11.4- The Election of 2244

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.4, The Election of 2244.

As with any revolution, historians argue about where to put our arbitrary and invisible temporal brackets to define the period we call the Martian Revolution.

Just last week, for example, I said that the the Martian centenary in 2209 was a good place to draw a line and say, this is when the swirling forces that become the Martian Revolution start converging.

But that was 40 years before the Revolution, and I'm happy to admit that contingencies, accidents, and different choices could have led Earth and Mars to very different historical outcomes.

In 2209, the Martian Revolution was not inevitable.

So the question is, when do we start to feel like those converging forces are coalescing into an unavoidable sequence of events.

The death of Vernon Byrd in February 2244 is an awfully tempting place to draw that line.

Now last week I also mentioned the historian Hamish Soto.

He's the one who said that Martian independence was still contingent and avoidable heading into 2247.

But I think it's unconsciously revealing that while Soto staked out this provocative thesis in the Declaration of Martian Independence Crisis and Contingency, when it came time to write his own general history of the period, Mars in Revolution, where does chapter 1 begin?

That's right, in 2244 with the death of Vernon Byrd, because even Soto must admit that at a certain point the array of contingency becomes circumscribed by the actual historical actors in place at a certain moment.

We can always say hypothetically a person could have done this different or that different,

but could they have?

Contingent choices don't come from nowhere.

They are born of the psychology and personality of the historical actors themselves, which are not necessarily as mutable as we might suppose.

Everyone knows Napoleon made a world historical mistake when he invaded Russia in 1812, and had he made a different choice, history would have gone very differently.

But that choice was born of Napoleon's personality, his experiences, his beliefs.

Is it really true Napoleon could have made a different choice in that moment?

No, I don't want to stray into dogmatic determinism here.

I'm just saying that the reason the death of Vernon Bird is such a critical causal moment in the coming revolution is less about Bird exiting the story and more about who is entering the story.

Timothy Werner.

And while one might yell and scream at Werner to do something, anything different in the years to come, was he really capable of doing something, anything different?

It's kind of hard to see how.

And that's why 2244 is when we say that the converging forces start coalescing into an unavoidable sequence of events.

Timothy Werner was born in the Geneva Dome in Switzerland in 2199.

It is difficult to imagine a person born into more maximum privilege.

Both branches of his family were S-class omnicore executives.

He was raised in the most elite rungs of corporate society, where it was possible to not just float above any and all social, political, and economic problems, but to not even be aware such problems existed.

But remarkably, Werner did notice them.

Despite every opportunity and incentive to tune out the world and enjoy a life of unconcerned luxury, Werner was curious about the world.

He was curious about philosophy and art and literature and economics.

At a young age, Werner developed an unshakable faith in his own ability to master any subject.

And from a young age, he was a firm believer in reasoning from first principles.

He approached every subject for the first time as if the subject was being approached for the first time by anyone.

that at least as much could be accomplished by setting aside the accumulated wisdom of the past as building on top of it.

Werner graduated from the Sorbonne in 2225 and entered Omnicor's finance division, where his family had long carved out a multi-generational niche, making his placement there a foregone conclusion.

In between the rather mundane work of corporate banking, Werner indulged in his polymath interests.

In the span of one year, he wrote articles about Rembrandt, beekeeping, and orbital platform engineering.

He attended various salons and conferences, ever eager to learn, but even more eager to weigh in.

He was convinced he had something to contribute to every conversation, every debate, and every discipline.

It was at one of these conferences, specifically one about space gardening, where he met Sarah Cartier.

Cartier was herself a young executive from an S-class family starting out in Omnicorps' public affairs division.

Werner and Cartier fell in love immediately and signed a marriage contract within six months.

Unlike most marriage contracts of their time and class, Werner and Cartier were noted for being romantically devoted to each other.

They had two children, Claude and Carolyn, and even hostile biographers, of which I can assure you there's no shortage.

Note their nuclear family was full of mutual love and support.

Werner's chat logs, even during the worst periods of the coming revolutionary crisis, show him in constant contact with Sarah and the children, even if sometimes he maybe should have said, I'm sorry you had a bad day, Claude, but there's actually something more important I need to take care of.

