A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (19 page)

To put it in different terms: in exchange for a tax cut that will above all benefit the wealthiest (and penalize the poorest), we shall henceforth have to pay for public services. And since these competing private enterprises will have to spend considerable sums to attract clients — which a public service does not have to do — the service’s final cost for the client will rise accordingly.

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.

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 spendthrift. Ignorance, exposure to risks, wasting, and vulnerability will be considered diseases. Other businesses will also have to comply with norms in order to avoid industrial disasters, work accidents, or external aggression, and even the wastage of real resources. In a certain way, all businesses will thus be forced to take account of the general interest in making their decisions. Some will even make their “citizenship” a dimension of their image and their competence.

The rise of risks linked to aging, to urban growth, to disasters triggered by ecological disturbances, and to terrorist attacks will gradually raise the share of these insurance premiums in the national revenue, at the same time as the share of obligatory tax and social security contributions will go down.

Businesses will have at once to respect the norms imposed on them by the insurance companies, and in their turn require their collaborators — a part of whose contribution they will pay — to comply with other norms. 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.

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.

First of all, a kind of hypersurveillance will see the light of day. Technology will make it possible to know everything about the origins of products and movements of men — which will much later imply essential military applications. Sensors and miniature cameras installed in all public (and eventually private) places, in offices and in recreational areas, and finally on the nomadic objects themselves, will monitor all comings and goings (the phone already allows us to communicate and be tracked). Biometric techniques — fingerprints, iris, shape of hands and face — will allow for surveillance of travelers, workers, and consumers. Countless analytical devices will make it possible to monitor the health of a body, a mind, or a product.

The unique nomadic object will be permanently traceable. All the data it contains, including images of everyone’s daily life, will be stored and sold to specialist businesses and to public and private police. Individual data on health and competence will be updated by private databases that will allow for predictive tests in view of preventive treatment. Prison — already a heavy financial burden to most nation-states — will be gradually
replaced by long-distance surveillance of a person under house arrest.

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. Forgetfulness was yesterday tinged with remorse, but tomorrow transparency will encourage us to do without it. Curiosity, based on a culture of secrecy, will also disappear — to the dismay of scandal sheets. Celebrity will go the same way.

A little later, around 2050, the market will no longer be satisfied with organizing long-distance surveillance: mass-produced objects will allow everyone to monitor his own compliance with the norms, and self-surveillance will appear. Machines will permit everyone, public or private, to monitor his own consumption of energy, water, raw materials, and so forth, while other machines will offer self-surveillance of his or her savings and inheritance. These machines will also help save time for living. Already the mirror, scales, thermometer, alcohol tests, pregnancy tests, electrocardiograms, and countless sensors are measuring parameters, comparing them to a value self-styled normal, and announcing the test results to the world. New technologies will arise to multiply these portable means of surveillance. Computers will be integrated into clothing by nanofibers and will miniaturize still further the body’s self-monitors. Electronic bugs, worn subcutaneously, will ceaselessly register heartbeat, blood pressure, and cholesterol. Microprocessors connected to various organs will watch
their functioning as compared to the norms. Miniature cameras, electronic sensors, biomarkers, nanomotors, and nanotubes (microscopic sensors that can be introduced into the pulmonary alveola or the bloodstream) will give everyone the opportunity to measure, permanently or periodically, the parameters of his own body.

On matters of education and information, we shall also see the appearance of self-surveillance instruments and software for monitoring compliance with the norms related to knowledge. They will organize verification of acquaintances. The nomadic ubiquity of information will become the permanent monitor for knowledge.

For a little longer, only doctors and teachers (working together on production and testing of these self-surveillance devices) will be authorized to use them. Then these objects will be miniaturized, simplified, manufactured at extremely low cost, and made available to all, despite the stern opposition of the experts with whom they will enter into competition. Surveillance will become nomadic and ubiquitous. Everyone will return with passion to these instruments. Fear of physical deterioration and of ignorance, growing familiarity with nomadic objects, mistrust of the medical and educational guilds, and faith in technological infallibility will open enormous markets for this variegated spectrum of devices. 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.

Once again, collective services (this time state-run) will become mass-produced industrial products. Everything put in place over the last several decades will meet a triumphant conclusion. Everyone will now have become his own prison guard. And at the same time, individual freedom will have reached the mountain-top — at least in the imagination, by the use of new nomadic objects.

Beyond the
self-monitors
will come (are already coming)
self-repairers
, making it possible to correct mistakes detected by the self-monitors. One of the early forms of this self-repair will have been the makeup, beauty, fashion, fitness, and cosmetic surgery industries. The aging of the world will create greater need for them. It will begin with the integration of self-repair equipment into artificial systems such as machines, bridges, buildings, cars, household equipment, and nomadic objects. Then microprocessors (first built with organic materials and later from biomaterials) will focus on repairing bodies. They will deliver medication at regular intervals: microcapsules will be introduced into the blood with the mission of detecting and repairing the beginnings of a cancer and to combat the aging of brain and body. If we come to know the genetic mechanisms of alcohol or drug dependency we may also try to block the behaviors they trigger. It will even be possible one day to manipulate the interior of cells without damaging them in order to repair human organs in vivo
.

