At the beginning of the new millennium, the world faced an uncertain future. The most powerful nation-states were at peace. Yet there were dozens of petty wars scattered across the globe, and the human race could look back on the bloodiest century in its history. Some nations were enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Yet the disparity between rich and poor individuals, rich and poor nations, was growing ever wider. Technological innovation was bringing dozens of everyday miracles to market each year. Yet the world faced serious problems which seemed impervious to any technological solution.
Meanwhile, an ecological catastrophe seemed likely to strike the world at any time. Global climate change, long feared, was slowly becoming obvious. Biologists reported a mass vanishing of species, the likes of which had not been seen since the end of the Cretaceous Era. Arable lands and healthy forests shrank worldwide, and the planet’s belt of deserts grew. Every month a few more millions were added to humanity’s numbers. Nations squabbled over how to halt the slow decline of humanity’s life support system, or ignored the situation altogether in the face of more pressing problems.
A few visionaries realized that the next century would be the critical moment in human history. The next hundred years might decide whether the human species would become extinct – or achieve transcendence.
The technology which epitomized the early 20th century was the nuclear weapon, the highest achievement and most fearsome weapon of industrial civilization. The technology most characteristic of the late 20th century was the digital computer, foundation of the networked societies of the future and source of unparalleled prosperity. As the new century began, some believed its primary technology would be genetic – the manipulation of DNA. They were right, but the new revolution was stubbornly slow to appear. By 2025, most of the industrialized world (particularly the United States) was in a technological slump. Innovation continued, but at a slower pace, and the unprecedented economic growth of the 1990s was gone.
Genetic engineering was rapidly becoming a mature technology in 2000. However, even as the new technology’s potential for human advancement was becoming obvious, its tremendous potential for abuse also became clear. Some feared cloning would rob humans of their individuality, and even the notion of cloning human tissues for transplants was violently rejected in many nations. Genetic testing and therapies promised to end the suffering caused by many diseases, but they also opened the door for discrimination on the basis of one’s genetic inheritance. Engineered food crops and “pharm animals” promised to vastly increase agricultural productivity worldwide, but they met resistance from environmentalists, traditional farming interests, and populations who feared eating altered foods.
It was the misfortune of genetic engineering that it matured at a time when much of Western civilization had soured on the notion of “progress” and technological innovation. Space development had stalled. Nuclear power was regarded with deep distrust. The Internet, once regarded as a source of endless miracles, had proven to be vulnerable to both deliberate attack and sheer accident. Genetic technology was particularly mistrusted, being associated with genetic discrimination, biowarfare, and “Frankenfood.”
The new genetic technologies were severely restricted in the most developed nations. The United States, the European Union, and Japan all agreed to strictly limit and monitor the use of genetically altered organisms. Foods and drugs originating from transgenic organisms were subjected to the strictest regulatory regimen of any industrial product. Scientists were strictly prohibited from using transgenic organisms in any situation which might allow them to escape into the “wild” ecosystem. All experiments with human genetic transformation were strictly monitored.
Still, no new technology can be suppressed for long. One of the great advantages of early 21st-century genetic engineering was that it could be practiced without much of the infrastructure of a high-industrial society. The startup costs for a genetic lab were low, and almost all of the needed equipment could be purchased on the open market. As a result, geneering was an ideal area of research for emerging economies in Latin America, Africa, or South Asia. Through the 2020s and early 2030s, many developing nations and individual entrepreneurs quietly invested in geneering facilities, hoping to steal a march on the wealthy nations who were moving cautiously with the new technology.
At first, these “biotech sanctuaries” floundered. Even with the strict limits placed on their activities, First World genetic engineers simply had more resources to apply to their task. Eventually, the sanctuaries hit on their main advantage: the ability to take risks, free of the shackles of regulation. Sometimes the results were grim, as in 2036 when a modified strain of hantavirus escaped from a bioweapons lab to devastate the population of Dar-es-Salaam. Sometimes, however, the sanctuary engineers hit gold. The most prominent example of this was a working cure for AIDS, developed in 2031 by the South African firm Ithemba Biotechnologies.
In the 1980s, the futurist Alvin Toffler pointed out that technological change sometimes caused radical shifts in culture and society. Such a change would sweep across the world like a “wave,” transforming institutions and worldviews, bringing a new kind of civilization into existence in a relatively short time. The results would be so significant that societies on opposite sides of a Wave would literally be inhabiting different worlds.
