tharsus or Elysium.

He certainly didn't want it spreading back to Earth. But it was here that he lost control with a plot. One of the whole objectives of the Society of Martians in organizing the march up the cargo tunnel was to document everything and spread coverage of the procession as widely as possible. To demonstrate to people on Mars and on Earth, the conditions had become so intolerable that it was triggering an unprecedented protest march of tens of thousands of people.

and that was before it turned into a scandalous massacre. So the Society of Martian Activists had the footage, had plans for disseminating it, and were able to easily evade the censorship programs that were hastily thrown up in response. Pirated videos circulated through the black channels, and soon the story and the footage were available to anyone on Mars or Earth who cared to pay attention.

And I plump forgot to mention this last time, but there's a really good digital repository run by the Martian archives where all of these vids are available to watch, Though fair warning, some of it is pretty disturbing and graphic. The footage of Bloody Sunrise was bad enough that Warner finally had to have uncomfortable talks with his closest supporters on the board of directors. As I said last time, they were mostly being fed unreliable information about how things were progressing on Mars.

There had been rumors that maybe it wasn't as greatest Warner claimed, but now there was this grisly vid footage that could not just be waived away. So Warner had to sit through a series of calls with support. porters back on Earth who express shock, alarm, and concern. And they told him, look, this is starting to feel untenable. We think you might have to change the way you're handling things on Mars. Werner's response, naturally, was to shift the blame to someone else. He laid this all at the feet of Mars Division Director Apollo Tanaka. He said that Tanaka had lost control with the situation and had even misled Warner himself about certain critical things. He also claimed security services had been told not to fire on

the crowd that day, but they ignored Werner's direct order. But he told them, I've already taken care of that part. And if poor performers in the lower classes were going to have their contracts annulled, then the upper classes should face the same consequences. So both Tanaka and the head of Mars Division Security Services, a guy called Dayton McCrash, by the way, were both terminated. Both of them were ordered to pack up and board ships back to Earth at the end of January 2247. The board of director says, yes, that's great. Obviously, they are to blame not you, but what are you going to do to ratchet down tensions? There will be a shareholder revolt if anything like this happens again. And here, Warner, through gritted teeth, finally gave up and said, fine. I'll make some changes

to how Mars is being run. He, of course, had a bunch of possible policy changes to choose from, most of which were found in chat memos from Apollo Tanaka. So he picked a few. and then wrote a company-wide chat memo that was issued on January the 31st, 2247. After expressing his sorrow over what had happened, Werner expressed his double sorrow because it was the result of a misunderstanding. One of the primary demands of the protesters had been to bring an end to the annulment of contracts. But Werner now said in this chat memo, that was already going to happen.

There was no need for further contract inolments because the compositional quality of the personnel on Mars had already been improved dramatically. He said that this had been settled before the march, and it was a tragedy these activists had been more interested in performative protests than accepting one of their big demands had already been met. This was, of course, a flagrant lie, and he offered no evidence of having ever communicated this to anyone because, well, no such proof existed.

He then went on to say that there had also been a lot of misunderstanding about what was going to happen to the annulled. In his opinion, a lot of will. misunderstanding on the part of malcontents and agitators, spreading the false rumor that people whose contracts had been annulled had to go to Saturn. That Werner said had never been true. They were, of course, free to return to Earth and always had been. He said it had never been policy to demand fees for passage home, nor that passengers needed a close connection to sign papers securing their right of return to Earth. The option of taking a new contract and going to Saturn had only ever been

just that. An option. Here, though, Warner humbly acknowledged Omnicor had not done enough to communicate that, or combat the misinformation being spread. But in case anyone didn't know, if you were annulled, you didn't have to go to Saturn. You could simply return to Earth, free of charge. Then, he said after spending all this time on Mars setting things right, he felt confident in letting go of the rains a bit, that the extreme centralization of decision-making would now be relaxed.

Mars Division would be put in the hands of Mars Division authorities who would be able to respond quickly and efficiently and competently to all further developments. And here he announced that he himself would be returning to Earth. His time on Mars was over. What more proof did anyone need that things were actually fine? Left unsaid, of course, was that after Bloody Sunrise, Warner was keen to get the hell off of Mars, lest anything like Bloody Sunrise happen ever again. and he ended the chat memo by saying that the newly reempowered Mars Division authorities would have a new addition to their corporate structure. The Martians had been saying since Mabel Doors campaign for the board of directors that the Martians needed a voice. Well, now they would get one.

