Network States
Network States
Fiction: A look into the hundreds of people re-fighting WWII in real time over cyberspace.
This article was written based on events between August 12, 2023 and June 1, 2024. Some names and details have been changed to anonymize certain subjects.
Harold Vaunnett badges me into his San Francisco workplace and we set up in the break room. It’s airy, full of light, a pre-war loft turned programmer den. The few employees around us pay us no mind. “I’m a senior front-end dev,” he tells me, and he looks the part. ‘Senior’ at twenty-four is not unusual at a startup like Piloo. He has red hair, shoulder-length. At first glance, he’s the kind of guy whose Tinder photo has the Cal campus in the background, who talks about nootropics and bouldering with utter sincerity. What’s less apparent is the war he’s waging against the Axis Powers as Chief of the Imperial General Staff for the British Empire.
I owe this story to my former roommate, Joanna Kim, who told me about a group of guys fighting World War II all over again through the internet. She was the one who got me in a Telegram group with @Libberator, also known as H. Vaunnett. Two weeks later I was meeting him at work for an interview.
He unzips a neoprene laptop case and pulls out a gray, 3D-printed cross. In the center is a profile of George VI, encircled by the words, ‘FOR GOD AND EMPIRE’.
“The PM mailed this to me earlier this year,” he tells me, beaming. I weigh it in my hand, feeling the plastic ridges. “For not fucking up Dunkirk. I’m now Sir Libberator, OBE.”
“The PM being another user?” I ask.
“Yeah, Fini, Finiburek, he’s Croatian,” Harold explains. He opens his camera roll and finds a saved selfie of a pasty Croatian man in a hoodie throwing up a ‘V’ beside a portrait of Churchill. “He's been PM for two years. He was the one who convinced me to ditch BurgerTime and join the Brits.”
“BurgerTime?” I ask, starting a voice memo recording. It's all coming at me pretty fast.
“That's the American team Discord,” says Libberator, rolling his eyes. “I could get into that, but it's a whole thing.”
“Let’s start with the basics,” I tell him, and he’s kind enough to walk me through it all. HOIMMRT, which he pronounces ‘hoymert’, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing project using a heavily-modded version of the game Hearts of Iron IV. HoI4 is a Paradox game, a ‘map game,’ where players command nations and direct their troops and economies. The Hearts of Iron series, in particular, simulates World War II, beginning in 1936 with a world on the brink.
These games are, according to Libberator, the domain of ‘virgins and autistic savants and weirdos.’ Normally, one player controls each nation, and the entire war unfolds over five to twenty hours of play. With HOIMMRT, two major changes have been made. First, each major nation is run by roughly five to thirty players, each of whom takes a specific role within the administration. Second, the game has been slowed down to the ludicrous pace of real time. An hour in the game is an hour in real life. Since HOIMMRT started in 2018, the in-game world has only made it from 1936 to 1941.
“We’re all getting older,” Libberator tells me, sounding wistful. “In the first year there were only like twenty guys. During the pandemic it blew up. That’s when most of the current UK leadership started. I’d say two thirds of newcomers quit in five months, so six months is kind of the probationary period.”
There's so much to dig into, and I’m having trouble deciding where to start. “Do you pay to participate?” I ask. “Who keeps the game running?”
“Oh, the worldmasters,” says Harold Vaunett, eating a chicken avocado sandwich from his bag. He says the term as if it's self-explanatory. “HOIMMRT was created by this guy Sovereigno. He’s fully anon, he made stacks off Bitcoin calls in ‘19 and this was like his passion project. He runs all the game instances on AWS and he pays two modders to run it and do the custom UI. I guess he worked out some deal with Paradox to not get TOS’d even though he set it up with cracked copies to do a LAN outside Steam.”
He goes on about Sovereigno and the worldmasters for some time. I learn that Libberator may have doxxed him on Wordpress, and that he allegedly lives in Puerto Rico to dodge federal taxes on his crypto. I also learn that Libberator is far too honorable of a gentleman to ever spill the man’s true name to a reporter.