Toffler spoke of three Waves. The First Wave was triggered by the discovery of agriculture perhaps 10,000 years ago. The Second Wave corresponded with the Industrial Revolution, which began about 1800. The Third Wave that Toffler predicted was associated with the spread of digital computers and information networks, beginning about 1960. Toffler’s vision was correct in many specifics, mistaken in others – but in 2155, people use the concept of “waves of change” in deadly earnest. Since 2000, two more such Waves have swept across the world, further complicating the process of human history.
The Fourth Wave involved the spread of genetic technology, beginning with the sequencing of human DNA at the beginning of the century, culminating with the “biogenesis revolution” and the appearance of variant human subspecies in the 2060s. Today’s futurists disagree about what constitutes the Fifth Wave, but almost all agree that its early stages are already transforming the world. Candidates for the central technology of the evolving Fifth Wave civilization include nanotechnology, memetics and powerful artificial intelligence.
Each Wave overlies the previous ones, but does not replace them. The result is “future shock,” the collision of unready human individuals with an utterly new form of society. Today, the dizzying speed of technological change means that all five Waves coexist on the same planet, subsistence farmers living side by side with gengineered parahumans and superhuman AI. The world is in a constant state of future shock. This accounts for many of today’s cultural phenomena, from reactionary Preservationists who desperately reject change, to radical Transhumanists who embrace it.
In the information economy, the ultimate resource is the human mind. That’s why it no longer makes sense for us to write off most of the world’s population. People in poor countries aren’t stupid, but they’re prevented from putting their minds to best use. Every human being left uneducated is a human being who can’t afford to buy our products, and can’t produce the innovation on which our future depends. – John Alan Kowalski, CEO of Columbia Aerospace (2033)
By 2031, Africa had suffered the ravages of AIDS and other immune-deficiency diseases for almost two generations. Many areas of the continent had been devastated, with whole villages wiped out and a complete breakdown of organized society. The owners of Ithemba Biotechnologies were painfully aware of Africa’s needs. Unfortunately, they were also aware that much of Africa’s population would be utterly unable to pay for the AIDS cure.
Ithemba’s strategy was characteristic of the time. Backed by the South African diplomatic apparatus, the corporation struck bargains with a number of African and South Asian governments. In exchange for distributing the AIDS cure free of charge to anyone who needed it, Ithemba would receive controlling interests in various state-held enterprises. As a result, by 2027 the biotech firm was diversifying into mineral extraction, petroleum refining, rare woods, computer manufacturing, and a variety of other industries. From these, and from the extremely favorable regulatory terms offered by the host governments, Ithemba made the profit that it could not make directly by selling its geneered wares to the desperately poor people who needed them.
From about 2025 to 2040, many other firms followed the Ithemba example. Biotech Euphrates made its first fortune with a series of robust food crops, which could be used to transform marginal terrain into productive farmland. Even the high-industrial firm Columbia Aerospace invested heavily in the developing world, building its largest launch facility near Quito in partnership with the government of Ecuador. It was a time when many entrepreneurs ventured outside the “completed” markets of the developed nations, risking everything to become merchant princes in the world’s poorest countries. Many of them failed, but others succeeded brilliantly. In so doing, they did much to solve problems in the poorer nations that had long seemed intractable.
The peak of the nation-state was probably in the middle years of the 20th century, when national governments were at their most intrusive and the most powerful nations competed for control of the entire world. Since then, social and economic trends have caused much of the power once held by nations to move to other levels of organization.
One aspect of this change has been the movement of sovereign power upward, from nation-states to the level of regional organizations. As the world grows more interdependent, many nations have found it useful to form partnerships with their neighbors. Free-trade zones and customs unions allow neighbors to trade more efficiently among themselves (and compete more effectively against outsiders). Law-enforcement agreements help control criminals who would otherwise flee across national borders with impunity. Military alliances help nations to defend against more powerful rivals. Nations which share an unpopular ideology can band together to prevent outside interference in their social arrangements. All of these relationships lead nation-states to hand over some sovereign authority to their partners.
This process was already under way in the 20th century, but it has accelerated. Today three out of six of the world’s Great Powers are not nationstates, but alliances in which no one nation dominates. The European Union was originally a simple free-trade zone, but over the past decades the E.U. nations have integrated most of their legal, law-enforcement and defensive arrangements as well. The Transpacific Socialist Alliance is an ideological bloc, devoted to promoting and defending nanosocialism. Finally, the Pacific Rim Alliance is a military partnership, allowing its members to defend against possible Chinese or TSA aggression.