But it never seems to have occurred to Werner that anything could be more important than being there for his children.

As Werner slowly rose up the ranks, he continued to be possessed with a zealous self-regard that made him believe that in all times and places, his ideas would improve things, that his idea was the best idea because it was his idea, and the best idea was his idea because it was the best idea.

Otherwise, he would have a different idea.

So while he could have just punched the clock, Werner constantly made suggestions to his superiors about how to improve things and make them better.

Some evaluators found this grading, and one performance review noted that Werner wrote 37 memoranda over one fiscal year suggesting changes to the structure of his own department, the finance division he worked in, as well as a half-dozen other divisions he did not work in.

The evaluator noted dryly, however, that not one of these suggestions was implemented, and at least half were literally unimplementable.

Werner remained absolutely unfazed by the rejection of his various suggestions, and in fact, he was only further emboldened to keep at it.

Now, a mind like his, with its restless desire for fresh ideas and new thinking and continual progress, seemed perfectly calibrated to be driven mad by the later bird years, with its calcified institutional inertia and persistently growing dysfunction.

But with an almost preternatural faith in his own ability to break through eventually, Werner just kept at it.

Because while it seemed like his temperament was ill-suited for the later bird years, it was also perfectly suited for the later bird years, because he was not the only one who could see how badly things were being run, how frustrating the lack of renewal at the top of the org chart was, and how badly things needed to change.

But there was one critical difference.

He was willing to speak up.

Werner's efforts may not have had any immediate effect on things, but it did earn him a following among a younger cadre of executives and shareholders, and by younger I mean people under the age of about 75.

They had all been perma-blocked from rising to the highest rungs of the corporate ladder because the ancient oldsters were camped out on top of them.

In the 2230s, there was quite a bit of grumbling that this was all in fact going on for far too long.

The dysfunction of Omnicore was becoming harder to paper over, and they were dealing with like a third consecutive generation of stifled, frustrated ambition from younger executives who were held down by a geriatric crust.

But no one seemed willing or able to stick their neck out and talk about it.

And that is where Werner really shined.

Because of his family, his position, and his own self-regard, he spoke up where others stayed silent silent and just went along.

Now, as I said last week, over an eight-month span in 2241 and 2242, three members of the Board of Directors died, suggesting for the first time the eternal gerontocracy may not be eternal after all.

Obviously, competition for these three vacant seats was incredibly high, and none of the voting shareholders had participated in elections since they approved the life tenures back in 2193.

So the possibility of new members being elected to the board was an exciting prospect.

After some internal deliberations about procedures, it was eventually decided that all three seats would be filled by a special shareholder election in the fall of 2242, with the top three vote-getters winning seats.

Now, depending on how you define a viable candidate, there were somewhere between 114 and 281 candidates who declared themselves or received votes for these three vacant seats in the fall of 2242.

In a race with so many candidates, it was difficult for any one of them to stand out.

So even a little bit of distinction, a little extra juice, would be enough to set you apart.

Werner had both.

He needed very little encouragement from his friends and family to declare himself a candidate on a platform of fresh ideas.

And that set him apart.

He later enjoyed pointing out that he was elected to the board with the most total votes, but that vote total was only about 4% of the total votes.

But in a comically crowded field, it was enough.

Timothy Werner was elected to the Board of Directors at the tender age of 43.

He was in some cases a hundred years younger than his new colleagues.

Werner spent the next 18 months raising his profile further.

The other two new members of the board were division heads looking to put the final capstone on their resumes.

But Werner stood alone with a vision for the future, of looking ahead to a time when the company would not be run by this ancient board of directors.

From his position he created space for criticism to actually be voiced, and for the idea to be floated that maybe, maybe, maybe, things did not have to be like this forever.

Loose talk started to grow, especially around the idea that maybe the life tenure vote of 2193 should be reconsidered, possibly overturned.

Those who had been shut out of the highest rungs of the company for so long finally felt the door crack open.

Demands started bubbling up that board members should attend meetings, make public appearances, be seen, do things.