“Have you ever met up with anyone from the game in real life?” I ask.
“Oh yeah, like half of BurgerTime live in the Bay. They used to do meetups at Cal before we all graduated and got old. We kind of had a falling out when I joined UK.”
“They didn't want you to go?”
“No,” says Harold, smirking. “I just called them all pussies one night at a house party after they voted to stay out of the war. I was pretty drunk.”
I talk to three other people that week in the Allied leadership—two over WhatsApp call and one by text through Discord DMs.
The first is @KingSalad, who works as a bank teller in Nottingham and gave me permission to use his real name of Nathan Samuels. KingSalad is the head of logistics and equipment production for the British Empire, and for the first twenty minutes of our call he raves effusively about the new logistics system that has just been added to the game.
“It’s a complete overhaul,” he tells me, his thick accent hard to understand at times. “HoI is a very different game than it was in ‘18, and the worldmasters could have just stayed with the same build we were using back then, but they’ve actually taken the time to patch in the latest updates and it makes a huge difference. Supply is way harder now, with trains and hubs and all that. It's a real bitch, mate.”
“If the mechanic is a bitch, why would you want it added?” I ask him.
“Because Jerry’s shit at it and I’m not,” he laughs. “I’ve been training the Free French logistics boss, on how to unfuck his North African supply lines. We have some vision on Italian movement in Algeria and their supply is a total mess by comparison. It's hilarious.”
“Are you helping the Russians, too?” I ask, unaware that I’m stepping on a social landmine.
He gets quiet. “That's up to the PM and the diplo corps,” says KingSalad. “Officially the policy is no contact. I just make the freight go where it's supposed to.”
The second call that week is with the new first sea lord of the British Navy, @Humungoose. In contrast with KingSalad, Humungoose is downright cagey, adopting a professional cadence as if he’s giving a press conference. I soon learn that he’s new to the job, having replaced the original first sea lord, @Jungerian, in a very heated dispute.
“Essentially,” Humungoose groans, when I push him to talk about the firing, “Jungerian lost a lot of our Atlantic Fleet to U-Boats and seaplanes last year, and people were accusing him, certain people, of being an Axis double agent, and those people found his Reddit account and they found, like, posts praising the German army in the Great War, and altogether they sort of made a case that he should not just be replaced but actually banned from the Allied master Discord, and he was.”
“Couldn’t he make a new account and rejoin?” I ask.
“He would need to pass the probationary period with the new account to get back in,” the new Sea Lord tells me. I later learn he’s a writer himself, from New Delhi. “I don't think he would be interested. It was very bitter at the end. He said some very terrible things and threatened some of the other players. It was rough.”
After my talk with Humungoose, my perspective on the game begins to shift. This isn't like some weekend LARP where you take off your elf ears and go back to your day job on Monday. This is a constant commitment. Army leaders go to sleep and wake up to urgent messages about flanking maneuvers and encirclements. At a real-time pace, every single division on the front can be micromanaged to an extraordinary degree. Amid it all, there's a heavy layer of social politics and paranoia at play. Loyalties are questioned, and the lines between real politics and gameplay personas become somewhat blurred.
For the Allies, that all seems simple enough, but a new question forms in my head as I consider the whole grand entanglement—what's going with the Axis?
“J*rnalist. ok lugenpresse kek. mods pls get him special flair. welcome ser.” This is the first response I get to my (somewhat dorky) introductory post on the HOIMMRT Axis General Discord.
I go through the public channels, looking for anything of interest. At first glance, I notice that #japan is totally dead. “Yeah nippong does not want to be our frens :(” @Pantzer tells me, in an apparent break from historical reality. “You can go join their GEACPS LINE group but be warned it is 95% moonrunes.”
After some backscrolling through the #lobby channel, I decide that moderator @Falklandoor seems like a well-spoken and respectable point of contact. I shoot him a DM, and after relatively erudite pleasantries he agrees to write out honest responses to my questions.
So, I conduct my third interview, this time with the minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich. Some of his answers he permits me to share right away. Some he requests be held for six months, until relevant battle plans have been executed. A fair few things he only agrees to share off the record.
