Alternate history writing looks at "what if" scenarios; What if the Soviet Union won the Cold War? What if the Roman Empire never fell? It's not just interesting escapism; it also allows readers to look critically at the world they really live in and reflect on current events. Popular alternate history stories have even become major television shows or movies. Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel "The Man in the High Castle" is set in an alternate timeline where an assassin killed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Germany and Japan won World War II. The book was later adapted into an Amazon Prime series.
On Reddit's r/althistory subreddit, users post scenarios asking, "What if the Soviet Union intervened in Iran?" or, "What if the U.S. plan for the Middle East was implemented after World War I?" The usual posts garner a handful of likes or comments, but a new alternate history timeline is making the rounds with interactions in the thousands. This new timeline, from Redditor GeorgeSquarshington, looks at an alternate world where someone really did hack the 2024 presidential election, both sides contested the results and America fell into a dark civil war.
GeorgeSquarshington, who asked to be identified by his username because of harassment around the sensitive nature of his story, calls his scenario, "How would Reddit react to a modern civil war in the USA?" The story plays out in fictional screenshots from social media, Wikipedia, YouTube and more, all posted to the Reddit channel.
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"I saw where people were claiming that the election was stolen, like even my mom and dad talk about it sometimes, saying that the 2024 election might have been hacked," GeorgeSquarshington told Military.com. "And I just started to think, 'What would happen if it were true, or at least if an intelligence agency or people in the military thought it was true?' And the story grew out of that."
Readers learn about new developments in the "war" through simulated internet reactions to the war's events. GeorgeSquarshington, along with supporters in a special Discord channel, game out scenarios and the story continues to evolve. Then he and some of the collaborators create detailed screenshots of what it would look like as the internet responded to the news.
In the story, the first contested election results lead to recounts in key states, tipping the election from Donald Trump to Kamala Harris. Protestors from both sides clash. Violently. Fires break out in Trump Tower. Harris is inaugurated in a bunker, and Trump barricades himself in Mar-a-Lago.
The posts illustrating the story are all based on real events, sometimes pulling directly from real internet posts.
"I'm a [web] developer, and so a lot of the posts I create by using an inspection tool on the webpage," GeorgeSquarshington said. "I find something I want to work off of, open inspector, change whatever I need to change to make it fit the story and then screenshot it."
That process makes many of the posts feel quite real, even when the subject matter is way out of left field. There are posts of users reacting to the capture of a foreign soldier. There are images of burned-out Russian tanks that feel quite similar to internet posts discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That reality is increased when the events are based in recent history, such as a botched raid of Mar-a-Lago, modeled loosely on the 2011 raid of the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan or when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the alternate timeline accidentally released plans to bomb Buffalo, New York, in a chat group.
The final product is a series of screenshots with an evolving storyline that feels similar to some command post exercises I did with my unit in the Army. The command staff would make decisions and tell the training cadre what we were doing, and then the training staff would come back with new events, called "injects," to which we would have to respond. The training would often include fake news coverage and a few social media posts illustrating the consequences of staff decisions.
And, honestly, much of this alternate history timeline is better illustrated than what we got from paid trainers in the Army. The paid trainers never included the crappiest people on the internet, such as the 4chan users who make fun of a man panicking after he reports his parents as collaborators and then watches as they're abducted.
The delivery through social media posts gives the story a feeling of immediacy and provides a granular look at how individual internet posters would try to navigate the chaos, and at how they might attack each other.
"One of the things I notice a lot online is how people like to act morally superior to everybody else, how quickly they dehumanize each other, even when they're doing the same things. I try to show that in my posts, too," said the creator.
GeorgeSquarshington says he steers the story according to what he actually thinks would happen next and incorporates reader feedback.
"I try to make it realistic," he said. "Like, I'm not a military expert and someone helping me said that a plan to have rebel tanks go through the forests wouldn't work, so we changed it to make it work better."
Now his biggest problem is figuring out how the story will end.
"The readers, you know, they all have one side they want to win," he said. "I want to give it all a good ending, but I don't even know what that would look like with a civil war."
The story is still playing out on r/althistory. A table of contents for the story so far is available here.
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