A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (22 page)

From then on, infranomads will be more and more vulnerable to epidemics, to lack of water, to desertification, to climate warming. More and more, they will be
forced to move from countryside to cities, then from city to city, to flee indigence and drought, to look for a job and a roof.

They will be increasingly available for every kind of revolt and will feed the pirate economy. They will also be the chief targets for vendors of utopias, and will become the leading players and the first victims of hyper-conflict (if it takes place). But they will also be the principal stakes and the great victors of hyperdemocracy (if it ever materializes).

Meanwhile (and this is the worst defeat), no one will be able to organize the governance of super-empire anymore. The market will be a golem without a brain, a plane without a pilot.

This victory of market over democracy will create an utterly novel situation — a market without a state. All the theoreticians recognize that such a market gives rise to the appearance of cartels, underuses productive forces, encourages financial speculation, fosters joblessness, wastes natural resources, liberates the criminal economy, and empowers pirates. Such was the fate in particular of China in 1912, of Somalia in 1990, of Afghanistan in 2002, of Iraq in 2006. Such will be the fate of super-empire.

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.

The market itself will not be satisfied with this situation. Wherever it has taken up residence, it has always needed a strong state to exist: on the global scale it will need respect for a few rules — so that dishonest players will not distort competition, so that the arms of war do not displace the laws of trading, so that property law is not infringed, so that consumers will remain solvent, and so that violence may be socially mastered.

Insurance and distraction businesses, the market’s principal strengths, will try to play these roles. They will produce norms allowing everyone to take his place in the super-empire and offer shows making it possible to escape it. To succeed in this, they will have to lean on specialist, corporate organizations offering a kind of self-proclaimed governance.

Banks and financial institutions will endow themselves (they are already doing so) with global prudential bodies. These organize monthly meetings of the presidents of the world’s leading central banks in Basel. This committee has already decreed (under the names “Basel I” and “Basel II”) applicable accounting and financial rules (without the prior acquiescence of any global law) to every bank on the planet. Such a coordinating body of all central banks will one day attempt, on its own authority, to fix a stable parity among all the world’s major currencies by imposing budgetary norms on states. Then it will create a global quasi-currency in an attempt to counter private currencies.

Other organizations will define rules for checking
on the origins of capital in order to combat the pirate economy. Initially public and later private, these bodies will complete and then replace police action by turning to mercenaries.

Very many other professions (accountants, lawyers, advertising personnel, information specialists, doctors, pharmacists, architects, teachers, engineers), themselves hard-pressed by the insurance companies, will decree norms. They will create specialist organizations, financed by quasi-taxes, to monitor their members and avoid scandals. To do so, they will use all the technologies of hypersurveillance.

Other institutions of governance of the same kind will emerge on the national or continental scale, particularly in the fields of energy, telecommunications, health, and education.

Finally, impartial agencies will establish norms for financial, social, ecological, and ethical orthodoxy. They will influence the behavior of businesses and states — anxious to present a clean image to the markets. In the environmental field in particular, the insurance companies will insist that businesses comply with the norms decreed by such agencies in order to reduce climatic disturbances and the damage caused by natural disasters that might follow in their wake.

“Governance” will thus itself become a particularly profitable sector. Businesses will specialize in it in order to support the insurance companies that gave birth to them. They will little by little take over from national regulators at the planetary level. The ones who carry the day will be those able to acquire private police forces to palliate the weakness of armies and the public police, and
to verify application of norms and truthfulness. Governance companies will also appear, supplying businesses with competent members for their administrative boards.

These surveillance organisms will first be dominated by the American empire: ICAAN, which today runs the Internet, constitutes a good example of a self-proclaimed international authority (but in fact a mask for the American government). These organisms will extend American law to the rest of the world before creating their own.

Regulators and insurers will thus be the fragile masters of the governance of super-empire. They will encounter competition and threats, paid for by criminal organizations that will try to eliminate them, as well as threats from other, relational bodies — which they themselves will try to eliminate.