“One thing you have to understand is that many Axis players are resentful over railroading a.k.a. all nations being limited to historical political goals, because of course the Axis lost in real life, so much of our side feels that Sovereigno is forcing us to lose again by having us pursue risky goals like opening up the Eastern Front. This is very myopic in my view, because we are the ones with initiative and the will to power, and we can set the table any way we want with the advantage of historical hindsight.”
I press him for an example, and he goes on. “Look at the Battle of France, earlier this year. Everyone thought blitzkrieg would fall flat because the Allies expected an Ardennes move and extended Maginot through the Benelux in 39. Of course, Generalfeldmarschall Factrius saw this preparation and created a false Panzer army to pretend we were pushing Benelux, all while coordinating with me to push out paratroopers with a huge buff stack under Student. Now we can use those same airborne for Sea Lion instead of having to pivot from Panzers + Motorized Inf to Amphibious.”
I later learned that this was the crux of the bad blood between the UK and US leadership. British Prime Minister Finiburek, anticipating a German paratrooper invasion of Britain, got on a Zoom call with the thirty-five American players (who vote on policy as a ‘congress’) to beg for eight hundred fighter planes as a lend-lease. Many American players argued that most of the fighters would be lost to German submarines en route, and that they would be better used in the hands of the Chinese. In the end, I’m told, the Croatian called them lamentable cowards and hung up.
“All of this is fascinating,” I write to Falklandoor, “but to be honest I’m more interested in the human side. You guys are RPing as a genocidal regime. Are you afraid of professional consequences? Does anyone ever take it too far?”
“First off, there is no concrete evidence that our in-universe Third Reich is committing the holocaust,” Falklandoor writes back, going on a long diatribe about supply lines and delousing and beloved Jewish players in the Axis community. “We haven’t even Barbed,” he adds, referring to a theoretical coming invasion of the USSR. “Of course, we all wish we could Barb soon because ultimately defeating communism in Europe is the whole point. We don't want to crush UK and France we just need them to accept Eastern Europe is volk sphere of influence.”
Driven by curiosity, I tell him I want to meet a German leadership player in person. “Come to the June war briefing Discord call,” he tells me. “We just assume Allied spies are there so we won’t say anything too important, but if you pass vibe check with some of the führung maybe you can DM them and meet up. I am strictly anon, sorry. Don't want to have to explain being a Reichsminister to HR, haha.”
Six months later, Falklandoor would go public whether he liked it or not, when Soviet Internal Affairs Commissar @Bunzo revealed Falklandoor to be a Texas insurance broker named Hugo Anthony Garcia. This is nothing that hasn't already been published elsewhere.
I attend the Axis strategy meeting and I’m eventually allowed to speak. I’m struck by how plain the voices seem, relaxed and affable and majority mid-thirties. Everyone is male, and almost all are American. After a bit of chatter, I put together that Großadmiral @Dongwaffen and the führer himself, @BigIron6, both live in the vicinity of Boise, Idaho. In a group chat with the two, I make a pitch to meet up for a beer in their neck of the woods.
“Ok but if ur a fed then gay + this is entrapment + it was all bants + i was just following orders + shotguns are a war crime + ur a kulturterror shill + lusitania was a valid military target,” Dongwaffen replies.
“?” I write back.
Twenty minutes pass. “Let me know when you’re in town and we can go to Bittercreek Alehouse,” the führer responds.
Führer BigIron6, to my mild shock, is a well-adjusted humanities professor at University of Idaho Boise. He shows me his school ID card to prove it. “Dongwaffen’s gonna be late,” he tells me, checking his phone and speaking with utter seriousness. There’s a heaviness to the man, as if struggling with some great artistic work that's putting a strain on his soul. “I don’t know about this country sometimes, man,” he says over potato skins. “I love America. I’m a patriot. I’m trying to do things right, I just don't know if it's too late.”