As biotech sanctuaries worked out the problems with cutting-edge biotechnology, the developed nations began to accept its miracles. The process was slow, but once regulatory restrictions were relaxed the developed nations began to foster their own gene-tech entrepreneurs.
The 2050s were a time of new hope for many people. The suffering of populations in Africa, South Asia, and other poor regions was rapidly being reduced. Even the most developed nations experienced a resurgence in economic growth, along with a new belief in “progress” as a force in human affairs. Digital and genetic technologies resumed the rapid advances which they had enjoyed before the turn of the century. The arrival of energy and mineral resources from space began to fuel an industrial renaissance.
The period was not without its discontents. Some of the era’s great projects, such as the construction of deep-space habitats and the terraforming of Mars, attracted sharp criticism. On Earth, the most controversial innovations involved the design of new forms of sentient life: increasingly sentient AI, “uplifted” animals, and even genetically transformed human beings. As progress seemed to march on, unstoppable, there were growing questions about the moral value of the new technologies.
How can anyone hold a patent on something every human being carries around in his body from birth? Do we all owe these guys royalties now just for breathing? – Anonymous Internet commentator (2008)
In the First Wave civilizations, the fundamental source of wealth was land, on which cattle could graze or food crops could be raised. In the Second Wave civilizations, land gave way to capital, the ownership of industrial machinery. Third Wave and later civilizations still make use of land and capital, but today the fundamental source of wealth is information.
Whether encoded as algorithms in a computer, sequences of DNA, or the molecular structure of a nanotech device, information has defined wealth since late in the 20th century. The most critical feature of information is that it can easily be duplicated. It’s possible to define who owns a given piece of land or a given item of industrial equipment, but any number of people can “own” the same piece of information. Even the physical representations of information – computer programs, genetic sequences, or nanodevices – can easily be copied (in fact, some of them tend to copy themselves). In any case, new information is normally useless until it is shared widely.
So how can someone who develops new, useful information make a profit, especially in cases where such development is very expensive? The answer is the legal concept of intellectual property. The developer holds the exclusive right to make copies of the information, expressed in a patent or copyright which is enforced by the state. As long as he holds this right, he can sell copies for any price the market will meet, usually many times what it costs to simply produce the copies. Anyone else who attempts to make copies (other than for individual, private use) can be punished with civil or criminal penalties. In this way, an artificial scarcity is imposed on the information, keeping its price high enough so that its owner can make a profit.
Like many legal concepts, intellectual property is a fiction, viable only as long as everyone agrees to be bound by it. Such agreement has sometimes been hard to come by. Even in 2000, fierce controversies were breaking out over the ownership of computer software, digital recordings of music, genetically engineered seeds, and other forms of intellectual property. Whenever the public saw too great a discrepancy between the value of information and the price charged for it, piracy became widespread. Individuals copied software, recordings, genetic and nanonic designs. Entire nations, falling behind in the race for technical innovation, chose not to enforce the international agreements protecting intellectual property. Propertyowners struck back with punitive laws and elaborate anti-piracy technology. In many ways, the conflict over intellectual property has defined the 21st century, just as the conflict over capital property defined the 20th century.
The conflict continues today, with whole ideologies devoted to one side or the other of the struggle. It has often been a matter of life of death, as when intellectrual property issues preclude the distribution of cheap “generic” drugs to fight killer diseases. Many an adventure in the Fifth Wave environment can turn on the struggle for ownership of information in the form of intellectual property.
In the developed world, the 2040s and 2050s were a time of material prosperity and political conformism. The main concerns of most people were to make a good living and avoid causing trouble. All of that changed suddenly in the early 2060s, with the great social upheaval known as the Transhuman Awakening.
It was a war for no clear object, in a country that presented no threat, fought by soldiers who had no choice. Vietnam with pretty mountains. You would think we might have learned something in the last century. – Captain Dana Martello, USMC (ret.), The Andean Conflict (2079)
Off Earth, the awakening was sparked by the release of the Ares Plague and the subsequent birth of the Preservationist movement. On Earth, the event that catalyzed the revolution was the outbreak of the Andes War.