And still further ahead, advances in the neuro-sciences will allow us to go in search (through a purely
mental act) of acquaintances and information stored in external databases, without the prior obligation to store them in our own memory. Bionic prostheses directly connected to the brain will help us build bridges between spheres of knowledge, produce mental images, travel, learn, fantasize, and communicate with other minds. We can already move a cursor on a screen thanks to a mental image transmitted to a computer through the workings of an electronic implant in the motor cortex. This already allows a quadriplegic to write fifteen words a minute through a simple thought transmission, and to send them off by e-mail. Telepathy is thus (already) reality. Tomorrow, these processes will make it possible to come up with new forms of direct communication via the mind and improve the process of apprenticeship and onscreen network creation. They will also become a source of new artistic sensations.

These technologies will make themselves felt at a time when the costs of public services become heavier and heavier. Country by country, sector by sector, they will progressively reduce the role of the state and the public institutions for provisions for the future. Thus, after rising, the share of collective expenses in the national revenue of each country will fall disastrously.

Growth of markets in the polycentric world will then work in the same direction as these technologies and will themselves contribute to the massive weakening of states. First of all, the great corporations, with a base
of thousands of specialist companies, will bring influence to bear on the media (using advertising to blackmail them) in order to orient citizens’ choices.

In an early phase, when wealthy minorities realize that they have more to gain by putting a property on the market than by putting it to the vote, they will do everything to have that property privatized. Thus, for example, when a rich minority thinks that the retirement system by allocation is no longer in line with its interests, it will shift it (by initiating short-lived alliances) into a system of retirement by capitalization — so that its pensions will no longer depend on a majority decision that might prove unfavorable to it. The same will be true for health, police, education, and the environment.

Then the market, by nature planetary, will violate/breach the laws of democracy, by nature local. The wealthiest members of the innovative class (a few hundred million among the two billion holders of shares, of mobile assets, and of mobile knowledge) will consider their sojourn in any country (including that of their birthplace — even if that were one of the masters of the polycentric order) as an individual contract excluding all loyalty and all solidarity with their compatriots. They will exile themselves if they feel they have not gotten their money’s worth.

Similarly, when businesses (including those of nations now mistresses of the polycentric order) decide that the tax code and the law applicable to them are not the best they might wish for, they will relocate their decision-making centers outside their country of origin.

States will then compete with one another by announcing massive cuts in taxes on capital and on the
innovative class — which will gradually deprive them of the bulk of their resources. Utterly drained, and pushed as well by the appearance of self-surveillance devices, states will abandon to the market the task of proposing the bulk of services related to education, health, security, and even sovereignty. They will do it first by relocating public services to countries with a low-cost labor force, and next by privatizing them. Then taxes will go down and the minimum wage statutes, as well as statutes for the protection of the weakest, will be swept away. Financial insecurity will become the rule for everyone.

In the absence of a state, businesses will increasingly favor consumers over workers — whose incomes will go down. Self-surveillance technologies will organize and accelerate this process by favoring the consumer over the user of public services, profit over wages, while giving increasing power to insurance and entertainment companies and to self-surveillance producers.

Then, by 2050 at the latest, a slow deconstruction of states — some of them born more than a thousand years ago — will begin. The middle class, the leading player in market democracy, will rediscover the insecurity it believed it had escaped by detaching itself from the working class. Contract will increasingly win out over law, mercenaries over armies and police forces, and arbitrators over judges. Jurists specializing in private law will have a field day.

For a time, states belonging to countries that are masters of the polycentric order will still be able to control a few rules of their social life. In such states, those politically of age will join forces with their economic counterparts — in other words, the age at which the
child becomes an autonomous consumer. In each country, utterly confused political parties will seek (more and more vainly) for areas of competence. Neither left nor right will be able to prevent the progressive privatization of education, health, security, insurance, nor the replacement of these services by mass-produced objects — nor, a little later, the dawning of super-empire. The right will even accelerate this advent with privatizations. The left will do the same, by giving the middle class the means to access (more equitably) the marketing of time and to private consumption. Public expropriation of big corporations will no longer be a credible solution. Social movements will no longer have the strength to oppose the marketing of the world. Mediocre governments, leaning on the few remaining civil servants and on discredited parliamentarians and manipulated by pressure groups, will continue to put on shows rarely visited and less and less taken seriously. Public opinion will not show much more interest in their deeds and gestures than they show today in the deeds and gestures of the very last monarchs on the European continent.