This article has a bit of a pedigree. I can trace its origins back to the fall of 2010, before I even joined the site, when I drafted an SCP entry for pasta that compelled you to make more of it, ad infinitium. The joke is that it was "copypasta". What stood out about it both now and then was that, unlike a lot of compulsion effects I'd seen lying around at the time, it did not force you to, right then and there, just make pasta until you died of exhaustion — multiple affected people would coordinate to make more of it. In the article itself, it got as far as a small town siphoning water off of a nearby lake for some [DATA EXPUNGED] purposes. Of course, that never went anywhere, but the concept of compulsion + mass coordination stuck with me.
In my freshman year of college, I read a story on one of the bigger mind control erotica websites detailing how, on a planet colonized by humans, a woman taking care of a farm by herself had eggs laid in her by alien wasps. Without getting too graphic in my retelling, she takes pleasure in this and becomes emotionally invested in the safety and propagation of these wasps.
Before anyone asks, I no longer care for that kind of content.
I'll be damned if I use a library computer to try and find the story and double-damned if I link it here, but as you can obviously tell, that is the "immediate" inspiration for the basics of this article. The idea of being beholden to parasitic insects stuck with me, and it was easy to extend the story into the future and imagine a whole planet dedicated to parasitic wasps. That's actually the point at which I sketched this idea out and posted it in the Ideas/Brainstorming forum, and then I abandoned it.
As evidenced by the quote at the beginning of this post, the suicidally irrational rationality detailed in critical theory struck a chord with me, both in relation to these ideas that had been brewing in my head since my high school years, and as a solid way of characterizing many (if not quite all) of the ills and contradictions of capitalist society. It's a pretty unsettling concept, suitable for an unsettling society. This helped me make the article conceputally rigorous and characterize it as what I want to be: a critical allegory of capitalist society in general and colonialism in particular.
"The End of History", as I've decided to title this, is A) suitably creepy, and B) a reference to a particularly infamous essay/book suggesting that Western liberal democracy is the end state of society. Given that capitalism is a totalizing force that tries to expand without limit and kills hostages when it can't, this struck me as a very unpleasant idea to contemplate. My big goal here is to find horror in the most charitable reading I could give to this kind of society — one without violence, unhappiness, disorder, or conflict, all under the banner of something parasitic, inhuman, and objectively irrelevant to any of those things, and at the expense of consuming all impulses, all identities, all relations, all activity. SCP-3000 is basically an allegorical rebuttal to social democracy; take away the various upsides of SCP-3000-3's society and you have a rebuttal to every kind of liberalism to the right of that.
Now, I've read a lot of other contest drafts, and I'll tell you right now that this will not be the scariest contest entry you'll read. I could have written something scarier, but it wouldn't be as good of an article, and I would not feel comfortable positing it as SCP-3000. This is the only thing in my head that I would feel comfortable assigning such a pivotal spot on the mainlist.
