A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (18 page)

London, first of all, would possess the means. The European continent’s leading financial center, a pole of attraction for the world’s elites and at the same time close to two of the greatest universities in the world, in twenty or thirty years London will still retain many of the characteristics of a core: a diverse population, an exceptional port and airports, and peerless creative capacity. But this will not be enough; the city that was the core in the nineteenth century will no longer possess the industrial hinterland or the infrastructure of transport and public services essential to production of future consumer articles. The City of London will be no more than a formidable financial platform, at once sophisticated and fragile: it could be forsaken at the slightest technological or military uncertainty, and many who live there now will flee it at the next explosion of the housing bubble.

The core could also be put together athwart the
vast conurbation built in Europe along the whole line of high-speed trains, from London to Frankfurt via Brussels, Lille, and Paris, which offers both the financial and the industrial power required. This would perhaps be possible if the political, industrial, and military integration of certain countries of the European Union, including France and Germany, were far enough advanced to have created a strong political, industrial and military power — without which a core would be hard-pressed to sustain its role. This region could then replace California, and the euro could perhaps replace the dollar. But this will probably not occur, in any case not before powerful shocks and aftershocks, which will happen much later, and which we shall discuss in the following chapters. It would in fact require this will to exist, to lead, to go forward together, to gather in talents from elsewhere, this urge to take power over the world, stimulated by fear of want and the courage to risk one’s life and soul that have shaped all the cores. But these qualities no longer seem to have a reason to exist without the stimulus of terrible threats, threats that will come later in this part of Europe.

Another core could emerge in the Scandinavian countries, between Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo. There we can find (and will find more and more) exceptionally relaxed human relationships, state-of-the-art industries, excellent universities, major petroleum resources, high educational levels, great security, and outstanding social protection. The region also offers a high quality of life, which, paradoxically, will be further improved by climate warming — even as that same climatic effect threatens the coastlines. But in my opinion the
Nordic countries, anxious to protect themselves from the world’s dangers, will refuse to meddle in others’ affairs except as clandestine diplomats, not anxious to attract the attention of freedom’s enemies. So they will reject the role of core — for a core is never neutral.

No other city and no other country in Europe will be ready to meet the costs for protection and expansion of a core. The role is therefore not close to crossing the Atlantic a second time.

Tokyo would be another serious candidate. Around 2030 its industries will possess a certain advance over those of the other Asian countries of the Pacific rim, and will play a major part in the conception of future objects. But the Japanese capital was unable to seize its chance in the 1980s, and in 2030 will still fail to create universal values: individual freedom is not its philosophical ideal. Nor will it be able to attract enough foreign talent. Besides, in the absence of reconciliation with China and Korea, Japan will still be unable to assume the role of political protector of outlying countries and the hinterland — and still less to assume the planetary military role incumbent on a core.

In about 2030, two other Asian cities, Bombay and Shanghai, will be the leading cities in the world’s biggest economies. They also might aspire to become this core of the mercantile order. They will both in fact be major ports, receiving the products of an immense hinterland and importing whatever comes in from the rest of the world. But to have the opportunity of becoming this core they will have to possess the ability to create communications networks, as well as urban, legislative, police, military, and technological infrastructures. They
must be able to stabilize their political environment and find the jobs essential for managing an overspilling rural population. As I see it, both these cities will fail, at least over the next three decades. Too busy dealing with their internal problems, faced with the threat of having to confront the rebellions of other less privileged provinces, lacking the most elementary infrastructures, they will not be ready in time to take over the torch from the ninth form.

Australia will doubtless also be ready — in the distant future — to become a core. It is a second America, possessing the same dynamic and the same ability to welcome immigrants, possessing the same will to develop the technologies of the future, and even blessed — today — with one of the world’s very best ports. But it is still too sparsely populated, too isolated from the rest of the world. It would need to make enormous progress in the transport of goods to put Sydney less than two hours’ flight from Los Angeles or Tokyo, as against five days by ship. And it would need a population of at least 100 million. All this would seem to be beyond its reach for many years to come.