For the first time, the aides running headquarters had difficulty stifling these complaints and demands, and Werner used his own position on the board to press the issue further.

Now, we'll never know to what extent this pressure would have succeeded or failed on its own, because on February the 17th, 2244, the supernova-grade news exploded in everyone's faces that Vernon Bird was dead.

This was profoundly shocking news, but within a matter of days, memos started flying that the Board of Directors must not immediately elect a new CEO without some kind of consultative process with at least the senior executives and major shareholders.

Maybe there could be some kind of plebiscite, however technically non-binding it would be, for people under the age of 100 to express their opinions about the state of the company.

And here the AIDS running headquarters made a critical blunder.

Instead of heeding these calls for delay and consultation, They went the other way.

Not wanting the selection of a new CEO to become a mass airing of grievances, they instead moved swiftly to make a selection to clear the issue off the table.

On March the 8th, the Board of Directors convened electronically to vote for a new CEO, unanimously selecting from among their own ranks Karen Killingsworth, who was herself 132 years old and who had not been seen in public in more than 25 years.

Far from putting the issue to bed, the election of Killingsworth set off a firestorm.

Company communications were instantly jammed with outrage and complaints that erupted like a geyser, and not just from younger, lower-level executives, but division heads who could not be so easily brushed off.

Over the next several weeks, the aides at headquarters tried to carry on as if this would all blow over, but by April the company was gridlocked with internal dissension.

The demand from below was now that the life tenure vote of 2193 needed to be rescinded, and Omnicord needed to return to its previous model.

of one-third of the board being up for election each year.

In response, the board issued a proposal saying, you're right, we need to make a change, and we will therefore adopt a consultative shareholder plebiscite to weigh in on the selection of future CEOs.

But that was the demand in February, and it satisfied no one by April.

The inability of headquarters to respond to the moment kicked the demands up a further notch.

Over the summer of 2244, company communications were jammed with exasperated frustration.

It was also filled with scandalous evidence of the corruption, graft, and total usurpation of corporate power by the aides at headquarters.

And this is all very funny because everyone had known about and participated in the charade, but now that Bird was dead, people suddenly decried it as a shocking travesty that was just now coming to light.

People started saying that what Omnicore really needed was complete renewal at the top.

That putting just one-third of the board up for election was not enough.

Every seat on the board needed to go up for election.

By September, this idea had broad support, all of it backed by senior executives eager to finally get their shot at the top.

On September the 5th, the board announced its willingness to hold elections to replace one-third of its membership, but that was the demand in April, and it satisfied no one by September.

Meanwhile, a few members of the board started to feel the heat in whatever capacity they were still able to feel heat.

Three of them resigned in July, five in August, another five in September.

In the seven months since Berg's death, the company had all but ground to a halt.

The internal fervor was such that on October 1, 2244, the aides relented.

They issued a statement bearing the key log signature of Karen Killingsworth, announcing that on December 1st, a shareholder election would be held for every seat on the board.

Change was finally coming.

Now out on Mars, the Sab elite were as plugged into these corporate channels as anyone throughout 2244.

They followed along with and participated in all the debates from the moment Bern and Bird died.

But they had a specific niche interest.

When calls circulated to bring back elections to the board of directors, the Martians agreed that Mars deserved a seat on the board, that with Mars being such a critical part of Omnicore's portfolio, that a Martian should be allowed to sit on the board.

When the demand started flowing that the life tenure vote be rescinded, that one-third of the board should be renewed and then the whole board should be renewed, the Martian position was always the same.

Yes, and at least one of of these new board members should be a Martian.

The question of who that Martian ought to be resolved quickly in favor of maybe the only Martian it could be.

And that was Mabel Dorr.

In their biography, The First Martian, Mabel Dorr and the Martian Revolution, Eggers Janice describes how Dorr saw this opportunity as soon as the first board member died in 2241.

That maybe not today, but at some point down the road, Mars was going to become large enough and important enough that a Martian would become influential enough to rise to the uppermost rungs of Omnicore.

Her chat logs on the subject were mostly vague gestures in 2242 and 2243, but when all hell broke loose after the death of Bird in 2244, suddenly her thinking became a lot more specific.

