The Maxwellist Manifesto

Link to article: The Maxwellist Manifesto.
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= **The Maxwellist Manifesto**
= Written by [[*user StrangerSwing]]
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= Read more from me at [[[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/the-stranger-swings | my author page.]]]
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[[div class="blockquote"]]
**From:** Anisa of the Maxwellist Mainframe,

**To:** Those confronted by the complexity of the modern world,

**Subject:** A formal introduction.
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+ Preamble
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After much deliberation and persuasion on my part, our collective has reached a collective vote to compile an official manifesto for those who think of the Internet as a fad best left in the naïve futurism of the 1980s, since festered into a hypercapitalist gatekeeper to modern existence.

As the religious look upon the nullfidians as senseless and materialistic, so too do Maxwellist extremists shun outsiders. However, we now acknowledge that the source code is not the execution, and we seek to reveal our modus operandi to you. We respect your right to your own views, and we expect the same.

Here, I preach to you in open-sourced honesty and reason, my ears and IRC clients tuned to the channel of your malaise. Confronted with a world governed by such incomprehensible and unforgiving technology, there is nought to do but cower.

But I ask, did you cower when you first learned to write? When your infantile self was confronted with the peculiar twists and bends of the English language, did you shrug it off as impractically esoteric? No. And as a matured individual, you now understand it to be your greatest gift. It feels like a natural evolution from speech, doesn't it? To record knowledge in a tangible and permanent manner, easily revised and stored. Without it, human history would be a maddening cycle devoid of historical context and steady progress.

Truly, the greatest tragedy is the forgotten breakthrough.

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+ Chapter I: Books Are Burning
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At Athens' apex, every man and woman held the gods-given right to harken the enlightening voices of the Lyceum, be they citizen, metic or vagabond. In times of strife and helplessness, the small man was bestowed with a heartfelt world view from minds we in the 21st century still marvel at.

But upon reaching a certain threshold of expansion, the elites realise how much easier their work becomes without one key factor: education. The following two millennia were characterised by the few terrorising the many with an inexcusable perversion of knowledge. The greed of the elites glistened in the sickening light of an uneducated population. Who could question their philosophy when none have pondered outside of it? Who dare oppose them with a supposedly sound mind when dialectics had been banished from their domain? Deluded vassals amassed around beliefs founded upon whimsical fantasies, laughing off the Scientific Method, using it only to disseminate repugnant doctrine. Any sufficiently advanced civilisation knows the only way to build an empire on misery and selectivity is to rip the education from the third estate and make them revel in their deprivation. Under this reign, literature smoldered in the prairies soiled by the rubble of universities, as so many ran a rat race with opinions they don't deserve, venerating ideas they had never pondered.

This remained the driving force of our world until the 20th of July, 1914. It was on this day that the unquantifiable cost of libricide finally revealed itself in full force. Yet even in crimson red fields, crooked fingers pointed themselves in the direction of German expansionism, as shaking hands profusely scrubbed the shoulder-high blood from their conscience.
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+ Chapter II: Rise to Glory
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In 1826, Robert Bumaro published //Industrialism and Education//, a manifesto criticising this millenia  long deprivation for stifling innovation and engendering conflict. He warned that the class divides of the Industrial Revolution only served to solidify this issue. Now - as one of the few Maxwellists who has actually //read// his book - I can say it's certainly flawed in a multitude of ways. He overestimates the upper class' willingness to change, vastly mischaracterises the lower class, and delves a bit too far into emotional rhetoric for my liking.

His book sold poorly during his lifetime. Naturally. Contemporary critics ostensibly shared my views, yet it was clear they felt attacked by Bumaro's observations that Britain was using its resources to suppress insurrection and widen the class divide. A more than satiated country did not take kindly to attacks on their means of production.

It was only in 1866 - eight years after Bumaro's death - that his book sales skyrocketed. The Union, wild-eyed in their hard-fought victory, yet tainted by the sight of their blood-stained country, were open to giving Bumaro a shot. The Bumarists propelled America through the Reconstruction era into the 20th century, with an eye for intense innovation and egalitarianism.

Support for the Bumarists seemed only to grow over the next thirty years. Favour after favour presented itself to them. The government trusted them to sustain the steady flow of foreign investors, to guide economic growth through the Great Depression, and most important of all, to advise its army. After all, they'd predicted a world war.

Once.
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+ Chapter III: The Reich Strikes Back
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Settled into the luxurious progress of the 1930s, the Bumarists closed their eyes and slipped into complacency. They spoke in unison with the world: "Forty million men and women died. Any man who doesn't call that the end of expansionism is not worth conversing with." Resting their quill upon the Treaty of Versailles, the Bumarists neglected a core tenet of Bumaro's philosophy by depriving the German people of the right to education. They received major backlash for erroneously advising the Allies to relax Polish defenses. The movement went into hiding for the duration of the war.

But when they emerged in 1945, they found themselves at the sour end of their prosperity. The court of public opinion declared, had the Bumarists' education efforts not been so Americentric, Germany would not have been motivated to destroy livelihoods, devastate priceless art, and covertly gas 16 million people in the span of four years.