Russia and Canada, their climates improved by global warming, will nevertheless not be credible aspirants. Islam too will dream of welcoming the core, whether in Cairo, Ankara, Baghdad, or Jakarta. But in 2035 it will be far from having the industrial, financial, cultural, and political means. For that, it would need an intellectual freedom unimaginable today.

It is also conceivable that the core might topple over into the virtual universe and that virtual automata will reign. We shall return to this.

Finally, it is rather tempting to think that the migration of cores will continue westward, pursuing the voyage begun three thousand years ago, and moving successively through Japan, China, Australia, and India, finally ending up one day in the Middle East where the mercantile order was conceived. One could even imagine the core stopping in Jerusalem, now capital of all the states in the region, finally at peace with one another. Even a world city — why not? — the planetary capital of all market democracies, or capital of a planetary market democracy. But Jerusalem doesn’t have the other prerequisites for being a core.

While awaiting the advent of this very distant utopia (which we shall discuss later, in the third wave of the future), no core seems likely to take over from Los Angeles. For a very long period of time, until the following waves of the future unfurl, a core will no longer be necessary to the functioning of the order. The market will have become powerful enough and the costs of data exchange low enough to free the members of the innovative class of the need to live in the same place in order to rule the world. New industry will be born in a thousand sites at a time: the mercantile form will function without a core.

Capitalism will be all the more thriving — more dynamic, more promising, more dominant. Those who have announced its funeral will once again regret their words.

I
n the United States and elsewhere, many predict that history will henceforth relate nothing at all but the spread of markets, then of democracy, within the frontiers of each country — in other words, the End of History. This evolution, they say, will take place naturally and peacefully. According to them, it will not require a war of democracies against the last dictatorships: it was not by bombing Moscow that we could wash our hands of the Soviet Union, nor by bombing and occupying Baghdad that we shall “democratize” Iraq. Nor is there any need for recourse to economic sanctions: no embargo, they argue, has ever defeated a single dictatorship. The peoples of the world, they hope, will free themselves simply through the workings of economic growth, transparency of information, and the expansion of the middle classes. They predict that the mercantile order will then be polycentric, in other words a juxta-position of a growing number of market democracies around a few dominant powers.

Such a scenario will certainly come about. Between 2025 and 2035, while the ninth form is fading away, it will give place to a masterless world, tenuously coordinated by a handful of powers. But I do not believe this
can last. A completely different world, working in the direct line dictated by history, will then take its place — a market without democracy.

In about 2050, harried by the pressure of market demands and thanks to new technological means, the world order will coalesce around a market that has become planetary — and stateless. There will begin what I shall call super-empire, deconstructing public services, then sovereign states, and then the very nations themselves.

This global market, unified and stateless, will long remain faithful to the values of the former Californian core. And since London’s cultural values long resembled Amsterdam’s, Boston’s those of London, and those of Los Angeles resembled New York’s, the super-empire will remain partially American. As we shall see, its consumer items will be very largely an extension of nomadic items, just like its culture (hybrid), its way of life (precarious), its values (individualist), and its ideal (narcissistic).

Thus will begin the first phase of the future. Then, as we shall see, may
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come a series of wars, leading to hyperconflict. And finally, faced with the failure of super-empire and of hyperconflict, new values will lead to readjustment on a global scale of the balance between democracy and market — and to a planetary hyper-democracy.

Wherever it is still not the case (essentially China and the Muslim world), sometime around 2035 commercial growth will create a middle class that overthrows dictatorship and brings a parliamentary democracy into being.

From there we shall continue to witness, as we have done for two centuries, the universalization — progressive and parallel, chaotic, and irreversible — of the market and then of democracy. This phenomenon will even carry with it Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Congo, China, and Iran. Intact or in little pieces, all these countries will be swept away by the logic that once swept away dictatorship in Chile, Spain, Russia, and Turkey. Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism will no longer oppose democracy. Indeed, each of these ancient wisdoms will even claim parental rights to democracy.