If change was coming, Mars deserved a Martian voice.

Not later, but right now.

And who better to be that voice than Mabel Dorr herself?

Dorr was not wrong to consider herself the perfect candidate for the job.

As we discussed last week, Mabel Dorr was incredibly popular on Mars.

Her name was known to all classes.

She was respected among the Saab elite as a dedicated and competent administrator, and she was loved down in the lower classes for her philanthropic generosity.

This was all theoretical, of course, until October the 1st, when the beleaguered aides at headquarters announced that every seat on the board of directors would go up for election in two months.

That very night, Dorr posted a screen vid to servers on both Earth and Mars, announcing that she was running for a seat.

Mars deserved a Martian voice, and she would be that voice.

Now we need to be clear about a couple things when it comes to the election of 2244.

First, this was a shareholder election on the basis of one share one vote, not one person one vote.

And given the unequal distribution of Omnicore shares, Martian votes were never going to amount to much.

And Dorr knew that going in.

But did that mean there were no votes to be had?

Absolutely not.

Omnicore had always included company shares as part of the benefits package for relocating to Mars.

Now did many Martians liquidate those stocks as soon as they were awarded and convert them into ready credits?

Yes, of course.

But oftentimes they did not.

And sometimes people didn't even realize they owned stock.

Omnicore had long used nominal amounts of stock as bonuses for hitting certain benchmarks at performance reviews.

D-Class techs especially were often not even informed that they had earned these stock bonuses.

Were there enough shareholder votes on Mars to put Mabel Dorr onto the board of directors?

No, not even close.

But if she turned out every Martian vote and drummed up additional support on Earth, she might be able to make a little noise and plant the idea that the Martians deserved a voice.

Dorr's campaign apparatus, funded obviously by her own personal fortune, coalesced first among the A's and B's.

These elite supporters participated in two ways.

First, they dove headlong into the election debates happening on the company servers.

Their goal was to drum up support for the idea that Mars deserved a Martian representative, a message that was frankly ignored by most commentators and shareholders, but which did find a little currency among those who sympathized in an enlightened sort of way.

But the A's and B's also spearheaded efforts to identify, target, and turn out every Martian shareholder they could find.

They managed to secure a list of every shareholder on Mars, and the vast majority of them were down among the D-classes.

So the A's and B's went down to talk to the Ds.

The shareholder canvassing operation is really important, because it becomes the formative basis for D-class political consciousness.

We talked last week about the Martian Way cultural movement in the B-class, but this was mostly seen and heard by people in the Saab elite.

The Martian Way didn't really penetrate into the lower classes.

There were certainly some D-class techs who got plugged into Martian Way material, as opposed to the bright noise feeds from Earth, but they were mostly inert politically.

And remember, the vast majority of Martians were totally unaware of the red-cap coup attempt in 2229, which had happened right above their heads.

But the seeds of revolutionary potential were absolutely there to be tapped.

And right now, here in the election of 2244, they are going to be tapped for the first time.

The main impediment to D-Class political consciousness had always been control over their media consumption and the hours that they worked.

The D-Classes were totally overworked, and had just a limited amount of recreational opportunities.

Standard workdays were 15-hour shifts every single day.

There was no such thing as a day off.

If you asked a Martian what they were doing this weekend, they would say, what's a weekend?

If anyone spoke up about overworked, they faced the threat of immediate contract annulment and deportation to the Saturn colonies, from which, so far as anyone could tell, nobody ever returned.

In between this work, as I say, they had a few limited recreational opportunities, but all the media they consumed was just bright noise pumped up from Earth that never made any mention at all of current events.

All of this conspired to keep them in line, focused on their jobs, and ignorant of larger affairs.

Now, as soon as the campaign of 2244 started, A and B class supporters of Mabel Dore started dipping down into the D-class warrens, posting up at drink holes and entertainment zones to spread information about the campaign for Mabledore, A Voice for Martians.

Now many of them knew Mabledore, and if they could be cajoled into stopping, their name would be plugged into a database to see if they could vote.

Many were shocked to discover that they were in fact shareholders who could vote, though as often as not they were more excited about the possibility of cashing in the stock they just discovered they owned for credits rather than participating in the election.