The game comes up surprisingly little, unless I press him. “It’s something to do,” he says, almost deflecting. “Men like us used to make history, you know. We used to hold the fate of the world in our hands. Now we’re all just plugged into the big machine. I guess that's what the game is, for me, it’s like my little piece of the Matrix. My spot in the big machine where I can imagine I’m living like our forefathers lived.”
“What drew you to the Axis?” I ask, getting to the heart of my curiosity. “You’re literally the leader of the Third Reich. How does that happen?”
“They lost,” BigIron6 murmurs. “What’s sexier than a last stand? I knew, if I joined the imperialists—”
“The Allies?”
“Yeah. If I joined the Allies and we won I would feel like it was pre-written, like we were just riding the wave of the big machine. That’s already my real life, I don't need it online. But, if we win as the fatherland… we’ll know we were really men of our own destiny.”
Dongwaffen never shows. BigIron6 gets distracted, texting a lot toward the end of the night. I tell him I’m here in Boise to visit my uncle, which is true, and he tells me to consider having some kids so I can have something to live for besides myself. I ask if he has kids, and he says he does. His wife is a nurse, and she's waiting for him at home.
I shake hands with the führer next to his Ford Taurus, and we part ways.
My next few weeks are spent diving into the East Asian HOIMMRT community, with the help of Google Translate and an occasional VPN. I quickly learn that the Japanese and Chinese factions are run near-exclusively by players living in those nations, and that all the internal discussions occur in their respective mother languages.
The Chinese players use a private QQ group with 96 members, although only thirty seem to be regularly active. Most of the conversation is focused on 人海, human waves, referring to the comically large amount of reserve manpower China can afford to spend repelling the Japanese. There's also a great deal of discussion around a figure named 老大列宁, ‘Boss Lenin,’ whom I eventually put together is the head of Soviet logistics CatgirlLenin herself.
CatgirlLenin, having lobbied for a massive Soviet lend-lease program for China, has created a Chinese faction far better equipped and more mechanized than their real-life counterparts. In fact, as far as I can tell from my first week of lurking on QQ, the Chinese are the only ones far exceeding all historical expectations. The atmosphere, despite heavy losses, feels giddy. Nanking has not fallen, and the Japanese Empire has been stymied in multiple disastrous naval invasion attempts. “日本鬼子哭了,” or “The Japanese devils are crying,” appears frequently on a meme with a red China-ball grinning smugly and CatgirlLenin as Overwatch’s Mercy handing down anti-air guns from the heavens.
The Japanese Discord is far more subdued, and most of the discussion appears to happen in private LINE group chats that never accept any outsiders. “Wait for doitsu,” written in English and referring to Nazi Germany, is frequently used as a response to newcomer accounts who ask about the state of Japanese strategy. One such newcomer, after asking a few times when the next naval invasion would begin, receives a very long response from a moderator explaining why their awkward sentence construction reveals them as a foreigner, and thus a spy. After that, silence prevails.
It's two months after I meet with BigIron6 that Trapgate commences. You may have heard about this, when it got to Reddit, or three weeks later when it made the Portland local news. I had the dubious fortune of seeing it all from the start.
It begins at 11:56 pm Pacific with a message from the now-deleted Dongwaffen account in the Axis General Discord. I’m glad I have screenshots to go off, because by the time of writing it’s all been scrubbed. “NAVAL BRANCH BEST BRANCH SOVIET BATTLE PLAN IS HERE,” he posts. Then he sends a 483 kilobyte document titled USSR_battlelines_1941_v4_TOPSECRET.docx.
“fake and gay,” the commander of the Afrika Korps, Feldmarschall @EhKilzAliens, replies, also at 11:56.
“How tf did you get this,” someone else asks.
“got it from veravee’s laptop,” Dongwaffen explains. At the moment, this means nothing to me. I later learn that @veravee, Vera Velasquez, is a Portland-based twenty-eight-year-old trans woman, political YouTuber, socialist agitator, and Associate Infantry Tactics Commissar for the HOIMMRT Soviet faction.
“stolen laptop felony theft enjoy prison. oh wait theft is legal in chazoregon.”