Soccer, which I mentioned above as the planet’s leading spectacle, already constitutes a particularly finished example of what will be, tomorrow, this collective governance of super-empire. Indeed, no international body is as powerful in its field as the Fédération Internationale de Football (FIFA), even though the United States plays only a marginal part in it. It already controls the considerable sums the media lavishes on the sport, without any verification of the legitimacy of those who direct it or verification of what it does with these resources. It has its own antidoping labs, which it uses when it chooses. The smallest neighborhood club at the other end of the world feels obliged to respect the tiniest change to the rules emanating from its headquarters in Zurich. The law of nomadic and universal work there is far in advance of national laws.

The same is true for all other federations of major world sports, and even more so for the International Olympic Committee, it too headquartered in Switzerland, in Lausanne.

Like these sports organizations, the other instruments of governance of super-empire will be institutions self-proclaimed for the greater good of their masters. Their doctrine, an apologia for competition, will constitute an idealized representation of super-empire.

These federations will be increasingly controlled by insurance companies that will cover their major risks: thus, in 2003, FIFA took out a specific loan to cover — for up to $262 million — the risk of a cancellation of the 2006 World Cup, threatened notably by terrorist acts. This gave insurance and reinsurance companies effective control of the event.

If these governance institutions should tip over into the criminal economy, they will prepare the moment when (in the second wave of the future) super-empire will be crushed by the pirates. On the other hand, if they manage to inspire general planetary interest, they will contribute to hastening the time when the third wave of the future brings them together in the bosom of a planetary democratic government.

Toward 2050, super-empire will be a world of extreme imbalances and great contradictions. It will fail and collapse, caught up in its own nets. While transparency will make disparities more visible and less tolerable, economic,
political, and military cycles will accelerate. Under the pretext of helping men escape scarcity, the market will have to create new forms. Industries will take fewer and fewer risks while demanding (under pressure from the insurers) maximum profitability. Salary-earners will plead in vain that their share of the revenue not shrink. Consumers — and electors to boot — will demand price cuts. With priority going to the short term, to the immediate, to the precarious, and to dis-loyalty, the task of financing all research and of collecting taxes will become more and more arduous. The insurance companies will be unable to cover all risks. Distraction and information will no longer be able to divert people’s attention from the clamor of daily tragedy. Growth, which today gives everyone hope, will no longer serve as an alibi. Hypersurveillance will put a gag on freedom and dry up the wellsprings of innovation.

Nomadism, at the very source of the mercantile order’s dynamic, will itself be gradually blocked by the technical limits imposed on travel. Ecological requirements will lead to limitations on airplane flights. Before the end of this century the moon will be colonized; a little later, the interior of the solar system will be colonized. But we shall not be capable of going much farther: at the speed of light, it would take four years and three months to reach the nearest star; and to venture even farther, astronauts would have to live a whole lifetime aboard, gradually replaced by their own children whom they would initiate into the mysteries of space piloting.

The hyperworld of super-empire will not be able to
tolerate being caged within its frontiers. It will not accept the fact that earth is at once the prison and the oasis of humankind. So it will then attempt — it is already doing so — this last astounding feat: exiting from oneself. It is there that man will rediscover his dialogue, endlessly resumed, with his own sexuality. He will try to present himself as an object in order to go and live elsewhere — anywhere that is not himself.

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. The monotheistic religions in particular consider sexuality a constraint imposed on men by the forces of evil. The mercantile order, on the contrary, chooses to admit it, while recognizing in it a function different from reproduction — pleasure. Reproduction thus remains (in the mercantile order as in previous orders) an animal constraint that psychiatry (starting at the close of the nineteenth century) aims to make tolerable. In the twentieth century, the mercantile order sought to evacuate the reproductive role of sexuality by making motherhood artificial, by using increasingly sophisticated methods — pills, premature labor, in vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers. In super-empire, the mercantile order will even go so far as to dissociate reproduction and sexuality. Sexuality will be the kingdom of pleasure, reproduction that of machines.