Now of course this is all happening just 15 years after a coup had been attempted, and the 2230s were a time of increased repression on Mars, not relaxing standards.

But Byrd's death and the rapidly unfolding cycle of events that followed caught Martian colonial administrators flat-footed.

There was nothing in company policy that forbade Mabel Dore from running for the board of directors or forbidding A and B class people from going down into the Warrens.

But it quickly became apparent to the authorities from reports they were getting from C-class supervisors that this was all heading towards dangerous political waters, that upper-class agitators were encouraging the D-class to think about their grievances, and how a Martian voice in Omnicore was not just a good idea but a necessary idea, and that it would be unjust to deny it.

So within weeks of Dohr's campaign getting going, the colonial administrators handed down edicts denying A and B class employees from accessing D-class areas unless they had been specifically approved to do so by the company.

They also started curtailing the upper classes from accessing certain servers back on Earth, though the latter was very easy to get around and never really proved much of an impediment.

But down in the Warrens, the seeds that had been planted sprouted and grew of their own accord.

They no longer needed the A's and Bs.

The shareholder database list had passed to enough D-class hands, and enough canvassing teams had been set up that they didn't need the elites anymore.

The Ds could do it for themselves.

And they were frankly much better at hiding things from C-class supervisors than the A's and Bs had been anyway.

Among these D-class techs who got their start in politics canvassing shareholders for Mabel Dore's election in 2244 was young Alexandra Clare.

The campaign spread wider and faster than the colonial administrators could suppress, and with the addition of the D-classes now active in a politicized Martian identity, the political apparatus that would activate in the crisis years to come was now set.

We have A-class executives surrounding Mabel Dore, plus a lot of B-class Martians who were already advanced politically, now fused with the masses down in the D-class warrens.

This was the basic structure of the first wave of the Martian Revolution.

But despite the fact that Mars deserved a voice, Mars was never going to speak with one voice because no society has just one voice.

Standing against and between the A's and B's on the one side and D's on the other were the Cs.

These mostly earthling supervisors nursed resentful hostility to those above them and cruel intentions towards those below them.

They stood as the most reliable supporters of the S-class colonial leaders, as well as more Earth-oriented A's and Bs.

Plus, there were plenty of D-class techs who were recent arrivals from Earth, who had their own resentments against the Martian-born part of the population, who often took advantage of new arrivals.

Every revolution is a civil war, and so too would it be on Mars.

For two months, Mabel Dorr's campaign apparatus worked tirelessly to identify and turn out Martian shareholders.

Then came the big day.

On December 1, 2244, the shareholders of Omnicor voted to elect a whole new board of directors.

This was a momentous enough event that even the bright noise from Earth was interrupted to broadcast the results.

All over Mars, From the drink holes down in the Warrens to office suites in the Prime Dome, Martians gathered to watch the results come in.

Now as I said, Dorr herself was under no illusion that she was likely to win a seat.

This was about making noise and being heard.

But as the night progressed and winners were announced, all Martians started noticing something.

The votes from Mars were never even mentioned.

Mabel Dorr was never even mentioned.

Not even once as a notable curiosity.

And then the last results came in.

The 52 new board members were proclaimed, and that was that.

The broadcasts from Earth switched back to their regularly scheduled programming.

The Martians were not mentioned even once.

This was a bitterly disappointing result.

Now, Mabel Dore and her elite supporters knew she wasn't going to win, but to not even have Earth take the slightest notice.

That stung.

It really did.

Meanwhile, down in the Warrens, in the push to rally shareholders among the D-classes, well, the messaging had never come with the preemptive expectation that victory was not actually on the table.

So to them, the fact that Doerr didn't win was all on its own a crushing blow.

But for their votes to not even be mentioned, for Martians to not even be mentioned, not even once.

Well, for some it turned them off politics entirely.

But for others, it radicalized them.

The final coda to the election of 2244 came a week later, and that is where we will begin next time.

Because this brand new board board of directors felt empowered to elect their own new CEO.

And the man they will elect is none other than Timothy Werner.

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