“no stolen laptop,” Dongwaffen replies, “i emailed it to myself from her apartment we were hanging out B)”
“WTF IRL?” The questions start pouring in now. Others are obviously reading the document. Many people are typing. “did you bang a tr00n dong jfc”
Anime reaction images from Dongwaffen. “yeeees for the volk of course only uwu”
“Did she know u were axis?”
“no i’ve had a fake acct in the Soviet Discord for six months and I met up with her at a DSA mutual aid event.”
“>her”
“Holy shit bro is irl mata hari stuff of legends.”
Photoshops of Dongwaffen’s profile picture, a grinning American chopper pilot with aviators in Vietnam, start pouring in. They range from mildly gleeful to heinously obscene.
Then @Grunnie, Reich Commander of the European Home Divisions and notorious mudslinger, chimes in. “Fake and I can tell you why. I am in a group chat with high command including Dong and the fuhrer, and I guarantee if this was a legitimate intel operation then Dong would have shared it in the secret group so we could do Barbarossa without Soviet spies in this Discord knowing we have their battle plan.”
Most people seem to agree with this. The highly extensive Soviet battle plan is regarded with serious scrutiny, and its appearance is deemed too convenient.
Then, at 12:40 in the morning, a message from Führer BigIron6 appears in the chat in shimmering gold. “Oops. Forgot to add Grunnie to the actual super-duper high command group chat. Yes the battle plan is real and yes Dong actually did penetrate Soviet leadership IRL for great volk justice. High Command has had the docx for two weeks and Barbarossa starts tonight. I wanted to let Dongwaffen break the news with a bit of panache. Thank you gentlemen for the hard work you’ve put in getting us to this point. This is podracing. This is where the fun begins. Ten weeks to Moscow ez, deus vult.”
“DEUS VULT,” about forty Axis accounts respond amid massive meme spam and airhorns over the #tunes channel. I realize at that moment that the server ‘Axis General’ is nothing more than a public-facing hangout, at best a PR outlet and at worst a honeypot for spies. All the actual strategy is happening far away, in smoke-filled Signal group chats.
I decide to check on the BurgerTime Discord. Most people are asleep. “WILL YOU FUCKING DECLARE WAR NOW YOU USELESS LIBS,” a user with a sexy Link profile picture named @Twilink shouts in #general, “CCCP IS GETTING SHREKED RN BARB HAPPENED.”
I stay up all night watching a Twitch stream of the Eastern Front and monitoring five different online war room communities. I feel like an addict. I feel like it’s news, not a game, like I’m watching Prigozhin drive for Moscow all over again. Of course, no one’s dying this time. It’s all a mirage—but the mirage is taking hold of me.
Around 4:30 am, US Domestic Infrastructure Secretary @EmpireStat wakes up and posts in the BurgerTime lobby. “o fuck barb”
The Twitch stream of the Russian border reaches 460 viewers. German Panzer divisions are slicing through the Soviet line like box cutters, encircling supply depots and masses of Russian troops. Motorized infantry are right behind them, filling in the frontline. German leg infantry, supported by high-armor heavy tanks in a configuration derisively referred to as “Space Marines,” are proving impossible for the Soviet divisions to dislodge.
Much of the discussion in BurgerTime revolves around the surprising effectiveness of German fighter-based air superiority over Russia. With great dread, they watch German air control surpass eighty percent—the threshold needed to begin paratrooper operations. “Someone text Libberator and tell him to get Spitfires over Ukraine or it's GG by the end of the week,” EmpireStat adds.
“Can’t rebase to Russian airfields without USSR joining Allies,” Libberator replies. I notice that he has rejoined the BurgerTime Discord after long absence. “They will join by EOD but we need to keep planes over UK still or Sea Lion will be paratrooper cheese.”
Then someone in BurgerTime posts screenshots of the Dongwaffen Soviet doctrine leak from Axis General. The tone shifts in seconds. “That's actually rape by deception,” US Air Force Commander @Shermanator posts. “Look up Oregon criminal code. Also taking the files off the laptop is hacking. Federal crime. That bozo is probably going to IRL prison.”
“Classic fash.”
