The Despotic Dictatorship of Despoticania is a gargantuan, cultured nation, ruled by The Despot with an iron fist, and renowned for its barren, inhospitable landscape, parental licensing program, and pith helmet sales. The hard-nosed, cynical, humorless population of 28.837 billion Despoticanians are ruled with an iron fist by the dictatorship government, which ensures that no-one outside the party gets too rich. In their personal lives, however, citizens are relatively unoppressed; it remains to be seen whether this is because the government genuinely cares about its people, or if it hasn't gotten around to stamping out civil rights yet.

The relatively small, corrupt, well-organized government juggles the competing demands of Education, Industry, and Defense. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Despoticania Prime. The average income tax rate is 75.4%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The frighteningly efficient Despoticanian economy, worth an astonishing 27,647 trillion Despollars a year, is driven entirely by a combination of government and state-owned industry, with private enterprise illegal. However, for those in the know, there is an enormous, deeply entrenched, broadly diversified black market in Information Technology, Arms Manufacturing, Retail, and Automobile Manufacturing. The private sector mostly consists of enterprising ten-year-olds selling lemonade on the sidewalk, but the government is looking at stamping this out. Average income is a breathtaking 958,754 Despollars, and distributed extremely evenly, with little difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

At the edge of the final frontier space's biggest missile platform is about to unfold, lobotomised jaywalkers can barely ambulate let alone repeat their offences, signatures have been replaced with illegible scribbles, and saying "don't do anything that The Despot wouldn't do" doesn't exclude a great deal. Crime is totally unknown. Despoticania's national animal is the Winged Unicorn Pig, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its national religion is Church of Transcendental Hatred.

Despoticania is ranked 1,457^th in the world and 1^st in The Alliance of Dictators for Largest Publishing Industry, scoring 29,113.55 on the Bella Potter Productivity e-Index.