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September 20 - December 6, 2021
As I write this, the shape of the world in 2050 and its likely configuration in 2100 are being determined. Depending on how we act today, our children and grandchildren will either inherit an enhanced, habitable world or else will toil, loathing us, in a sort of hell.
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Will poverty and inequalities in wealthy countries become the wellspring for new violence?
Will the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca, through which the bulk of the world’s oil flows, be blocked by ships sunk by pirates?
To put it another way: human history relates the individual’s assumption of his rights as an entity legally empowered to plan and master his fate free of all constraints — except respect for the right of his fellow man to the same freedoms.
After a very long struggle and in the midst of a serious ecological crisis, the still dominant empire — the United States — will finally be defeated around 2035 by this same globalization of the markets (particularly the financial ones), and by the power of corporations. Financially and politically exhausted, like all other empires before it, the United States will cease to run the world. But it will remain the planet’s major power; no new empire or dominant nation will replace it. The world will temporarily become polycentric, with a dozen or so regional powers managing its affairs.
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They will prefer freedom of action, responsibility, and access to knowledge.
They will usher in the birth of a universal intelligence, making common property of the creative capacities of all human beings in order to transcend them. A new, synchronized economy, providing free services, will develop in competition with the market before eliminating it, exactly as the market put an end to feudalism a few centuries ago.
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Like Bruges and other cores to follow, Venice is not the center of technological innovation. The core does not invent — it hunts down, imitates, and implements the ideas of others.
conditions for increasingly solitary urban living in smaller and smaller apartments, with increasingly fleeting sexual or romantic partners. Fear of being tied, flight from lasting attachments, and obvious indifference will become (are already becoming) forms of seduction. Apologia for the individual, the body, and independence.
Huh
To skirt this obstacle, which eats into consumption, the mercantile order first encourages storage of time-devouring objects — books, disks, films — in material fashion, then (today) in virtual form: unlimited stacks, illusory, no longer possessing any relation to the possibility of being used. As though this stacking served to give everyone the illusion that he will not die before reading all these books, hearing all these melodies, and living all this stored time. In vain.
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By now it will have become clear that time is in fact the only true scarcity: no one can manufacture it; no one can sell the time available to him; no one knows how to accumulate it.
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Some will then find that freedom itself — humanity’s major target since the beginnings of the mercantile order — is in fact only the illusory manifestation of a caprice within time’s prison.
It will become increasingly clear that one can be a democrat and favorable to the market economy, without necessarily speaking English and without believing in the natural and everlasting supremacy of the American empire.
All this resembles what happened in times past to Venice, Genoa, Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Boston, and New York.
These Watchers will not spring forth ready-made from the imagination of crazed researchers or technicians touched by the hand of God. They will be responding to the financial imperatives of the mercantile order, always on the lookout for new ways to reduce the time needed to produce existing objects, to raise network capacities, reduce collective expenses, enhance the use of time, and transform desires and needs into commercial wealth.
Users (private individuals or businesses) will become consumers, obliged to pay directly for their services, whether in the form of a direct purchase from providers or else in the form of premiums paid to insurance companies (private or public) as a substitute for tax revenue, which will plummet.
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These insurance companies will demand not only that their clients pay their premiums (to insure themselves against sickness, joblessness, death, theft, fire, insecurity) but will also verify that their clients conform to norms to minimize the risks they will be called on to cover. They will gradually come to dictate planetary norms (What to eat? What to know? How to drive? How to protect oneself? How to consume? How to produce?). They will penalize smokers, drinkers, the obese, the unemployable, the inadequately protected, the aggressive, the careless, the clumsy, the absentminded, the
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Huh
This compliance will imply monitoring one’s health, knowledge, vigilance, and property. Being thrifty with rare resources, keeping an eye on one’s health, training, and protecting oneself (and more generally staying in shape) will become socially necessary behaviors.
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For the insurance companies to pay off economically, everyone — private individual or business — must therefore agree that a third party verify his conformity with the norms. For this, everyone must agree to be monitored. The era of Big Brother, earlier proclaimed but only partially implemented, will become the norm.
Nothing will be hidden anymore. Discretion, hitherto a condition of social life, will no longer have a raison d’être. Everyone will know everything about everybody, and we shall evolve in the direction of less guilt and more tolerance.
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Bent on establishing continual adjustments to their premiums on evaluation of the risks run by each of their clients, insurance companies will urge them to participate in the markets. They will therefore insist that their clients furnish proof that they use self-surveillance.
Practitioners will then find themselves a new niche treating diseases that would not have been detected earlier, while teachers will become tutors to those singled out as refractory in the knowledge field.
All time spent on anything but consuming — or on accumulating consumer objects in a different way — will be considered lost.