“Least gay germany player.”
“Rule 6 no transphobia please. You will be muted.”
“How was I transphobic?”
“I think it's a LARP.”
“Someone should probably go to the USSR Discord and check on Vera.”
“There be commie dragons.”
“they banned all US team players last year.”
“I’m still in it.”
“Link?”
I click through the link to HOIMMRT Tankies United II. I’m not allowed to post until someone approves my membership, which never happens, but I can still lurk in the #comrade-cooler channel as the debacle unfolds. There's a raging debate over whether the game should be rolled back two weeks, due to the theft of the battle plan.
“Sovereigno is a lolbert cryptofash,” @Abyssal posts at 11:10 am. “Absolutely zero chance he does a rollback or anyone gets punished for this.”
Shortly after, Soviet Intelligence and Internal Affairs Minister @Millicent comes in with a lengthy update. “I just spoke to Vera on the phone,” she tells the group. “Yes the theft and the rest of it is real and yes the user in question pretended to be a leftist DSA volunteer to gain access to her apartment. At this moment she does not want to press charges and she asks you to please not bring this to the authorities or media due to the risk of harm to her and her roommates who are also marginalized folks.”
“unalive him,” @Amethyst posts, and I pay no notice. It's lost amid a torrent of sympathies over the Dongwaffen incident and lamentations over the collapsing front.
I text BigIron6, bleary-eyed. “Got time for a call?” I ask. Five hours later we're on the phone.
He's sharper and more verbally agile here than he was at dinner months ago. “You said Dongwaffen lived in Boise,” I say, “but he was in Portland the whole time?”
“Opsec,” the führer tells me. Operational security. “Got to flood the zone. We were never planning on Sea Lioning with paratroopers either, you can print that.”
“What if you are, and that comment itself is a planted feint?” I ask.
“Good,” he chuckles. “You're learning.”
Three days later, CatgirlLenin is subjected to a five-hour Zoom where the Soviet leadership grill her on her failure to produce adequate anti-tank guns. She and Army Minister @Siskover are blamed for the compositional deficiencies of the Red Army, and in the end both players resign while refusing to admit wrongdoing.
@veravee does not log on to Tankies United II again.
Back in San Francisco, I meet Harold Vaunnett for coffee. “Compared to the other factions, Commonwealth chat is downright idyllic right now,” he muses. Showing me his phone, he scrolls through a recent history of polite discourse between the UK, Raj, Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, and Free French players. “Stiff upper lip, I guess,” says the red-haired man.
“So you would never go back to the US faction?” I ask him.
“I don’t think so,” he tells me, “but we made up. I’m going to a meetup in Palo Alto this weekend. A lot of people have been DMing me to say the mood is shifting toward war. We aren't expecting any Pearl Harbor, but, still. The laptop thing has a lot of people really pissed off.”
The next week all the big news hits. First, Leningrad has fallen. Second, Großadmiral Dongwaffen has been hospitalized IRL, and Reserve Admiral @zinner has been placed in command of the German Atlantic Fleet, with support from the Italian High Admiral @Spengloni. Third, a man had been arrested for ambushing Dongwaffen outside his house in Portland and breaking his ribs with a steel pipe. Fourth, the arrested man was Amethyst, a regular poster on Tankies United II.
Misinformation spreads through every national Discord, Telegram, Signal, QQ, and LINE chat like brush fire. Some allege that veravee had ordered the attack. Some allege that veravee is Amethyst. Eventually, it comes out that Amethyst is a seventeen-year-old DSA member named Ethan Frunn, now a legal adult at the time of writing.
Frunn swears he did not coordinate with any other players. He was acting alone, in response to what he described as sexual predation in the DSA community by Dongwaffen, a forty-one-year-old gun store employee named Chester Beauchamp. Beauchamp presses charges, claiming that Frunn was trying to kill him. The local news, picking up the story, focuses on it solely as violence between political extremists. Frunn is described as white nationalist adjacent. HOIMMRT is never mentioned by name in the article.
