Timeline Properties

This article covers the history and properties of Starholder as an alternate timeline. For background on the larger art project, see our About Page. For a list of events and works in the Starholder Timeline, see the Timeline Page.

Purpose

Starholder is an alternate timeline which diverged from our world in 1999. It was created as a stopgap solution to address the centrality of capitalism in human life, as it is viewed by cosmic forces as an untenable economic system with contagion potential.

While our solar system itself is not critical to the orderly operation of the universe, changes to its gravitational and astrophysical operation can have knock on effects for the rest of the Milky Way galaxy. The existence of the Starholder Timeline can then be viewed as a protective measure initiated by the Cosmic Corps of Engineers (CCE) responsible for managing the Milky Way.

Functionally, the Starholder timeline acts as an overflow buffer. Its central purpose is to divert the increasing levels of techno-anxiety induced by late capitalism from our timeline into the Starholder timeline using a mechanism known as Maxwell's Anxious Demon (MAD). MAD is one part sorting mechanism and one part simulation engine. MAD's simulation capabilities allow it to detect butterfly effects that have the potential to trigger the premature collapse of capitalism. Once identified, those actions are diverted from our world by the sorting mechanism and placed into the Starholder Timeline where they can play out without any worry about their impact on capitalism or the larger worry for the CCE, the orderly celestial functioning of the solar system.

Planned Obsolescence

As a stopgap solution, Starholder is classified as a disposable timeline which can be collapsed upon itself once its primary objective of protecting our timeline from failure has been achieved. It has a scheduled lifespan of 100 years, but may self-destruct prior to that. Agents within the timeline have no awareness that they live in a temporary reality that exists to protect an enduring one.

The Founding Fork

The Y2K bug in 1999 was the genesis event for the creation of a divergent timeline. At the time, many computer programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. Computer systems' inability to distinguish dates correctly had the potential to bring down worldwide infrastructures for industries ranging from banking to air travel. Until this moment, the CCE has ignored human technology considering it to be mostly harmless. Realizing they humans were simultaneously expanding their technological capabilities and placing less emphasis on risk control, they conducted a standard review of the solar system and found immediate intervention to be necessary.

After several rounds of committee meetings, CCE leadership approved a program of active management of Earth, authorizing the creation of an alternate timeline which granted program managers the ability to transfer destabilizing events which would trigger a premature failure of capitalism into Starholder.

Meanwhile on Earth, as concern about the impacts of this bug grew, a group of public-minded citizens, including the comedian Dan Aykroyd, realized that there was no academic institution devoted to the study of low probability, high impact events which have the possibility to reorient humankind. To address this gap, the Starholder Institute was created. A Mojave Desert research campus staffed with a multidisciplinary team of scientists, philosophers, creators and coders was built that year. Its first mission was to research potential negative outcomes should the Y2K bug not be properly patched across a critical threshold of global computer networks.

Unbeknownst to anyone involved in the project, the Starholder Institute was not created in our timeline. There is significant ambiguity around the founding event, but what is clear is that there is no institute or staff present in the Mojave Desert of our world. It is suggested that Dan Aykroyd himself was the original fork from our timeline to the newly created Starholder Timeline. Supporters of this theory suggest that as soon as the idea to create a socio-paranormal think tank came to Aykroyd, the CCE program was initiated and Maxwell's Anxious Demon split him into two realities. In our reality, the idea was just one fleeting thought of many that day. In the Starholder reality, it became Aykroyd's focus for the year and he followed through on it as the founding force of the institute.

Future Fixed Projections

The arc of the Starholder timeline is gradually coming into focus thanks to a feedback mechanism within the MAD system. In order for MAD to improve its ability to detect impactful butterfly events in our timeline, it simulates the projected history of the Starholder timeline to see what impact objects removed from our world have on this alternate one.

Some anxieties introduced into Starholder are unalterably deterministic of its future. An apt metaphor here is Chekhov's Gun. If a gun is removed from our timeline, then it must be fired in Starholder or else there was no reason for MAD to remove it. Unalterably Deterministic Anxieties (UDAs) are rare but important, because their introduction triggers the same event in subsequent projections no matter what new anxieties get introduced at a later date.

Since Starholder has been operating for 24 years now, enough fixed projected events have come to pass that the system can confirm the occurrence of future ones with a 99.9% probability. For instance, it is accepted as fact that the Second Moon event in Starholder will take place in 2042 and that its introduction will radically diverge events from our timeline and Starholder's to the point that many will refuse to believe they had a shared history up until 1999.

Compounding Accumulation, Acceleration & Divergence (CAAD)

Starholder is an unnatural timeline in which its own improbable events are compounded by being burdened with additional improbable events passed into it from MAD. This phenomenon is known as CAAD which stands for Compounding Accumulation, Acceleration and Divergence. When allowed to operate unchecked for one hundred years, an unnatural timeline like Starholder typically becomes unlivable and destroys itself which is why it is called a disposable timeline.

