A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (20 page)

Nations will be nothing more than oases competing with one another to attract passing caravans. Their way of life will be limited by the rare resources brought by the few nomads who agree to make a halt there long enough to produce, trade, and entertain themselves. Countries will no longer be lived in at any length by anyone but the sedentary — forced to be there because they are too hostile to risk, too fragile, too young, or too old — and by the weakest, some of them immigrants from elsewhere in search of a more decent way of life.

The only states to pursue development will be those
that have attracted the loyalty of their citizens by favoring their creativity, their successful integration, and their social mobility. Some nations in the social-democratic tradition and some tiny state-run entities will resist better than others. Irony of history: with the advent of super-empire, we shall witness the return of those city-states that dominated the beginnings of the mercantile order.

To prevent this destruction of national identity and stand up to the immigrant waves that will follow, racist dictators (whether theocratic or secular) will seize power in certain states. What will soon play out, particularly in countries like the Netherlands or Belgium (the first cores of the mercantile world, and among the planet’s most ancient democracies), will be revelatory of the evolution that next settles on the most robust states (and on those most concerned about their freedoms).

While Africa vainly struggles to construct itself, the rest of the world will begin to deconstruct itself under the hammer-blows of globalization. Tomorrow’s Africa will therefore not resemble today’s West. Rather, it is tomorrow’s West that will resemble today’s Africa.

And then (in my opinion even before the twenty-first century ends) the government of the United States will itself lose — doubtless the last in the bosom of this polycentric world — the essentials of its instruments of sovereignty.

This will happen first in the virtual world. As we have seen, the printing press once acted against the powers that be. In the same way, the Internet will act against the United States. It will begin by not serving Washington’s interests. Then, playing on its free-of-charge
services, multiplying its information sources, liberating the controls imposed on information by the wealthier, it will drain the U.S. government (like that of the other countries) of many of its most important powers. Many people will even claim citizenship of the virtual universe, abandoning citizenship of every real state, even that of the United States.

In the real world, businesses of American origin will relocate their research centers and their headquarters, thus depriving the federal American state of the bulk of its resources. Financing the many functions of sovereignty, in particular of defense, will be more and more onerous. And finally, the citizenry will no longer want to see its children die in battle, and will no longer want to be forced to take part in the defense of its country.

Certain forces, especially military, will then attempt to restore the means of action to the federal state by nationalizing strategic businesses, closing the borders, and squaring up, if necessary, to former allies. The means of information will lie and attempt to dress up an increasingly inaccessible reality. In vain. On its last legs, Washington will have to relinquish control of the great economic and political decisions to each state of the Union and to the big corporations. Administrative services will be privatized one after the other. Prisons will become private businesses with zero labor costs. Even the army, the last refuge of sovereignty, will eventually be privatized like all the rest.

Then, like the Roman Empire in its day, the American empire will disappear without leaving a political authority in place in the new Rome. States and nations will still have a place — nostalgic apparitions, fleeting ghosts,
scapegoats both impotent and easy to direct in the absolute marketing of time.

Capitalism will then march to its end, destroying everything that is not itself. It will transform the world into an immense market, its destiny disconnected from that of nations and freed from the demands and the servitude of a core. Like the American empire before it and like each of the nine forms of the mercantile order, this super-empire will carry an extraordinary message of freedom, but it will also have extremely alienating dimensions. It will put the finishing touches to what the market had begun since its origins — making every minute of life an opportunity to produce, to trade, or to consume mercantile goods.

Like the conquerors of the Roman Empire, the markets will hasten to don the garments of the vanquished: American society will long remain the model the super-empire proposes to the world. Super-empire will also urge businesses to enter every surveillance market. It will urge every student to finance his own advanced studies and his permanent training. To defend the private ownership of belongings, ideas, patents, and persons in the absence of a state, but also to protect the environment, the market will produce police forces, armies, private jurisdiction, mercenaries, and arbitrators.

All time spent on anything but consuming — or on accumulating consumer objects in a different way — will be considered lost. The market will go so far as to dissolve
headquarters, factories, and workshops so that people may start consuming as soon as they leave their houses, working, playing, staying informed, learning, and self-monitoring. Upper limits on retirement age will vanish. People will work, if they can, without constraint. Transportation will become centers of commerce. Hospitals and schools will essentially give place to sales areas and to after-sale services for self-surveillance and self-repair units, which will become (as we shall see) the seeds of the third wave of the future.

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, to obey (in appearance) only his own whim, and in reality to comply with the norms setting the requirements for his own survival.

We have seen how the nomad of man’s earliest societies, like the citizen of market democracies, obeyed a body of complex rules, the expression of multiple collective ambitions. But the citizen of super-empire will no longer be bound by the slightest social contract. In a situation of nomadic ubiquity, tomorrow’s man — and woman — will perceive the world as a totality at his or her service — within the limits of norms imposed by the insurance companies on his or her individual behavior. He will see the Other as a tool of his own happiness, a means of procuring pleasure or money or even both for himself. No one will dream of concerning himself with other people. Why share when you must fight? Why
work in unison when you are competitors? No one will think any longer that the happiness of someone else might be useful to him. Still less will he think of seeking his happiness in that of the other. Any collective action will seem unthinkable — and therefore all political change inconceivable.

Solitude will begin with childhood. No one can force parents, whether biological or adoptive, to respect and love their children long enough to raise them. Precocious grown-ups, the youngest will suffer from a solitude no longer compensated by any of the networks of previous societies. Likewise, more and more of the elderly, living longer and thus alone for longer than in the past, will one day know practically no one among the living. By then, the world will be no more than a juxta-position of solitudes, and love a juxtaposition of masturbations.