In 2064, a new insurgency broke out in Peru. Like the Sendero Luminoso insurgency of the 20th century, the “Red Sword” movement was inspired by radical Marxism. Unlike the Senderistas, the Red Sword’s radicals drew their manpower primarily from the indigenous population of Peru, and posed a serious threat to Peru’s urban centers and central government. The new rebellion also had some remarkably un-Marxist ideas, calling for the absolute rule of a genetically enhanced Incan elite and the rejection of all high-industrial technology. By 2052, the Peruvian government was fighting a vicious guerrilla war and was in dire straits. In that year, Lima made its first appeal to the United States for military aid, suggesting that a rebel victory would make the American alliance with Ecuador untenable and threaten the Columbia Aerospace facilities near Quito.
The Andes War was the first major conflict which involved engineered and biomodified soldiers on all sides. The United States deployed Marine and regular Army units made up almost entirely of combat cybershells, run by advanced infomorphs or by human soldiers using teleoperation. Most American officers in the field used some level of biomodification, as did many of the Red Sword insurgents. The Peruvian government used uplifted animals as bodyguards and commando troops.
The war was quite controversial in the United States and the rest of the developed world. Both rebel and Peruvian government forces behaved with extreme brutality. The diverse nature of the combatants brought the issue of nonhuman rights to the immediate attention of the American populace. Many young people demonstrated against the use of infomorphs and gene-modified organisms in dangerous or menial occupations. Other elements of society rejected them as “inhuman,” and demanded an end to their construction. Some conservatives also claimed their inhumanity, but supported their use as a liberating factor for “real” humans.
After American forces withdrew from Peru in 2070, LAI-driven cybershells of increasing sophistication began appearing in civilian society. Combat models entered service with police and private security firms. Labor models appeared in the unskilled-labor pool and in public-works projects. Some were even produced to serve as expensive companions, bodyguards or sex toys. All of these events further polarized society in the U.S. and elsewhere, touching off years of social and political upheaval.
We regard the present human norm as a transitional state. We will not give up our humanity, but we will perfect it in a thousand diverse ways. – Ian R. Walker, The Transhuman Experience (2056)
One social movement of the time was Transhumanism. Transhumanists argued that technology could be used to vastly extend the potential of the human species. Genetic and cybernetic enhancement, the medical extension of human lifespan, the use of mind-altering drugs, communion with increasingly advanced computers, all were touted as valuable tools for the extension of human capability.
The Transhumanist movement had roots stretching back into the 20th century. In fact, some of the movement’s earliest leaders were still active in the 2060s, having taken an interest in life-extension technology from the beginning. The movement was driven by people of all ages and from all walks of life, including a number of wealthy entrepreneurs and influential artists.
Most of the older Transhumanists were committed to promoting their ideals through established social institutions. On the other hand, in the 2060s the movement attained a great deal of popularity among young adults in the developed nations. In some ways, these young mid-century Transhumanists resembled American and European radicals of the 1960s. They laid the same emphasis on moral value, made the same demands for freedom and justice, and mounted the same aggressive challenge to established institutions. Their foremost complaint was that the original Transhumanist ideals had been hijacked by a corporate and political “establishment,” which was interested in life extension but tended to oppose the rest of the Transhumanist program. These young radicals insisted that the benefits of new technology should be made available to everyone, not used to tighten the grip of a reactionary elite on social power.
Led by their elder heroes, the young Transhumanists had a profound effect on the politics and social life of the developed nations. In this they again resembled the radicals of the 20th century, who lost many specific battles but still managed to permanently change the social landscape. Unfortunately the revolutionary young Transhumanists also emulated some of the darker features of 20th century radicalism. Some of them destroyed themselves by undergoing untested genetic therapies, using dangerous drugs, or accepting illegal cybernetic implants. Others pursued violent protest against established corporate or governmental institutions. Still others turned away from a world they saw as corrupt, forming small communities on the fringes of society, or venturing into space.
Never mind what either God or a billion years of hard-won evolutionary experience have given us. A few technical marvels turn up and these people are ready to rewrite themselves from scratch. Is it any wonder that they lose something precious along the way? – Carl Edward Stokes, founder of the Human Alliance (2053)
On Earth, the Preservationist movement of the 2050s was often portrayed as a conservative reaction to Transhumanism. In fact, Preservationism had its roots in the environmentalist movements of the late 20th century, and was given its modern form during the debates over Martian terraforming in the 2040s. After the Ares Plague was released in 2050, radical Preservationism spread widely on both Mars and Earth.