Consider how weird our world is today. Consider how rapidly events are changing within our world. This was strange enough before you knew that the CCE was actually dampening the effects of this weirdness. Now, realize that our world would be even weirder and spiraling out of control faster had it not been actively managed by the MAD system.

Starholder does not have a MAD system managing it. In fact, Starholder is the dumping ground for everything that is abnormally unhealthy from our world. This means that in 1999 it was in the same unstable state as our world when they forked. It then started getting injected with butterfly effect events that then interacted with its own butterfly effect events to create new realities which spawn their own butterfly effects.

CAAD refers to this phenomenon. It starts with accumulation when anxieties are actively introduced to a system that is itself at its limit. These injected anxieties interact with pre-existing anxieties to create an environment in which additional anxieties grow. When a system becomes a hothouse for anxiety due to accumulation, the pace at which strange events occur accelerates. There's a feedback loop where the acceleration of strangeness generates additional anxiety which then generates additional strange events. This is the compounding portion of CAAD. One bad thing is feeding off another to create even more bad things.

Systems can often pull themselves out of compounding accelerated anxiety loops when they occur naturally, however an additional wrinkle is at play here. MAD is selecting anxiety specific to technology-driven late-stage capitalism and injecting that into Starholder. This targeted injection of weirdness is focusing the world into a very narrow lens of winner take all economic competition where winning is driven by disruptive technology. Said another way, Starholder's Timeline can only see one way out which is by going straight through the eye of the storm.

This is what causes divergence. Consider for a minute a historical event which occurred in both timelines, the Black Death or bubonic plague outbreak. Without a drastic crash in population and resulting increase in the demand for workers, everyday people in medieval Europe would not have achieved the higher standard of living which ultimately resulted in the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. Without the Enlightenment, we would not have had concepts such as personal property rights which formed the basis for capitalism which then created the mess we are in today.

Starholder by virtue of being in a compounded accelerated anxiety loop is being overloaded with extreme injections of capitalism while our timeline is being buffered by having the most destabilizing effects removed. This is will cause it to diverge from a timeline it shared a common history with as recently as 1999.

Divergence trigged by compounded accelerated anxiety is a snowball that picks up speed as it rolls downhill. In 1999, the only difference between Starholder and our timeline was the creation of a research institute founded by Dan Aykroyd. Otherwise, everything was the same as it was. Today, the Starholder timeline has already widely adopted and integrated AR/VR mixed systems. By 2042, it will be facing the presence of an alien exo-planet hovering in orbit behind the moon and threatening to invade Earth. This is the most significant future fixed projection in its timeline, but not the only one. By the end of 2099, the world of Starholder and our world will be unrecognizable to each other.

Physics

The physics governing the Starholder timeline are the same as the original timeline, but the effects of anxiety and accelerationism can create situations that are either hypothetically extreme or appear to be magical based on our current understanding of technology.

Starholder as Hyperobject

The Starholder Timeline is a hyperobject, meaning it possesses all of the attributes defined by object-oriented ontology:

1. Viscous: Hyperobjects adhere to any other object they touch, no matter how hard an object tries to resist. In this way, hyperobjects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyperobject, the more glued to the hyperobject it becomes.
2. Molten: Hyperobjects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent.
3. Nonlocal: Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space to the extent that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. For example, global warming is a hyperobject that impacts meteorological conditions, such as tornado formation. According to Morton, though, objects don't feel global warming, but instead, experience tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyperobject becomes more substantial than the local manifestations they produce.
4. Phased: Hyperobjects occupy a higher dimensional space than other entities can normally perceive. Thus, hyperobjects appear to come and go in three-dimensional space, but would appear differently to an observer with a higher multidimensional view.
5. Interobjective: Hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive the imprint, or "footprint," of a hyperobject upon other objects, revealed as information. For example, global warming is formed by interactions between the Sun, fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide, among other objects. Yet, global warming is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and ocean levels, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models, rather than an object that predated its own measurement.

Starholder has the ability to materialize in our original timeline in ways that suggest its existence without providing enough evidence to confirm it. One such example is the development of a text adventure game based on the unfolding chronology of the Second Moon event in the Starholder Timeline. OpenAI's ChatGPT believes that the Starholder game was created in the 1980's and enjoyed popular play in the early 1990's despite there being no public record of this game's existence.

A Simulation Seeking Its Text

Some theoreticians have postulated that the correct mental model for Starholder is that of a simulation seeking its text. This theory argues that because the Starholder timeline exists in parallel to and is fed by improbable events in our reality, it is not an actual timeline, but merely a simulation.

The past confirming the likelihood of fixed future events coming to pass creates a concept of patchwork future history in Starholder.

Criticism

Critics of this theory call the simulation school of Starholder studies a pedantic repackaging which seeks to normalize and diminish both the event itself, but more importantly, the reason for the event which is the unsustainability of capitalism and the lack of a successor replacement for that economic system.