To combat this solitude, many at any age will choose to share with others, temporarily or permanently, a roof, goods, advantages, fights, games, even in the absence of any shared sex life, in any case without obligation to faithfulness, and accepting the multiplicity of their respective partners. In these networks, many will seek endless opportunities for risky encounters, whether remunerated or not. They will find substitutes for their solitude in self-surveillance objects and self-repair drugs.

To manage mercantile time, the two dominant industries will still be insurance and distraction. Insurance companies (and the risk-coverage institutions of the financial markets) will create private police forces that will first take care of hypersurveillance of businesses, consumers, and workers. They will spend considerable sums
to shape public opinion and gain the loyalty of their clients. They will require of them the obligation to respect the norms, and then the purchase of self-surveil-lance items. For the poorest, microinsurance will no longer be (as it was in the ninth form) an instrument for promoting democracy but its substitute. Similarly, the distraction industries will use surveillance technologies and offer performances ceaselessly adapted to the reactions of the spectators, whose emotions will be permanently captured, monitored, and integrated into the play. The fact that the spectacle will be free of charge will serve as a support for new consumption. In order not to seem reduced to fear management, self-surveil-lance will dress itself up as information, as a game, or as entertainment. What remains of politics will also become a pure stage-managed show put on by politicians, occasional players in a neglected performance.

By 2020, in other words well before super-empire overthrows nations, many businesses will begin to do without sedentary bases. They will be either temporary groupings of individuals or else permanent gatherings of tribes. In either case, they will be in ferocious competition with one another to win over clients and investors.

The first, structured on the lines of a theatrical troupe, will assemble (they are already doing so) the skills and the capital to fulfill a determined task. Their longevity will depend on the projects of those who
founded them, on their ability to invent new products, and on the decisions of their financiers and their clients. Since people’s life expectancy will have risen considerably, these businesses will endure for much less time than those who work in them. Most of them will disappear at the very latest with their creators: their employees will be temporaries, hired to do a given job. Their work, under increasing constraint from the requirements of profitability, of the just-in-time, of the made-to-measure, will be more and more stress-inducing, flexible, and insecure. These “troupes” (businesses) will play in “theaters” (the markets awaiting them) for as long as they have “spectators” (clients). They will disperse after putting on a “play” (a product) or several plays. Microbusinesses will construct the essentials of these “theatrical companies.” Many will be tiny multinationals, made up of a few associates located anywhere on the planet. As always, creative work will be the chief source of wealth.

Much rarer, businesses of the second category will be organized over the long haul on the lines of circuses or movie studios, in other words around a name, a story, a project. They will assemble several troupes (temporary employees, continually replaced by others). They will perform in places that change constantly, places where the market is to be found. The public will be drawn in by the past fame of the circus, and will come to consume its products without prior knowledge — although they should have precise knowledge of the “theater’s” products before visiting it. Their all-important quality will be the ability to select the shows they will put on every season. Their cultures, languages, and where-
abouts will be mobile and unpredictable. Their administrative boards will be made up of very well-paid governance professionals. Their leaders will need time to think over the long term in order to find new attractions in advance: they will have to manage flexible production processes, local marketing teams, and targeted marketing campaigns with teams specializing in worldwide coordination. They will have to do all they can to develop the creativity of their fellow workers (even temporary workers), and the loyalty of their clients (even occasional clients).

These firms will in fact be fitters, “props assistants” bringing together modules manufactured by specialized subcontractors, themselves “theatrical troupes” in pitiless competition with one another. They will essentially be networks of nomadic associates. To keep those of their collaborators they value, they will offer them everything a state once did: from lifestyle to security, from insurance to training. Their chief asset will be their brand name, which they will protect and sustain to keep consumers eager for their future products. They will finance vast communications programs in order to constitute the right references for a particular universe. They will incarnate values each consumer would like to embody, places everyone will want to visit. They will take environmental and social values into account, thus partly replacing functions abandoned by governments, at the very least by generously funding nongovernmental organizations. The top “circuses” will be industrial firms working in infrastructures, machine tools, motors, food, household equipment, clothing, transport, the tourist industry, distribution, beauty, fitness, entertainment,
energy, information, finance, insurance, defense, health, and education. These circuses will establish trademarks and hunt for the best experts to work for them. They will also push ahead in the fields of environment, private security, mercenaries, surveillance, network infrastructures (in particular for finance, urban maintenance, and equipment), environment, transportation, and communication. Huge markets will open more than ever for products destined for the poorest. Microcredit will become more important than the traditional banking system. Insurance companies will acquire the leading “circuses” and will ensure their growth.

Some “circuses” will be bold and intelligent enough to make radical changes in their positioning, as Nokia or General Electric once did.

The leading “circuses” will essentially be of American origin or attached to American values, for it is there that entities best able to assemble the means for a durable global project will be found. We can already name some of them — AIG for insurance, Citigroup for banking, Disney for entertainment, Bechtel for engineering, Whirlpool for household equipment, United Health Group for health, Pearson for education, Wal-Mart for distribution, Exxon for energy, Microsoft for software, Boeing for defense and aviation, Nike for clothing, Coca-Cola for drinks and food. Few will be European: Nokia perhaps, L’Oréal, Nestlé, Danone, Mercedes, Vuitton, HSBC, Sanofi. “Circuses” will next be Indian, Brazilian, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Mexican.