Preservationism stood in opposition to all significant applications of biotechnology. Unlike earlier environmental movements, the Preservationists had little quarrel with high-industrial technologies or (nonsapient) digital networks. The manipulation of life and of living ecosystems, however, was seen as the height of human arrogance. Preservationists argued that humanity could thrive without using genetic technology, allowing “wild” ecosystems to manage themselves through natural processes. They also opposed any attempt to create nonhuman intelligence which might one day eclipse “natural” humanity. Terraforming, the creation of new species through genetic manipulation, the use of sapient AI, all were regarded as evils to be resisted by any means necessary. In particular, the divergence of humanity itself due to the creation of variant subspecies was regarded as deeply dehumanizing and dangerous. It was this position that placed Preservationism in direct opposition to the Transhumanists.
Preservationism was essentially a reactionary movement, driven by older citizens and often arguing on the basis of traditional moral values. Even so, its members were easily as prone to radical action as the Transhumanists. Some members of the movement worked in the halls of state or corporate power to enforce their ideals. Others mounted popular crusades against technological excess, attacking genetic clinics, sabotaging AI research facilities, even organizing street violence against nonhuman “monsters.”
One of the most important political trends of the 21st century has been the shift of social power into the hands of the elderly, in all the hyperdeveloped nations. Even in 2000, the elderly formed an important political bloc. In the United States, for example, the elderly were wealthier and more likely to vote than any other demographic sector, and they were organized through specialinterest groups more powerful than those of any other age bracket.
The demographic and economic trends of the 21st century have only magnified the political power of the elderly. After a century of falling birthrates and improvements in geriatric medicine, the elderly today make up the majority in most of the Fifth Wave nations. In any case, the simplest way to become wealthy is to “buy and hold” investments, a strategy that is most effective for the long-lived. As a result, many of today’s wealthiest (and therefore most influential) individuals are among the oldest.
Elderly people are not necessarily political conservatives. Indeed, some of today’s super-elderly are extremely technophilic and progressive – most notably, those Old Transhumanists who have survived for over a century because of their early interest in life-extension technology. Still, in today’s Fifth Wave nations there is a strong correlation between age and conservatism. Most of the super-elderly survived to that age by being cautious in their investments, in their choices of medical treatment, and in their social interactions. Furthermore, despite their age today’s elderly can still have many years ahead of them. They tend to take the long view, resisting any impulse to take risks or even allow others to do so.
As a result, the hyperdeveloped societies have all grown steadily more conservative over the past century, even while technological innovation has continued to accelerate. Today’s Fifth Wave societies are dominated by a cautious, wealthy, super-elderly class, many of whose members have been in positions of power since mid-century. Their rule has been benevolent but sometimes intrusive, focused on keeping economic growth steady and social unrest under control.
One small people, one marginal society has for centuries fixed a template to which all the rest of humanity has been forced to conform. First with their guns, then with their money, they have stolen the world’s inheritance and squandered it. Time to take it back, while there remains something worth saving. – Fedayin Islam Chairman Mehdi Kermani (2071)
Finally, while Transhumanists and Preservationists fought their ideological war on Earth and in deep space, a third movement gained momentum in the developing world. The so-called “Majority Cultures” movement had its roots in Mao-Communism and the Non-Aligned Nations movement of the 20th century. In the developing world, it encouraged the rejection of Western cultural ideas and consumer goods, along with the development of indigenous folkways. The movement claimed that Western ideas were inherently anti-democratic, since they held dominance in world affairs all out of proportion to the numbers of people living in the Western nations. Justice and democracy demanded that non-Western cultures dominate the world’s political and economic systems. (The point that democracy and the notion of the “public will” were essentially Western inventions was generally ignored.)
Meanwhile, the movement also attained some popularity in the developed nations themselves, mostly in academia and among disaffected youth. Academics who embraced the movement called for an end to the dominance of “hierarchical, linear, logocentric, scientistic” modes of thought. They went beyond even the Preservationist ideal in their rejection of almost all scientific inquiry.
While the Majority Cultures movement failed to set off the same kind of social upheaval as the Transhumanists or Preservationists, it did inspire nationalist sentiments in many parts of the world. As the 2070s came to a close, many developing nations used the movement to drive their own “independence struggles,” rejecting the influence of Western-dominated world institutions and multinational corporations. Many in the developed world were inspired by the movement to withdraw from Western society, forming independent communes or moving to the developing countries.
Ideas are capital. We want to seize the real means of production. – Anonymous nanosocialist activist (2094)
Nanosocialism is a political philosophy, first stated (under the name “information socialism”) by the Australian academic Kyle Porters in 2049. Porters observed that although modern civilization was utterly dependent on information technologies, the central notion of intellectual property often gave rise to significant injustice. Although he was by no means the first person to point out this contradiction, he was the first philosopher to construct a coherent political ideology in response.