He was initiating the creation of a thing called the Martian Advisory Council. This council would be composed of 24 Martian-born executives who would be able to provide valuable input and guidance for the Mars Division authorities. It would remain to be seen how influential this council would be. But as Ken Slid describes in the last days of old Mars, a detailed account of the period between Bloody Sunrise and the Three Days of Red, the creation of the Martian Advisory Council was meant to do two things. Pacify the general population of Mars by giving them something they would believe represented them, at least on paper, but more importantly to give elite Martians the voice that they believed they deserved,

to give them a stake in everything, to cleave their interests from the lower class. Maybe Martian A's and B's would stop helping and funding the D's, who were the really scary problem. So the big takeaway from Werner's parting chat memos, four things. First, no new contract annulments. Second, people who had been annulled did not have to go to Saturn. Third, the extreme centralization of decision-making would be dialed back. And fourth, the Martians themselves would now have a voice in the Martian Advisory Council. Those were the things he did say.

So now let us turn briefly to what he did not say. He did not say that those who had been an old would be reinstated, only that they would not have to go to Saturn. But if you were born and raised on Mars, what was Earth to you? Alexander Clare was a third-generation Martian. Going to Earth may have been better than a one-way ticket into the void of no return that was Saturn, but it was still deportation to someplace she had never been, and away from her home forever.

He also said nothing about all the technological upgrade, save for a brief comment that he understood there had been hiccups along the way, but that there was no going back now. That part of the new protocols would remain unchanged. After issuing this company-wide chat memo, Timothy Warner packed his bags and left Mars on February 2, 2247. The scope of his failures would become known to the solar system in stages. On the day he blasted off, some people on Mars knew how bad things had gotten,

but information was so tightly controlled and censored and compartmentalized that it was tough even for Martians to put together the full picture. Back on Earth, Mars was generally little regarded or thought about. The footage of Bloody Sunrise made for good screen fare, but there wasn't a lot of real context or understanding in the general population, though it did obviously have an impact with the board of directors who were like, maybe our vaunted CEO isn't doing as great a job as we thought. As the years went on, and everything that happened happened,

and then more years went on and more data and sources and information came to light, while then it became glaringly obvious that this is a story of a man who inherited a bad situation and made it worse, and that these policy changes here at the last minute, issued literally as he left the planet behind forever. It's just not going to be enough. What is hilarious, though, is that when Timothy Warner was asked, things had gone so wrong on Mars, he would ignore all this stuff he had done up to this point and say, this is really what did it right here, that the changes he made to the new protocols in early

2247 as a response to bloody sunrise, that that is when things went from being salvageable to irretrievable. The very things that had he done them earlier probably would have salvaged the situation. So in case he were starting to worry, no, he never did internalize any kind of responsibility, nor did he learn a single damn thing. One of the very last things Warner did before leaving was name a new director of Mars Division. For this, he simply elevated the vice director, Ava Zhang. Zhang was an undistinguished and effectively anonymous executive, who wound up becoming vice director of Mars Division because she was undistinguished and effectively anonymous.

After all, if you were distinguished and well-known, you didn't wind up getting sent to Mars. only people who lacked good connections got sent to Mars. Now she was being handed an incredibly volatile situation that even the best leader would struggle to navigate. That she failed is not really her fault, but that would not stop Warner from blaming her for failing to clean up the mess he had made. There's a really good book about her called Cliffs of Class, Ava Zhang and the Martian Revolution by Ged Harara, that shows that despite the daunting task in front of her,

that she was somewhat optimistic about things. The annulments had been suspended, that was a huge blessing, and she was not at all opposed to the idea of a Martian Advisory Council providing critical recommendations to get through the rest of it. She was even writing home to friends that the promotion would be a great boon to her future career prospects at Omnicor. Zhang convened the Martian Advisory Council for the first time on February the 13th, 2247. Now, because the MAC was a pretty naked attempt to co-op the Martian elite

and divide their interests from the CDs down below, they could not get away with excluding the most vocal and well-known of the Martian elite. To exclude them would undermine the whole point, which was to get the disaffected elites back on sides. And so among the 24 members of the MAC we find Mabel Dorr, as well as several other members of the Society of Martians who would go on to serve in Doors' cabinet, like Clarice Bo, Kinder James, and Omar Ali, who I first mentioned last week, and who we will get to in due course. The other members of the MAC don't appear to have been in the Society of Martians, but they were all Martian-born A-class executives. At the first meeting, Ava Zhang promised that she was here to listen and take their advice seriously,

and I think Cliffs of Glass make it clear she wasn't lying about that, but she was working inside of larger forces that would quickly overwhelm her. After convening, the Martian Advisory Council roughly divided into two groups. One group believed that Werner's parting concessions were enough to get the situation back under control. The Martians now had a voice, that is us right here in this council. There will be no more annulments and no deportations to Saturn. All that's left to do is increase security, restore normalcy, and get everyone back to work. The other group was led by Dor and her people who said, yes, this is a great start,

but we have to consider it a beginning, not an ending. and though they had a list of suggestions that included a plan to finally put an end to all the technological bugs created by the new protocols, their central recommendation was reinstating the annulled. That it was simply not enough to stop future annulments. Those who had already been annulled needed their jobs back. They needed their lives back. Despite the fact that Zhang had been somewhat re-empowered to make decisions, she could obviously not immediately take so bold a step as to reinstate the annuled. but she definitely agreed with those on the council saying it was of paramount importance to restore order down in the warrants.