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The more solitary a man is, the more he will consume, and then he will monitor and distract himself in order to furnish his solitude. Individual freedom, constantly increased (in appearance at least) by self-monitoring, will lead everyone to consider himself responsible for his own private sphere, both professional and private,
Huh
For them, this apprenticeship will be a vital necessity; curiosity, an absolute requirement; manipulation, a daily habit.
With the return of nomadism, they will have to suffer. The delocalization of businesses and immigrant workers will push their incomes down. They will miss the days when frontiers were closed and lifetime employment was guaranteed, objects were long-lasting, marriages were sealed and remained sealed, the laws were unbreakable.
For these middle classes, staying insured and entertaining oneself will be the chief response to the world’s risks. Insuring oneself will be their obsession, and distracting oneself will be their way of forgetting.
One day they may even be able to insure themselves against a broken heart, sexual impotence, intellectual shortcomings, or the denial of maternal love.
States, or what remains of them around the year 2050, will no longer be viewed as anything but the successors of businesses. No one will any longer be capable of guaranteeing equality of treatment of citizens, impartial elections, or freedom of information.
From the very beginning, the human species has sought to distance itself from its own method of reproduction. To differentiate itself from the animal kingdom, it strove first to deny the reproductive function of sexuality, then to give it another meaning. In the ritual order, most cosmogonies insist that not being born of a sexual relation is peculiar to the gods.
In this ultimate vision of super-empire, death will be delayed until the disappearance of the last clone possessing consciousness of himself, even until all clones born of himself by all the other clones born of others are forgotten.
Then man, at last manufactured like an artifact, will no longer know death. Like all industrial objects, he will no longer be able to die, since he will never have been born.
In matters of global violence, states have never been the sole players. Mafias, gangs, terrorist movements — I call them pirates here — have always intervened between nations to fight them or, at the very least, to violate their laws.
To carry out the missions it has taken on, the American empire — like the Roman Empire of yore — will have to incorporate more and more foreigners into its own forces.
Two percent of the American armed forces — some 300,000 — are already made up of immigrants not yet naturalized.
Huh
Their numbers are increasing substantially since the decree of July 4, 2002, which speeds up the naturalization of foreigners joining the army (an almost identical copy of a decree by the emperor Hadrian, which goes back to the year 138 of our era . .
And finally, many will profit from the progressive weakening of states to let their impulses toward violence develop, freed of all constraint. The first freedom will be freedom to kill, gratuitously and without goal or strategy.
Today we must perform the same act of faith in the future. Try once again to show that humanity is not doomed to destroy itself — neither through the market, nor science, nor by war, and above all not by stupidity or malevolence.
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Man has never built anything on a foundation of good tidings.
Once more, disasters will be the most eloquent advocates for change.
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Vanguard players (I shall call them transhumans) will run (they are already running) relational enterprises in which profit will be no more than a hindrance, not a final goal. Each of these transhumans will be altruistic, a citizen of the planet, at once nomadic and sedentary, his neighbor’s equal in rights and obligations, hospitable and respectful of the world. Together, transhumans will give birth to planetary institutions and change the course of industrial enterprises.
We will also find among them billionaires who have entrusted the bulk of their fortunes to a foundation, as well as social innovators, teachers, creators, religious and secular women, and quite simply people of good will. People for whom the Other is a value in himself.
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Transhumans will constitute a new innovative class, bearers of social and artistic innovations rather than solely mercantile offerings.
In such firms, profit will be only a constraint necessary for survival, not a final goal.
They will value lived time rather than stored time, and services rather than industrial products.
They will offer the presentation of stored time free of charge, and will require payment for live entertainment. Movies will be presented gratis, and film buffs will pay to see the same actors onstage. Music files will be free, and music lovers will pay to attend concerts. Books and periodicals will be free, and readers will pay the publishers for the privilege of debating their authors and hearing them speak. Publishers will sell lectures given by their authors and books of very high quality. Such costlessness will come to permeate all fields essential to life.
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Humanity’s common good, the ultimate objective of hyperdemocracy, will be neither greatness, nor wealth, nor even happiness, but protection of the things that make life possible and worthwhile — climate, air, water, freedom, democracy, culture, languages, fields of knowledge . . .
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Finally, at the ultimate stage of evolution, we might witness (we may already be witnessing) a hyperintelligence of the living, of which humanity will be but an infinitesimal component. This hyperintelligence of the living would no longer act solely in the interests of the human species.
The chief essential good will thus be access to “good times.” Times when everyone will watch not the spectacle of others’ lives, but the reality of his or her own;
Between now and then many events will have taken place, worse and better than those imagined here. Beauty will succeed in nourishing and protecting the last sparks of humanity. We will have written and shaped masterpieces, we will have discovered new concepts, we will have composed songs. Above all, we will have loved. And we will love again.
