Activist

A bit of backstory

The United Planets Organization is an umbrella organization for all human colonised territories.

It was created around 2000 years ago, maybe a bit more than that but it's not important anyway, when earth, the place were all of humanity stemmed from, became inhabitable. Before that it ruled over all colonies as the home planet of humanity, but then the UPO became a thing, probably because of the lack of actual humans on their "home planet".

I say lack of actual humans but it's more than a lack of anything, we still learn about earth in school but it's always tainted with a bit of shame, since it doesn't even host any form multicellular life form anymore, and hasn't for more than two milleniums. That happened because of us, though I'm not even sure most people know that.

The UPO has ruled over the whole part of the galaxy we've colonized ever since.

It is here to make unified rules on trade and human rights, to conduct global research, and to militarily coerce the planets that don't submit to the rules, though that rarely happens. The military is mainly used in massive scale humanitarian disasters, when a planet has trouble sustaining itself or when a major crisis breaks out.

A lot of planets break a lot of interplanetary laws, but they always get away with it thanks to the loopholes in the system and lobbying. The most that happens is sometimes a fine, but even that is rare.

The UPO only has influence on planets, everything smaller than that is of the responsibility of the planet itself, so it ends up like " Yeah, I know my company did bad things, but if you don't mind I'm going to decide the punishment for that myself, it's not within your competence. ". Everyone knows it works that way but the only ones who could do something about it seem weirdly reluctant to do so. I really wonder what their reasons are...

So the UPO has little influence on the daily life of people, and most planets conduct their business as they want. The only thing that binds planets together is trade, and as we all know it, trade is not subjected to any kind of legal restraints, so that's another area where the UPO has no influence.

To be fair there's a place where the UPO has a lot of influence, and that's on Ixlid. That means the planet is actually pretty nice to live on, the moral rules that are supposed to apply everywhere actually apply here, so we have that going on for us. Workers are not really exploited, air quality is pretty good, we have good schools, and some other nice things.

But it doesn't mean everything here is good, far from it.

And the main cause for concern is that no one can say what is not going well.

Chancellor Trevil already has done a lot during his years to prevent anyone outside of the UPO assembly and various councils to have a voice. They have tried to prevent our opinions from mattering to anyone for a long time in fact.

All communications here are separated between the political sphere and the public sphere.The political sphere comprises of all official declarations, government-approved messages and so on. It's the verified/government-approved informations. This is the only thing that's considered serious by the public. Meaning if you don't agree with the establishment, what you say will be dismissed as not serious or not facts, since it's not official. This works well to silence nutjobs and conspiracy theorists, but it gives an (illegitimate) entity full control over public opinions and even culture, without calling it censorship.  That's because, of course, censorship is a thing of the past and no government has used it for a long time because they're so nice and attached to freedom values.

A third sphere exists, but not as big or recognized as the others, this is the scientific sphere. This one actually works pretty well, favors integrity and verified things. Conflicts are resolved intelligently and people and their opinions are respected. But the problem with that is that it still works as a sphere, it doesn't have any link to "the outside world". "The public", as medias like to call them, don't know how this system works, don't see their results and have no direct contact with scientifics of any kind. So many people end up disregarding it and believe what the political sphere is telling them about science.

What you might notice here is that in this whole system there is no place for opposition.  That's motivated by the fact that the UPO is supposed to have its own opposition from the inside, coming from the elected ambassadors, and then overcome it to reach a consensus. It rarely needs overcoming but hey, that's what it was designed for.

But what about our planet? We are completely ignored when it comes to self determination now that we don't even elect our representative, even if he always had been UPO's puppet. We are governed by the powerful of the galaxy, and I don't like that one bit.

And what about the biases the assembly has in representation? This system automatically excludes any marginal idea, any idea that can not get a whole planet to agree on. The UPO assembly ends up in a incredibly homogeneic state, which promotes their dominant idea then to all planets.

The result of that is that we are in a self-promoting system that works on a ruling class keeping itself in power, which can hardly be considered a good thing.

Talk about a vicious circle...