She would take a wait-and-see approach towards the reinstatement question. After all, the promise of no deportation to Saturn might just resolve this issue all on its own. And the thing was, we can't say that no one responded to that part of Warner's parting concessions. Among the annulled, there were those who had been born on Earth, who had immigrated to Mars in their own lifetimes, and who did have connections back on the blue planet. They had been terrified to show their faces because they didn't want to get sent to Saturn, but now that they were promised to return to Earth, they were ready to quit their shadow existence on Mars and report for processing.

And to Omnacor's credit, they didn't lie. Those who reported were actually put on ships back to Earth as promised. But in the end, this only accounted for about 20% of the annulled. The rest were Martian-born Martians, and they were not going to voluntarily report to be sent anywhere. So for the most part, tighter security and control down in the warrants was the principal upshot for the D-classes. Censorship was set to maximum levels to control communications. Scanning, monitoring, and tracking were all placed on alert levels that involved actual human involvement by both security services and the C-class supervisors. Bonuses were increased for the supervisors for hitting basic work metrics like hours logged

to get the supervisors focused on making sure people were where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there, regardless of output quotas. This was just one of a host of new bonus options. For example, those running commissaries could be rewarded for cutting down on double ration scams that allowed Martians to skim extra food that they could smuggle back to the annulled who were in hiding. These inducements mostly have the intended effect. Supervision was ratcheted up across the board, and it became very difficult to move around

with seditious impunity. Zhang also put in place new pay and bonus structures for the security services. There would now be big rewards for identifying and detaining the annulled. Now, since the annulment started, security services had simply been expected to round up the annuled who didn't report for processing as a regular part of their job. But in their book, the Shadow Martians, Luca Ellick, makes the convincing case that up until now, one of the biggest reasons the annulled had been able to stay hidden, was that the security services had not really been trying to catch them. Because actually trying to catch them meant a lot of extra work they were not particularly inclined to do if they didn't have to. So they were very adept at explaining how impossible it was to do what they were being asked to do. Right up until the moment they were offered large bonuses for every annul they identified and delivered for processing,

and suddenly the job wasn't so impossible anymore. There were two big things that required a lot of extra work that they had previously not wanted to do, but were now willing to do. first was manually reviewing and recalibrating monitor footage to make better and more accurate face matching that could compensate for the pixel wash. The second was going through skin chip locator programs and manually monitoring the auto reports. They always knew the location of every employee's skin chip. That was easy. But the annulled had fallen out of these automatic sweeps. Culling through the raw data and identifying pings that weren't part of the auto report had simply been too much work, and they simply hadn't been doing it.

Now that they had a financial incentive, they started really putting in the work and identifying unidentified skinship pings that were hiding in the data. So the location of an old Martians could now be reasonably pinpointed. At first, the Martians did not realize that this was happening, and security services carried out sweeps and grabs that grew the numbers tossed in the stockades for processing. These sweeps and grabs were so laser-focused that the Society of Martian networks realized that the security services had clearly gotten off their asses. The recommended response was twofold. First, it appeared pixel wash wasn't as effective as it had once been, and the annuled really did need to avoid all major tunnels and five-ways,

because clearly the quality of the monitoring had jumped up quite a bit. The second recommendation was more drastic. Skin chips were a biomechanical component embedded in the hand that could be gouged out in extreme circumstances, but it was a painful process that would leave visible and easily identifiable scars. Plus, skin chip removal was its own. self-grounds for immediate termination. So as long as there was a chance at reinstatement,

removing the skin chip was incredibly risky because it seemed to all but guarantee a permanent shadow existence without any hope of returning to normal life in the future. But many of the inold took that risk, and skin chips started getting ripped out, because the immediate threat of deportation seemed to far outweigh the long-term implications

of being chippless. So the result of all this was that, yes, some annulled were voluntarily coming out of the shadows and accepting transport back to Earth. Security services were nabbing more people than ever before, but none of this was coming close to putting the issue to bed. Up in the Prime Dome, more and more members of the Martian Advisory Council shifted in Mabel Doors' direction. The only way to close the books and move on was to reinstate people who had been annulled. It was the only way things were going to go back to normal,