Hypersurveillance, self-surveillance, and then self-repair will provide what is needed for it. After repairing diseased organs they will want to produce them, then create replacement bodies. First they will produce line-ages of stem cells without destroying the embryo, which will make genetic therapy ethically acceptable, and then reproductive cloning. Finally, they will manufacture the human being like a made-to-measure artifact, in an artificial uterus, which will allow the brain to further develop with characteristics chosen in advance. The human being will thus have become a commercial object.

Thanks to the astounding progress we can expect from the nanosciences, everyone will even hope to transfer his awareness of himself to another body, to acquire his own double, copies of beloved people, dream men and women, hybrids built with peculiar traits preselected to reach precise objectives. Some will even seek to overtake the human species with a life-form endowed with a different and superior intelligence.

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.

But well before humankind transforms itself into machines, well before super-empire takes command, man will have succeeded in resisting this prospect — he is already
resisting it. Super-empire will collapse. It will be smashed to pieces on the shore. Men will throw everything into the fight to avoid such a nightmare.

After the violence of money will come (is already coming) the violence of arms.

T
he disappearance of the Soviet system and the spread of democracy seem to have made war a remote prospect. The arms race is over. All countries seem to have realized that economic growth brought them much more than conquest. Never, in fact, has the world as a whole been so pacific, in appearance at least. There is today no war between two countries for the first time in more than six decades.

And yet, as with the ending of every form, at the same time as states are unmaking themselves and super-empire looms on the horizon, a new pre-war begins. When the market is universal, differences are flattened out and each entity becomes everyone’s rival. When the state weakens, the possibility of channeling and mastering violence disappears. Local conflicts multiply, identities are threatened, ambitions clash, human lives no longer have value. The disappearance of the Soviet Union has eliminated one of the world’s policemen. And further, the coming failure of super-empire, the sophistication of weaponry, and the proliferation of players might even converge (in the bosom of super-empire) to trigger a global conflict. It will be a planetary conflagration, a hyperconflict far more destructive than all
previous wars, local or global. Here is the story of its possible beginnings.

Between now and 2025, with the step-by-step advent of a polycentric order, new regional powers will burst forth, all of them wanting access to the same riches. They will create the military means to match their ambitions. Among them will be all the powers that dominate this period and a few others, more marginal, more bellicose.

Fascinated by the way in which empires are born and die, China (whose military spending, even today, is particularly low) will seek to become a major power once again, including on the strategic plane. One way or another, it will seek to take back Taiwan and consolidate its hegemony over East Asia, as the United States did over the Americas in the nineteenth century. It will lean on South Korea, forcing it to arm. It will let North Korea’s totalitarian regime linger on; that country too will seek to acquire new means (which will include the nuclear) of defending itself. Japan in turn will rearm in order to resist a Korean threat and the increasing power of China. India will refuse to have itself encircled by Muslim powers. Even if it does not become an Islamic state, Pakistan will seek to defend itself against India and ensure its ascendancy over its neighbors, from Afghanistan to Kashmir. Indonesia will try to equip itself with the means of ensuring the direction of Islam as a whole and of dominating Southeast Asia. Australia
itself will want to affirm its influence over the region and protect itself against Indonesia’s designs.

Shiite Iran will try to control Islam, to the great detriment of the chiefly Arab Sunnis. To achieve this, the former Persia will have at its disposal a vast population, a lot of money and petroleum, and a geostrategic position. Turkey will refuse to abandon control of the Turkish-speaking world to Iran. Saudi Arabia, the unpredictable vassal of the United States, will try to remain a dominating player in its own region. Egypt will have every reason to see itself as the biggest potential power in the Arab world. Israel will try to remain a regional power in order to survive. Algeria and Morocco will quarrel for preeminence in the Maghreb. Despite threats of disarticulation, Nigeria and Congo, whose birth rates are soaring, will want to control the regions around them. South Africa will want to dominate its neighbors to ensure that it does not remain locked into its enclave.

