— THE ORIGIN OF THE VANGUARD —
Reclaiming Analog Sovereignty
I woke up one day and realized I don't know how anything works anymore.
Our world is either solid-state or ubiquitous. If something breaks, I can't fix it; I just have to throw it away and buy a new one. I realized I was like the Eloi from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine—a passive, helpless consumer entirely dependent on machines I didn't understand. The environment around me had become a frictionless digital void, and I was losing my grip on the physical world.
So, I put my phone down. I started taking old things apart and putting them back together again, and reading old books like The Time Machine.
Then I got the crazy idea to gamify this whole experience.
— Executive Director
The Narrative Engine
I decided to build a playable sequel to the novel. What if the Time Traveller came to our era, looked at our disposable technology, and realized he was watching the birth of the Eloi? What if he tasked us with reconstructing the physical marvels of the 19th century to save ourselves?
We found the perfect historical catalyst: Prior to 1880, the US Patent Office required inventors to submit working, kinetic models with their patents. Hundreds of thousands of these brass and iron marvels existed. But two catastrophic fires (1836 and 1877) ripped through the U.S. Patent Office. The 1877 fire alone destroyed over 75,000 models. These are our literal "cracked globes and smashed machines." And in 1925, Congress purged the archives, auctioning off our mechanical heritage to private collectors in un-manifested crates.
The Awe Society was born to recover them. We use the most advanced manufacturing tools of the 21st century to rescue, reverse-engineer, and resurrect the endangered ingenuity of the 19th century.
The Awe Society Foundation acts as the central treasury. We purchase these lost models at auction, and our Vanguard Artificers restore them for Philanthropic acquisition.
By claiming active Bounties—deducing the blueprints, forging the prototypes, and machining the final "Heavy Iron"—our Makers earn Syntropy Points, Cash Bounties, and commercial royalties on the final pieces of Luxury Functional Art. We aren't just reading history; we are forging it.
View The Masterworks Gallery