I consider going to Portland to interview the participants, but decide against it. Vera Velasquez is nowhere to be found. Ethan Frunn is back with his foster parents, awaiting trial. Chester Beauchamp and his lawyer try and fail to get Frunn tried as an adult. Death threats are mailed to Beauchamp’s workplace. Soviet players try and fail to get him fired from the gun shop. Stalingrad succumbs to a crushing pincer encirclement.
A heavy intensity sweeps across the player base. The Twitch stream surpasses 3,000 concurrent viewers for the first time. A HOIMMRT subreddit is created, mostly for onlookers, and a moderately popular strategy game YouTuber makes a three hour video on Trapgate, which he re-coins The Dongwaffen Affair. Every major nation is flooded with requests to join, and most minor nations become entirely player-run. In a rare public appearance, Sovereigno makes an announcement that he will be upgrading the game’s AWS plan to handle additional traffic, and that donations in BTC or Ethereum are always welcome. I message him to ask for an interview, and he never answers. By April of 2024, which is March of 1942 in-game, there are over 700 people actively playing HOIMMRT.
By the time Ethan Frunn is sentenced to six months in juvie, no one cares about the case anymore—even the Soviets. The heat of war is too intense, too immediate, and too all-consuming to allow for social grievances to linger. Around that time, I learn that the Soviet leadership has begrudgingly allowed KingSalad of the UK faction to step in as their Logistics Minister, in order to, in his words, “unbum it a bit.”
May 3rd, Harold Vaunnett invites me to be his plus-one at a BurgerTime party. “When’s this article coming out, anyway?” he asks me as we Uber to some estate in Mountain View.
“When it’s done,” I tell him, not knowing when that might be.
We arrive, and the place is bumping. Americana adorns the two-story house, like Fourth of July in May. ‘LET US CONTINUE…’ a banner reads above the TV. On screen, someone is casting a rave-themed portrait of FDR. A handful of the young guys here wear suits and fedoras with some indeterminable degree of self-awareness. The rest are dressed more fratty.
Somehow, astonishingly, a quarter of the attendees are relatively stylish young women. After chit-chat, Harold and I find that none of them play the game.
“Attention!” a skinny guy wearing a pageant sash calls out from halfway down the stairs.
“Listen to the mothafuckin’ president,” a dude bellows, and everyone quiets.
I realize that the skinny man is @Basadu, American president, and that the house we are in belongs to him—or at least his parents. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, speaking loudly with a put-on mid-Atlantic air that sounds vaguely Kennedy, “you are all here today because you are sons and daughters of liberty, because you want to see peace and enterprise uplift the world and put an end to human suffering. There is no nation in a better position to achieve that than the United States. Some of you, senators, were present this morning for the vote and already know the gravity of this day. For the rest, let me tell you now. The fascist empires of Germany and Japan will not be allowed to engulf our Earth in darkness. We are the light. America is the light. Standing here as your president, I assure you now, we will come to the aid of our mother Britannia in this war, and we will win!”
Someone on a laptop hits a soundboard key, and an airhorn sound effect blares. Streamers in red, white, and blue explode from poppers, filling the air. A cover of “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays, loud, as everyone cheers and chants, “USA, USA!” It’s unlike any time I’ve heard the chant before. It’s not a joke to these people, it’s not football or even national politics. It's war. Cyber-war. Network war. Culture war. The intoxication is inescapable.
We get beers and eat hot dogs and sit on the back porch watching the secretary of war cannonball into the swimming pool. “What will you do, when it’s over?” I ask Harold. “It's been so many years of your life.”
“I dunno,” he says. “There's a lot I’d do differently, knowing what I know now. Battle plans, priorities. If the worldmasters start another game up, I guess I’d just play again. Keep putzing my life away, closing Jira tickets and earning plastic medals in little map games. Until we get a real one, you know… a real world war.”
He leaves me with that. The secretary of war resurfaces in the pool holding lost car keys. This world around me feels far from true war, but it feels just as far from true peace. It’s a third state, a managed post-scarcity land where the battles of our forefathers play out as farce over TCP/IP. It doesn't seem like it's ever going to end.
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