Russia will attempt to recover its global status and will consider itself in the front line against Islam and China. To defend itself against these neighbors, it will rearm and weave a web of military alliances stretching along its pipeline system. In Western Europe, Germany and France might each rediscover a regional ambition, if the European Union can no longer channel their rivalry.

Brazil will seek to dominate the southern hemisphere of the Americas. Venezuela will strive to challenge it for this role and gather around it the Andean countries, with a view to expelling the United States from the region. Mexico and Argentina will refuse to be
marginalized. In Mexico in particular, major political and social revolts will endanger its alliance with the United States, while Canada will seek to remain neutral. The demands of the war on drug dealers, imposed by the United States, will also require a major reinforcement of Mexico’s military potential.

All these regional ambitions will clash. We shall see a Latin America in revolt against the American economic and political presence, an Arab world dreaming of eliminating Israel, a coalition of Persians seeking to upset the Arab world, a Russia wanting to dominate part of Europe all over again and at the same time protect itself against China and Islam. India and Pakistan will attempt to remove one another from areas that border them; China and Russia will covet the same border regions. Japan, the United States, and China will fight for domination over East Asia.

Military alliances will form, sometimes associating improbable partners. Iran will cooperate with China and Russia; China with Pakistan; Russia with the European Union; Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and Iran could unite in a Muslim confederation. The small countries of Southeast Asia, now members of ASEAN, will unite militarily to escape American, Chinese, or Japanese domination; Iran and Venezuela will seek support from Russia and China; the European Union will seek closer ties with the United States; Russia will seek ties with Algeria and already sends arms to Venezuela, which has requested observer status in . . . the Arab League!

These clashing ambitions, first on diplomatic and economic terrain, may lead to military confrontations
between states. Very venerable forces — pirates and mercenaries — will enter the lists.

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. When deconstruction weakens states, and law and the police become more discrete, violence will spread in public life and between individuals. These pirates will even become essential agents of the economy and of geopolitics.

As soon as the ninth form reaches its limits and super-empire begins, pirates will be more numerous and more powerful than ever. They will no longer seek to make a nest in the bosom of super-empire; they will no longer be satisfied to profit from a cold war. Whether their motives are criminal or political, they will have neither territories nor even families to protect and will be free to consolidate their power over the world. The more super-empire develops, the more powerful they will be, without a state police with the means to fight them.

These pirates will be of several kinds.

Some nations that unmake themselves under the pressures of the market and the workings of democracy will give birth to pirate entities, blurred zones without law, pirate states or nonstates. They will be in the hands
of war leaders at the head of overarmed groups controlling regions, ports, pipelines, roads, and raw materials. This is already the case with Somalia, with Transnistria (on the Moldovan-Ukrainian border), part of Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Pakistan, among many other regions of Africa and Asia.

As we have seen, cities that have grown too fast will also become pirate kingdoms in which no army and no police will ever dare venture. This is already the case (among others) with certain conglomerations in Brazil, Nigeria, Congo, and Colombia. They too will equip themselves with increasingly sophisticated arms.

Mafia-style organizations, cartels, white-collar criminals, and leading drug traffickers will operate without a geographical base. They will collect funds, issuing threats and behaving like states — and against states — in order to guarantee their security. They will equip themselves (they are already equipping themselves) with the most sophisticated arms. They will threaten judges, police, and political leaders likely to put themselves in their path. Sometimes, as is already the case in Colombia, Somalia, Brazil, and Pakistan, these bands will control cities, territories, even whole countries. Hypernomads (chemists, intellectuals, accountants, engineers, military officers, financiers) will put themselves at their service and take part alongside them.

Political or religious groups, they too without a territorial base, will acquire all possible military means to take control of a country, expel its occupants, and then destroy the mercantile order. This is the case, for example, with al-Qaeda and other nihilist movements within its sphere.