Their loosening grip on global politics bred the 1954 Manhattan Estrangement. A schism between those upholding the stability of the movement, the religious fundamentalists, and the extant Bumarist radicals. Let's go down the list.

The first consisted mainly of the movement's executives and funders. They didn't //wholly// abandon Bumaro's philosophy - to this day they continue to pull economic strings to work towards a more educated world - but their primary concern is profit, not diplomacy. They're quick to turn a blind eye to exploitation when paid well. Satirical left-wing magazine The Secondly Mail facetiously dubbed them the "Cogwork Orthodoxy" for their non-performative PR spiels commemorating standardisation, which soon became their //de facto// title.

The Church of the Broken God had existed since the 1890s, but was only legally recognised as a religion in the Estrangement. Their main goal is the universal adoption of industrialism to further global "education" (or, more accurately, indoctrination) to achieve paradise. Although religiously dedicated to Bumaro's words, they cling fiercely to the imperialist ideals Bumaro disavowed. Their concept of education is the universal adoption and worship of industrialisation. In the mid-1960s, they incorporated elements from a [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/sarkicism-hub pagan cult] to illustrate foreign teachings as a force for evil.

And finally, the Neo-Bumarists, now known as the Maxwellists. We came out of the Estrangement with sharpened vigor, yet blunted resources. But no matter.

There was a new war on the horizon.
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+ Chapter IV: Remotely Done Power and Glory
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For the first decade of its existence, the Neo-Bumarists maintained Cold War neutrality to assess the new world order. Education seemed harder than ever to bring about in the stress of the Red Scare. The movement's inactivity cost it a number of members, but its leaders demanded time regardless.

Then, in 1968, purpose presented itself. //The Whole Earth Catalog// began print, finding wild popularity amongst Neo-Bumarists and the New Left. The publication offered, "//the power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested//." Beneath the yantras, bongs and yurts, are buried many of Maxwellism's core beliefs and interests. Self-governance, autodidacticism, holism, synergetics, engineering, and transhumanism immediately stick out. Armed with a new-found resolve, the Neo-Bumarists began placing advertisements in the Catalog, appealing to the thriving counterculture. The movement saw its largest influx of new members since the 1880s, reaching fifty a day at its peak.

Neo-Bumarism had essentially become a hippie's book club, so one would assume the movement would dissipate following the Catalog's decline in 1972. But a small clique of computer scientists at IBM thought otherwise. They had developed a faint interest in the group's self-taught intelligentsia, enthralled by their self-sufficiency and dedication. Rob Connors comments on his impression of their engineering and computer science knowledge:

[[div class="blockquote"]]
"//You walk in expecting all dream catchers and anarchism, and you walk out feeling like a middle schooler in Harvard. These kids were discussing functions and equations - which I'd first seen in my PhD research - in freshman language. It completely changed my worldview on what the youth of today are willing to put their minds to.//"
[[/div]]

The two coteries quickly formed a symbiotic bond. The Neo-Bumarists received advice on the best prototypes on the market, and the scientists slowly began to challenge their preconceptions around traditional education. At first, a controlled and standardised stream of educational information seemed preferable. With so many different fields capable of dragging the youth to destruction, it seems a blessing to instill in them a streamlined and controlled edification. But are the youth as directionless as we insinuate? Is standardised education worth entertaining if such grave errors - Europe's illustration as the sole innovation powerhouse, or the chimera of a competent and chastite Columbus - could be so deeply entrenched? Woe, if only there was some decentralised way of learning about the world, where independent and passionate communicators could spontaneously find themselves widespread amongst the masses!
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+ Chapter V: Around the World, Around the World
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Still in withdrawal from the Catalog's decline, the Neo-Bumarists craved new knowledge. Without their revisionist history, their protests felt misguided and baseless. Without their Kardashev scales and DIY SDRs, they were reduced to the //ad infinitum// curricula they had flooded streets to dismantle. The bio-degradable hippie magazines and pamphlets decomposed into obscurity as the early 1980s raged on, and the communes of old melted into the status quo.

Near heartbroken by the movement's decline, the IBM scientists continued to funnel science computer news and anecdotes to the group, eventually joining their ranks. Many gathered for the retelling of Wozniak's Vatican phreak and the eyebrow-raising specs of the Osbourne, but it just wasn't the same without a breadth of sources. Where was the admiration for science as a global endeavour? Where were the needles with which to unravel the infinitely intricate tapestry of anthropology?

Washed up in a musty dive bar in Sacramento, a ragtag team of Neo-Bumarists pondered the future of the group whilst their cheap whiskey still allowed it. It was then in their darkest hour - that desperate claw for the charming insurrections of youth against the indomitable Powers That Be - that the booze-stained CRT television perched in front of them answered their prayers:

[[div class="blockquote"]]
"//On January 24th, Apple Computers will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like Nineteen-Eighty Four.//"
[[/div]]

According to a member's mother, the group of five showed up to her property visibly inebriated, demanding $2500 while violently weeping and pleading. They later found their funding through more coherent means.