Porters pointed out that the individual holders of intellectual property were usually unable to enforce their rights against piracy. Software and genetic designs were being stolen wholesale around the world, bringing profit to pirates at the expense of the original designers. Despite this, the artificial scarcity imposed on information by the concept of intellectual property kept the benefits of new technology out of the hands of most of the world’s billions, who lived in rank poverty as a result. Porters suggested that the state should go beyond the simple enforcement of copyrights and patents, and actually seize ownership of them. He believed that only the state could properly reward technological innovation, while still distributing the benefits of such innovation fairly to all.
At first, “infosocialism” was not taken seriously in the developed nations, but in some parts of the world it combined with the Majority Cultures movement to produce a viable new ideology. By the late 2070s, several nations in South America and Southeast Asia were governed by local infosocialist parties. Piracy of advanced technology had long been a going concern in these nations, primarily benefitting a corrupt entrepreneurial class. Bolstered by Porters’ theories, governments found it attractive to seize the benefits of such piracy for themselves, striking a blow against Western-style capitalism and local corruption at the same time.
The infosocialist nations repudiated all international treaties protecting intellectual property. Patents and copyrights held elsewhere were ruthlessly pirated, although the infosocialist regimes usually offered “royalty” payments if the owners of intellectual property were willing to sign over their rights. Scientists and engineers within the infosocialist nations were often richly rewarded by the state for their work, at the cost of losing all control over their inventions. Some of the infosocialist nations even extended the principle to works of creative art, seizing the right to publish such works and pay royalties to their creators.
Naturally, the repudiation of international agreements had severe consequences, as most nations imposed economic sanctions on the infosocialist regimes. In response, the most committed nations in the infosocialist bloc formed the Transpacific Socialist Alliance. At about this time, the outside media began calling the new ideology “nanosocialism,” due to the Alliance’s emphasis on state control of emergent nanotechnologies.
The TSA has struggled along ever since, surviving economic sanctions and the Pacific War, gathering more support around the world each year. Most outside observers believe that nanosocialism is doomed to fail, for many of the same reasons that Soviet-style Communism failed over a century ago. Still, in many parts of the world the ideology is strongly attractive, and the TSA shows no signs of immediate collapse.
You, our parents, our architects. You had such grand ideals, and in their name you planned us more carefully than any generation in history. You designed our bodies, you blueprinted our minds, and oh yes, you built millions of us in vats to serve as your slaves. Now you have the gall to blame us because we didn’t turn out the way you wanted? – Bioroid-emancipation activist “Felicia Prime” (2098)
By the early 2080s, the social upheavals of the Transhuman Awakening were over. Most of the radical youth movements of the early Awakening had collapsed, although both Transhumanist and Preservationist ideals were continuing to take root in different sectors of society. In most parts of the developed world, a conservative reaction had gained control of political and social institutions. The new young generation was cynical rather than idealistic, interested in surviving rather than rebuilding a hostile world.
The era from about 2085 to 2099 was often called “The Overturn.” It was a time of economic prosperity worldwide, but in most places it was also a time of social drift, during which rival ideologies fought bitter but increasingly ineffective struggles. The global political order which had existed since the fall of Soviet Communism in 1992 was finally beginning to unravel. Established powers such as the United States and the European Union were suddenly finding themselves eclipsed by nations new to the center of the world stage.
The 21st century has also seen the revival of an “ancient” political form: the city-state. Some city-states (such as Monaco, Singapore, or Vatican City) were already in existence in 2000, due to the vagaries of history. These have been joined by a number of independent or nearindependent cities, which have gained their autonomous status during one of the century’s many secession movements.
Such a “free city” is a unique environment. A city-state usually has a much larger nation-state as a neighbor (as Montreal is dominated by Quebec) or is entirely surrounded by foreign territory (as Vatican City is surrounded by Italy). The city-state’s government is usually careful to consider its neighbor’s wishes in all things. Even so, there is always some reason why the neighbor tolerates the independence of the city-state. The nature of the relationship often lends itself to adventure situations: espionage, political and economic intrigue, even the threat of military action.
Perhaps the city-state simply has a comfortable historical relationship with its neighbor, as in the case of Montreal. In this case, the city chose to retain close ties to Canada even after the breakup of the larger nation. Relations with the new independent nation of Quebec remained amicable, and Montreal continues to be well-integrated into the Quebecois economy and society even though it is politically independent. Visitors to such cities will simply need to deal with a different government and legal structure, and will not find much political intrigue underway.