because they were also keeping an eye on further incidents that were cropping up down in the warrants, any one of which might set off another bloody sunrise. And through May and June 2247, little fires were breaking out all over the place. One notable incident was a scuffle down in the warrants that turned into a brawl that very nearly turned into a riot. A group of about a dozen C-class supervisors decided to slum it down in a D-Class entertainment zone. They got fueled up and started running their mouths about how much better things were going. Wasn't it great that the inold were finally getting the boot after all they had? had been the ones causing all the problems, and they openly bragged about the bonuses they were

getting for keeping their D-class techs focused on their work. This endeared them to precisely no one, and things seemed to have exploded when they offered to buy a round for some techs using bonus money they had gotten for keeping their teams on a tight leash. A drink got tossed, a punch got thrown, and pretty soon about two dozen people were grappling, fighting, and slamming into each other. Security services mobbed the scene and immediately went after the D-classes and protected the C-class guys who had provoked all of this. This only infuriated other Ds in the entertainment zone who had not taken part in the original fighting. They went after the security services, who only just managed to get the upper hand thanks to a wave of reinforcements. Dozens were arrested and thrown in the stockades.

Another notable incident followed a couple weeks later. Some D-class techs showed up to their work sites and discovered that overnight, several of events, their former co-workers who had been an old had been rounded up for deportation. When they were ordered to start working, they set down their tools and their screens, and they said, we're not doing anything. And then they said the dirtiest word in Omnicor's corporate code book, strike. They refused to listen to their supervisors. They refused to do any work. They tried to spread this strike, but the comms were on tight restriction, so they couldn't communicate with anyone. And their section was quarantined to prevent them from physically moving to other areas and carrying the dreading.

contagion of a work stoppage, of a strike. All the workers involved were arrested and thrown in the stockades. And these were just a couple of literally dozens of little fires breaking out, all of which are detailed in the last days of old Mars. Back up in the Prime Dome, the Martian Advisory Council started turning in Mabel Doors' direction even more and arguing that we have to stop incidents like this, and the only way we're going to do it is reinstatement. Plus, they were all getting leaned on from people they had

connections to in their personal lives. There were annulled amongst the B classes and even a couple of A's. Their friends and families were now leaning on the members of the Martian Advisory Council to do something to get them reinstated. And here, Eva Zhang started to budge. She was not insensible to the fact that Werner's annulments had been heavy-handed and done probably more harm than good. You know, probably.

But this was not a decision she could make on her own. But with numbers to show Werner, about how many and old were voluntarily reporting, and the successes that the security services were having and rounding up those still resistant, that maybe they could wrap this all up by doing some targeted reinstatements, especially among the B and A classes.

She very deliberately pitched this as a way to continue cleaving the interests of the Sabs from the Ds down below. After much begging and pleading, Werner finally responded that there could be some targeted reinstatement of managers and supervisors. So starting in June 2247, new lists started getting posted. Not more annulments, but reinstatements.

But just as the annulments had started at the bottom and then risen to the top, reinstatements would start at the top and go to the bottom. So all the people listed on the initial reinstatement posts were B's and A's. Now, for them, it was a miracle to be wildly celebrated. People suddenly found themselves able to come out of hiding, and there was just jubilation in the upper habitat areas. It really did seem to be a return to sanity, like maybe things would go back to normal.

But other members of the Martian elite, especially in the B classes, felt the supreme injustice of all this, especially those in the Monce Cafe set. Marcus Leopold and Ivana Darby had been waging a never-ending crusade to protect those who had been rounded up for deportation, but faced a nearly impossible fight,

nearly always lost. But now the reinstated, statements were finally happening, it was dead obvious they were being offered to one set of Martians, but not a different set of Martians. And the only thing that distinguished them was their employment class. And so one of the things that begins to percolate here that will obviously become hugely important during the course of the revolution, is what is the point of the class system in the first place? Why should one Martian who had been an old get deported just because they were D-class, while another Martian doesn't, just because they're in the B-class.

Every Martian was a Martian. Every Martian was equal to every other Martian. The class system itself was proving itself to be a gross injustice. It always had been. And now they were being motivated to really do something about it. Because while we're here and talking about it, why is the Martian Advisory Council, the supposed voice of all Martian,

composed entirely of A-Class elites? Didn't all Martians deserve a voice? As the title of this episode doesn't just imply, but beats you over the head with, everything the Mars Division authorities were doing here in 2247 was just too little, too late. Had all these policy changes gone into effect months and months ago, yeah, maybe they could have done some good.

But there was simply too much anger and too much fear out there. And now that the B and A class annulled were being reinstated, even the Martian Advisory Council started to fall back into a complacent belief that they had done enough, that all they needed to do now was track down the last annulled in hiding and the warning, in the warrants, ship them back to Earth, and it would be smooth sailing from there. But next time, we will see that far from smooth sailing, they were all headed right into a storm. In July 2247, the overstuffed stockades will become ground zero for an insurrection that will

begin as a simple act of resistance, but blow up into nothing less than the Martian Revolution.