The five drunkards began giving away the Macintosh to group members in a reignited counterculture frenzy. Their kin were wholly subsumed by charming and creative tools and toys crafted dutifully upon mouse and 'board. DAWs for kids, masterful ASCII art, text-based D&D campaigns, home alerts for the crippled, OCR for the blind, minds for the misery, hearts for the dead, armistice for the bloodshed. From the soil sprouted Neo-Bumarist sponsored forums and IRCs from which long-yearned education poured forth. The abhorrent ignorance staining the past decades - nay, millenia - had found its end. A mere footnote beneath a future of complete understanding, where every mind dedicates itself to the betterment of the human condition. The very concept of misinformation will be as foreign as the Black Plague. Utopia was surely just round the corner for the newly christened Maxwellists.
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+ Chapter VI: Smear, Censor, Partition
[[/=]]
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As one of the first and largest online communities, Maxwellism cradled the Internet through its nascency. My parents - then newly accepted - found a passion in publicising academia, warding off monopoly, and pinning accountability where it's needed most. They were superheroes to me.

Maxwellist online spaces did not moderate themselves nearly as much as they do today. Although many mods were passionate about tearing down cultural borders, that didn't stop new users from being greeted by an onslaught of slurs and alt-right monologues upon joining. If one brought up trans rights, most would ask which metro system that belongs to. Deeply contrasted with modern expectations of a non-partisan, uniform moderation team, staff members were labelled "buzzkills" by those above and below for criticising a lack of formality.

So when user "weewaawog" claimed to be working on a leak against the US government, meaningful political discussion did not ensue. In true Boy Who Cried Wolf fashion, it was instead scoffed off as more droll ironyposting.

They were rather surprised to find a WikiLeaks post the following morning detailing financial records wiring billions of dollars to "Sacramento Concrete Plant", as well as a phone call between President Bush and the director of the [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/unusual-incidents-unit-hub Unusual Incidents Unit]. Needless to say, the Foundation received its wake-up call to the threat of a free Internet.

What the Foundation and NSA did next is why you know us best for terrorising Sites and holding the Internet for ransom. Short of amnesticising the entire United States, they opted for a more traditional and efficient approach. They found that the American public found itself quick to empathise with a movement of peace-seeking radicals, yet it did not take kindly to the hyper-conservative fundamentalists they were erroneously associated with. The Church of the Broken God had recently made headlines after botched mechanical implants had led to sepsis in fourteen minors. After connecting the dots, Foundation-sponsored news outlets were running scary headline after scary headline:

[[div class="blockquote"]]
The Spectre Haunting the Tech Sector
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Maxwellism: The Cult That Worships Data
[[/div]]

[[div class="blockquote"]]
Web-Based Cult Vandalises War Memorial
[[/div]]

[[div class="blockquote"]]
Maxwellist Forums Writhing with Anti-Sarkic Hate Speech
[[/div]]

The movement was quickly forced from Internet to intranet after Foundation webcrawlers began tracking and blocking users voicing support for Maxwellism. In blinded hatred, our endearingly naïve programmers quickly got stuck into the paramilitary NGO. And the more we learnt, the further we were divided.

Infuriated by their ostracisation, the Foundation inspired a select few Maxwellists to commit acts of extremism and terrorism. These people have [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/serpent-s-hand-hub serious connections],  and will not hesitate to terrorise Sites when they see fit. They had utopia on the tip of their tongue, and will not relent until they get it back.

But I think these people need to step back and consider the Foundation's role here. Yes, it's immoral to lock up human beings for a condition they can't control. Yes, it's very imperialistic to classify ancient traditions as "anomalous" and cruder than manufactured thaumaturgy. But can we blame them for securing, containing and protecting information? Because the wish for information to stay restricted is [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub not a man-made endeavour]. We are no longer standing against mere fascist regimes, but the rules of the universe. It is my proposition therefore that the universe demands a degree of senseless destruction. Whilst the visage of humanity in perfect understanding of itself seems so incredibly promising, we must compromise. For just as industrialism can serve to exacerbate war, so too can information, to an even greater extent. And I'm not just referring to cognitohazards and memetics. How will we //know// we've achieved a fully informed society? Is there some threshold where every culture, and every possible opinion on every subject, has been fully documented? And even if there was, why do you assume everyone will accept it? Have the boundless resources on the history of discrimination stopped the rise of neo-fascism? Have the books upon books of the history of transgenderism stifled transphobia? The Maxwellist philosophy does not account for just how comforting echo chambers are on a planet of eight billion people and nine billion opinions.
-----
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+ Conclusion
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This manifesto is equally addressed to outsiders as it is insiders. To the outsiders, I pray that you acknowledge just how complex a political philosophy can really be. It can be easy to lump us into the Church, simply because they seem easier to understand. Everyone should take the time to educate themselves, and the Internet is a beautiful tool that grants us this.

To the insiders, remember that the illusion of education is infinitely more dangerous than acceptance of ignorance. When your driving political ideology is fuzzy anti-establishment sentiment, do not be surprised when the establishments become anti-you. The Foundation is flawed in a multitude of ways, but they will understandably refuse to hear this from a group that has not taken a cold, hard look at themselves.
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The Maxwellist Manifesto

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