The organization of free elections will obviously not be enough for the long-term establishment of market democracies. The Iraqi, Algerian, or Zimbabwean examples show that even free elections — if they are un-accompanied by stable economic and political institutions, and if the citizens show no true desire to live together — can on the contrary force democracy to retreat. These countries must (as all the others before them have done) equip themselves progressively with secular constitutions, parliaments, political parties, judicial and police systems working in full respect for human rights, and a genuine plurality in information. It will take them time: we must not demand of Asia and Africa what nobody at the time demanded of Europe.

To help them, the already democratic nations must deploy their own values and institutions and not their missiles. They must open their markets to the businesses, the products, and the students from these countries. They must finance job-creating investments there, encourage the emergence of modern farming methods, a banking system, social security, a judicial and police system, and finally promote newspapers, radio networks, new elites, and nongovernmental organizations.

In the course of this process, tribal groups, regions, and peoples will decide not to go on living with one another. Wealthy regions will rid themselves of the burden of poor regions, as was the case when the Czech Republic sundered itself from Slovakia. Among existing democracies, Flanders could opt to separate from Wallonia, northern Italy from the south, Catalonia from the rest of Spain, as Scotland could claim independence from the United Kingdom. The Kurds might dissociate themselves from other Iraqis, and the Indians and the Indonesians could even decide to distance themselves from each other. The states artificially created during the colonial era in Africa or Asia could also burst asunder. More than a hundred new nations could be born before the end of the century.

In each of these future democracies, as in the old ones, a growing share of the national revenue will briefly be handled by public budgets and by insurance systems, social or private, which will usher in mutual benefit insurance for health risks and for those related to aging. This process will go hand in hand with the progressive disappearance of the peasant and worker class and swift rise of the middle classes — less acquainted with the
harsher aspects of toil, and in a better position to satisfy themselves with formal freedoms and material well-being.

For as long as democracy and market remain equal powers, they will share their areas of competence and respect the borders between them. The mercantile order will organize itself as a juxtaposition of market democracies; the world will be polycentric, with one or two major powers on each continent — the United States, Brazil, Russia, and the European Union, even if the last-named will not offer all the attributes of a state. Nigeria, the most populated country, will join them if it still exists, which seems unlikely. Together, these nine nations, mistresses of the polycentric order, will constitute an informal world government, which I shall return to in the third wave of the future. We shall see them again at the Security Council and at meetings of the G8.

Such a polycentric order will be unable to hold together. By its nature, the market is a conqueror: it accepts no limits, shares no territory, and engages in no truces. It will not sign a peace treaty with states. It will refuse to leave them any competencies. It will soon reach into all public services and will drain governments (even those of the masters of the polycentric order) of their last prerogatives, including those of sovereignty.

Even if nations, regulatory agencies, and international organizations briefly seek to contain and limit the markets, industrial, financial, and technological powers (whether legal or illegal) will refuse to accept any kind of polycentric balance. They will butt constantly against frontiers and compete with all the public services, one after another. Then the education and health services
and those linked to the exercise of sovereignty will cease entirely to be public: doctors, teachers, then judges and soldiers will become salary-earners of the private sector.

Finally, like others before them, these services — now become too costly in time and money because of the aging of the planet, of massive urbanization, of growing insecurity, of the ecological stakes, and of the need to train oneself permanently — will be replaced by mass-produced industrial objects.

Now will begin (it has already begun) a colossal geopolitical battle for planetary supremacy between market democracies and the market. This battle will lead to the victory — unthinkable today — of capitalism over the United States, and even of the market over democracy. Here is its story.

The markets will progressively find new sources of profitability in activities that are today exercised by the public services: education, health, environment, sovereignty. Private enterprises will seek first to commercialize these services, then replace them with mass-produced consumer objects, dovetailing perfectly with the dynamic of technical progress at work since the beginnings of the mercantile order.

