the one tailored to suit their playstyle? It seems not, no.

it may not surprise you to learn that part of the influence on my design for Ynn and the Library was the Dreaming in changeling...

right
the way i see it, 20th-21st century capitalism was a massive gamble by one wing of the syndicate to try to implement a particular model, which didn't take hold the way they wanted and let in a lot of jhor. I think its ok to cast the syndicate as having overreached wildly and failed their task.

a lot of this is influenced, tbh, by looking at the m20 nephandi book and extrapolating forward.

my other hot-take is that in m5, you have the virtual adepts rejoin the technos, and have their influence be part of what swings them back to being utopian. Their paradigm is basically compatible with the technocratic paradigm, and they were always a weird fit in the trads imho.

exactly, yeah.
Shkreli and his ilk are just, like, straight-up nephandic.

(wilhelm reich is more of an etherite)

The people running investment firms aren't Syndicate members, they're opportunistic nephandi. The Syndicate are more, like, the economists trying to keep vulture-capitalism in check.

the two key things with this pitch is that the technocracy is returning to its more utopian idealism, but has also lost control of the system.

if the timeline's moving forward and we don't want the syndicate to be overtly villainous, you can simply have them recognise the wildly entropic patterns in the capitalist system and be working to pull back from that.

i mean the other option is to have the syndicate's *current ideology* be rejected. Remember, the syndicate deals with /value/, not necessarily capitalism. The cold war was a syndicate internal conflict between factions supporting communism vs capitalism, after all, which the capitalist faction won.

(tbh I also find that - in a post-qanon, post-covid-denialism world - original mage's pitch of "science is a plot by a nepharious conspiracy to control you, and you should reject the mainstream consensus" hits kinda differently.)

I think there's a lot of space to play as technocrat mages trying to revive that utopian vision among their org, tbh, and it's one of my favourite angles to take in mage games.

you're 100% spot on. If you compare the presentation of the present-day technocracy and their predecessors in DA content, the contrast is pretty stark. But, at the same time, you can still see traces of that early idealism in aspects of the technocracy.

oh yeah for sure, it's *far* from a new medium.
I've been doing this stuff for, like, decades at this point. Back on IRC and mushclient and stuff.

I've seen a few names for it floating around. "living community" and "live text" and "digital larp" all get used a lot.