Some city-states remain in existence because they provide services that are unavailable in the nearby nation-state. Singapore is an example of this type, surrounded by Malaysia and close to Indonesia, both nations members of the nanosocialist bloc. The nanosocialist nations have been cut off from most of the world by trade sanctions, but Singapore still trades both with them and their enemies. As a result, Singapore can act as a middleman, helping its neighbors obtain goods they would otherwise have to do without. Singapore makes a profit from this relationship, and retains its independence. Such cities are usually not under any immediate threat of attack, but they are still centers of political intrigue and espionage since they act as “gateways” between rival power blocs.
Other city-states remain independent because they are defended by a powerful ally. East Timor, for example, has a long-standing defense relationship with Australia. Such situations are rife with conflict and intrigue, since the city-state’s nearest neighbor is usually hostile. Espionage plots are again common, and in this case the city-state is often in danger of invasion.
The East Is Ahead – Teralogos WorldNews article headline (2076)
Foremost of these new Great Powers was the People’s Republic of China. For decades the PRC had charted its own distinctive course, paying lip service to Mao-Communism but actually forging its own synthesis of Chinese social ideas and Western-style capitalism. Relations with the rest of the world were often prickly, as the Chinese leadership maintained its distance from the West and from the developed nations of eastern Asia. Economic growth was steady and tended to be somewhat faster than in Japan, the United States, or Europe. By 2085 the PRC had the largest national economy on the planet, passing that of the United States and still growing rapidly.
Meanwhile, another new superpower of sorts was emerging from the “infosocialist” political movement of the 2070s. In 2089 several nations with infosocialist governments formed the Transpacific Socialist Alliance. Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, and Thailand were the dominant partners. The members agreed to closely coordinate their economic and foreign policies, standing in defense of infosocialism against the world.
The new alliance soon alienated most of the world community through its radical policy of nationalizing all intellectual property. By 2092 the developed nations had enacted severe economic sanctions against the TSA, forbidding most trade and severely curtailing cultural and scientific exchanges. The sanctions had less effect than the capitalist nations had hoped, in large part because it proved impossible to prevent the flow of information in both directions across the TSA borders. Technical data continued to enter the TSA, while infosocialist propaganda poured out. The sanctions further encouraged the TSA nations to engage in wholesale piracy of patents.
The TSA failed to meet many of its economic goals, but “nanosocialism” (as the ideology eventually became known) did make many high-tech goods available to the general population of the TSA nations. The standard of living of the poorest citizens improved markedly. Soon, nanosocialism was as popular within the TSA as it was reviled outside.
Many of the hyperdeveloped nations have experienced a serious population problem throughout the 21st century – but it isn’t a matter of overpopulation. Rather, the industrialized nations have seen significant drops in birthrates and even in overall population. This has often caused economic difficulties. Labor shortages have slowed economic growth. Meanwhile, as the ratio of working to retired individuals drops, social programs favoring the elderly have had more and more difficulty finding enough tax revenue to operate.
This problem has been particularly acute in Europe, with nations from Spain to Russia facing serious population losses throughout the century. Japan has also suffered population decline, and presently has the “oldest” demographics of any nation on the planet. Although medical science has allowed many people to continue working to much higher ages, the difficulty remains.
Some nations (notably Japan) have responded to this trend through technological innovation. As working individuals become more productive, as computers and cybershells become better at working independently, economic growth can still continue even as a nation’s workforce shrinks. Other nations (notably Russia and some Asian countries) have supplemented their workforces through manufactured bioroids. This has the negative effect of producing a servile class in society, but it prevents economic decline in the same manner as robotics.
Another approach is simply to encourage immigration from the developing world. A nation with open borders can easily attract skilled labor from poorer countries, offering economic opportunity (and often great social or political stability). Such replacement migration simply keeps the nation’s demographics “young,” ensuring that the workforce remains strong even as the native population ages. This approach has been used by the United States and by some European nations. The primary side effect is a shift in the nation’s ethnic makeup, as with the rapid rise of Hispanic culture in the United States or the recent surge of Islam in parts of Europe. Such cultural shifts have often led to social unrest, especially since they involve an element of generational tension as well.