First they will seek (and find) new means of accumulating more and more energy and information in increasingly reduced spaces — in particular to diminish consumption of energy, raw materials, and water, and
face the consequences for the environment. This will take place through the use of technologies permitting storage of energy and information on nanometric entities (whence the term nanotechnologies). We shall move toward the construction of nanomachines by assembling molecules, which will require locating, manipulating, and positioning atoms. Diverse technologies will make it possible to economize on water, forests, and petroleum, and to use still uncertain resources like the wealth of the oceans and of space. Microprocessors will use DNA and peptide biomolecules, which will serve in the construction of nanocomputers. Nanoenergy power stations will work on hydrogen batteries. Autoresponders will be capable of repairing and reproducing themselves. In addition, major technical advances will improve the ecological effectiveness of materials, of propulsion, aerodynamics, structures, combustibles, motors, and systems.

These technologies will radically transform the way in which current objects are produced. They will allow the consumption of much less energy per unit produced, better management of drinking water, urban wastes, and polluting emissions. They will improve the characteristics of food products, clothing, housing, vehicles, household equipment, and nomadic objects.

Other nomadic objects — such as lenses, glasses, and prostheses of different kinds — will miniaturize the means of information, entertainment, communication, and transport, leading to a massive rise in nomadic ubiquity. The single nomadic object will be integrated one way or another into the body. It will serve as a sensor and a controller. Adapted plastic materials, reusable and recyclable, will allow the transformation of clothing into
linked nomadic objects. Other plastic materials will become throwaway screens, allowing for creation of wall-pictures in public places and in connected households. This will turn our way of lighting, building, reading, and living on its head. Personalized robots will help the sick and then the healthy in their daily lives. Robots will allow simultaneous participation in several virtual meetings and the reproduction, at least virtual, of a vanished or fantasized person. Self-steering cars will relieve us of the need to drive, at least on the freeway. Hypersonic aircraft will put Los Angeles less than four hours from any point in the Pacific; ships will put every Asian port less than twenty-four hours from one another and will reduce transpacific runs to three days. Diverse private companies will send tourists to hotels in space and organize voyages to the moon, and later to Mars.

Around 2040 the essential will begin. It will cut massively into the cost of organizing market democracies, reestablishing the profitability of industry, gradually reducing the role of states to zero, and destroying, little by little, the polycentric order. Acting as the engines of growth, new objects will take over from automobiles, washing machines, and nomadic objects: these will be surveillance objects, replacing many traditionally state-run functions. I shall call them the Watchers.

Services such as education, health, and sovereignty will thus be slowly replaced — as was the case with transport, domestic services, and communication — by mass-produced machines. This will once again open new markets for businesses and raise the profitability of the economy. Since this will mean manipulation of services essential to social order — indeed the foundation stones
of states and peoples — it will radically modify relations with the individual or collective imagination, with identity, life, sovereignty, knowledge, power, nation, culture, and geopolitics.

And now we stand before the most sweeping revolution awaiting us in the next half century.

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.

This process will go through two stages, which I shall call
hypersurveillance
and
self-surveillance.

When the law of the market starts to prevail over that of democracies, public services (education, health care, security, and then justice and sovereignty) will begin to face competition from private enterprise. States will be expected to treat chains of foreign hospitals as public hospitals, and the affiliates of foreign private universities as national universities.

Private security, police, and information will compete with national police forces in surveillance of movement and data, on behalf of insurance and commercial companies. These will want to know everything about their employees, clients, suppliers, competitors, and risks; they will also want to protect their assets, material, financial, and intellectual, against a range of threats. This transfer to the private sector will gradually reduce
public spending and help save on scarce resources. As we have already seen, it will become part and parcel of the host of services making it possible to track objects and people. Nomadic ubiquity opens itself to hypersurveillance when whoever is connected leaves traces of his passage.

Private services will then manage social rights and the administrative services. We will be in a position to receive an administrative document or an allotment by paying more: this is already the case with Great Britain. In many places the state is henceforth relieved of the burden of countless decisions, entrusted to high independent authorities that relieve the state of all responsibility.