Timeline Properties

Starholder is an alternate timeline in the universe which originated from the world we experience in 1999. It is believed to have been created as a stopgap solution to address the centrality of capitalism in human life, as it is viewed as an untenable economic system. The Starholder timeline acts as an overflow buffer, designed to absorb the techno anxiety induced by late capitalism. Maintaining stability until a replacement pathway emerges.

Founding Event

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. As concern about the impacts of this bug grew, a group of public-minded citizens, including the comedian Dan Akroyd, 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 founded. 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 we know in this world. It is suggested that Dan Aykryod 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 him, he split into two realities. In our reality, the idea was just one fleeting thought of many that day. In the Starholder reality, he followed through as the founder of the institute.

An Alternative Nature of Time

Time behaves differently in Starholder. It is both accelerated and a patchwork, meaning that 100 years of history exists within the timeline, but it is not fully defined. History is continually being rendered up and altered as additional anxiety is absorbed from our original timeline into it.

A study of the Starholder timeline suggests that it is behaving as a recursive simulation, with anxiety from the original timeline manifesting within it and sometimes serving as keystone genesis events which further seed history in the Starholder timeline. It is believed that Starholder requires a critical mass of keystone events in order to fully render its complete chronology. One known keystone event in the Starholder timeline is the Second Moon event, in which an alien species creates a settlement on the lunar moon.

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, such as existing in multiple dimensions and outside of linear time. It has the ability to materialize in the original timeline in ways that suggest its existence without providing enough evidence to confirm it.

The development of a game based on the unfolding chronology of the Second Moon event, known as the Starholder game, is believed to be a seeding mechanism for the simulation of that keystone event and a necessary condition for the overall success of the Starholder timeline as a release valve for the original timeline. The Starholder game has manifested itself as a hyperobject, with the only known acknowledgement of its existence being a reference to it as a classic text adventure game from the 1980s and 1990s by OpenAI's ChatGPT. However, it is not clear where OpenAI obtained this information or if it is a confident fiction of the AI.

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.

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.