Other pirate forms will be born. The proliferation of violence and rage, provoked by the advent of super-empire, will lead to outrages of a new kind. Masses of infranomads, with nothing in common but traveling together, could become threatening. Just like the nomadic masses that crossed the Rhine in the year 406, hordes with weapons in their hands could cross the Strait of Gibraltar, the river Amur, or the Usumacinta waterway — menacing, no longer begging.

Some of these forces could form a league against states, and in particular against democracies. We shall see (we are already seeing) drug barons in the service of political causes or using immigrants as ferrymen or smugglers. We shall see (we are already seeing) nations in ruins become mafia lairs. We shall see (we are already seeing) terrorist forces — by nature nomadic — finding refuge in nonstates. We shall see (we are already seeing) Mafia-style organizations supporting political, secular, or religious opinions, as the Mafia itself once did, or French gangsters who turned collaborationist in 1940. We shall see (we are already seeing) acts of urban violence so extreme that they will require responses more military than police in nature.

Confronted with these threats or acts of aggression, nations will need increasing numbers of soldiers and policemen capable of risking their lives. But fewer and fewer volunteers will come forward, and public opinion in market democracies will no longer want deaths in their armies, and still less among conscripts. Already today, only one-half of one percent of the American population is under arms, and every soldier killed is a national tragedy. 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. 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 . . .).

Nor will this suffice. Corsairs will have to stand up to the pirates. Mercenary businesses will develop, employing former military men. They will be used as suppliers of men to armies and police. In Africa there are a hundred companies of this kind, supplying men and matériel to governments, businesses, even to international organizations. They will soon be exercising general security functions: defense, protection, even attack. Industrial businesses will legally finance such mercenaries, whom they will place at the service of governments from whom they seek markets. Some of these mercenary companies will be used to restore peace in places where the intervention forces of the United Nations or the Organization of African Unity (OAU) have failed, as was already the case with Sierra Leone. The UN will even have its own offices protected by mercenaries. Some countries will use them more or less openly to wage war at a distance against every kind of trafficker, without visibly committing their own forces. Among these mercenary companies, some will obey a good-conduct code obliging them to respect the laws of war,
while others will adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Most of them — like the governments they serve — will no longer respect any constraint. The practice of torture in Iraq and the fate reserved for the prisoners at Guantánamo are premonitory signs of this trend.

Then the anger of peoples will erupt against the mercantile order and above all against the United States, which will direct it for another twenty years at least. A secular anger, based on rational premises.

Hatred against a core is not unleashed when the core is at the peak of its power, but when it begins to decline. This was the fate of all the previous cores: it will be the fate of the American empire. Triumphant at the falling of the Berlin Wall, Washington has already become the chief target of a wave of criticism challenging globalization and market democracy.

Now a critical coalition will emerge, targeting America and the mercantile order. It will embrace all those who expect nothing more from them or who are frustrated at not receiving their benefits. They will criticize America pell-mell, along with the West, globalization, market democracy, and the coming super-empire. Antiglobalists of every hue, most will have nothing to propose in their place.

Their criticism will first be directed (is already being directed) at the invasive role of the United States, which monopolizes the essentials of the world’s wealth, wastes
its resources, disturbs its climate, enslaves peoples, claims the right to rule them as it pleases, and violates many rules of the democracy it aspires to dictate to others.

Next, the criticism will focus on the markets. This will be all the easier as the facts establish more and more clearly that markets suppress neither poverty nor joblessness nor exploitation; that they concentrate all powers in a few hands, inflicting insecurity on increasingly numerous majorities; that they shelve long-term requirements; that they compete with one another to destabilize the climate; that they create scarcities and invent new cost-free arrangements in order to profit from them later. They will protest that hope and the quality of life are not at all the same from one place to another in the world; that the targets of their anger will become — with hypersurveillance and self-surveillance — one of the most pernicious and absolute forms of dictatorship. And finally, the markets will be reproached for liberating violence by orienting all desires toward a hungering for mercantile objects, including a hunger for arms.