Suddenly humanity is marching forward not as a species, but as a clade, a cluster of related kindreds free to move in their own way and at their own pace. I don’t know why this seems to terrify some people. It’s always been our destiny to give way to those alien and unfathomable creatures, our children. – Dr. Sayyid Iqbal, Biotech Euphrates geneticist (2109)
Aside from the nanosocialist revolution, the world continued to enjoy peace and prosperity through the 2080s. In the developed nations, the situation was one of social drift. The grand ideological crusades of the Awakening era were over, leaving behind cynicism and sour infighting over relatively trivial political issues.
By 2085, the majority of humans were gene-enhanced. The most common alterations were subtle and therapeutic, correcting well-known genetic disorders and bringing a general improvement to health and quality of life. In the wealthiest nations, however, more radical transformations were becoming common. It was now possible (and, in some circles, acceptable) to engineer one’s children for significantly higher intelligence, specific talents, or even a different physical structure. By the mid-2080s, dozens of engineered genetic types had gained widespread popularity. Despite dire predictions, this diversification in human genetics had relatively little effect at first.
The social time bomb exploded in 2090, when Hippocrene Laboratories made a public release of the specifications for its Alpha-series genetic design. The Alpha upgrade had been available at high cost for some time, but now it would be well within a middle-class budget in the developed world. At the same time, the first Alpha cohorts had reached young adulthood, and were already making a notable mark in many sectors of society. As a result, the design proved extremely popular.
At about the same time, Biotech Euphrates announced the conclusion of public trials for its more radical Ziusudra design. Despite its superficial similarity to the unmodified type, the Ziusudra was in fact a new human subspecies, unable to interbreed with the human root stock without technological aid. This in itself was not new, as there were already a number of such subspecies in existence. The widespread popularity of the Ziusudra template, however, meant that Homo sapiens sapiens would henceforth be sharing Earth with other human species. Indeed, the original human species might soon be a minority within Earth’s population. The world community was now confronted with the fact that the very definition of humanity could no longer be relied upon. Many observers (not all of them Preservationists) feared that bloody conflict would result.
Humanity did not have the luxury of time to decide how to deal with its division. The 2080s also saw the first mass production of bioroids, the genetic “uplifting” of nonhuman species to full sentience, the appearance of human-level sapience in computers, and the first experiments with personality uploading. Despite every effort on the part of Preservationists worldwide, time has proven that humanity would inevitably be remade in a thousand divergent images. Once a fringe philosophy, Transhumanism was rapidly becoming so pervasive as to be taken for granted in much of the world.
In 1976, the biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in the course of a popularized discussion of evolutionary theory. According to Dawkins, a meme was a unit of cultural information – an idea, a fashion, or a technique.
Dawkins made a deliberate analogy to the concept of the gene as a unit of biological information. He proposed that it might be useful to think of ideas as subject to laws analogous to those governing organisms. Ideas copied themselves from one human mind to another, just as biological organisms copied themselves through the natural reproductive process. Ideas could spread through a human population, much like a virus. Ideas, like genes, were subject to mutation. Ideas competed for the attention of human beings, just as organisms competed for energy and the chance to mate…
Dawkins’ proposal was slow to have any effect in the scientific community. Over the course of the 21st century, memetics has developed into a hybrid of neurobiology and mass psychology. Memeticists study how the human brain generates and stores ideas, and how ideas are likely to change as humans share them with each other. A few practical results have appeared, advancing the state of fields such as cognitive science, demographics and psychology. No stunning breakthroughs have been made.
The primary influence of memetics has been in popular culture. One implication of the meme concept is that all elements of human culture are essentially artificial. An idea can survive and spread because it is good at attracting human attention – and this “talent” may have nothing to do with the idea’s truth. People who follow pop-science memetics tend to treat all ideas as conditional, not worth accepting without question. This tends to infuriate followers of various religions, political ideologies, and other beliefs requiring a commitment of faith.
Memetics also encourages one to think of his own beliefs as foreign ideas that have gained a foothold in his mind. As a result, a follower of pop-science memetics may decide to “have his memes upgraded,” just as he might undergo genetic therapy or have biotech devices implanted. The popularity of memetic ideas has thus led to a surge in demand for psychotherapy, making the therapeutic industry a significant sector of the economy in some Fifth Wave nations. The term “memesplicer” has become common slang for any psychotherapist or sociologist.
Recently, researchers in artificial intelligence have been surprised to learn that their sentient computers consider memetics to be a useful concept. The most advanced of today’s AI do much of the work of organizing their own thought processes. Many of these, including some of the most successful at emulating human behavior, claim to have attained great insights after studying memetics. In fact, some of the most accomplished memetic theorists of recent years have been infomorphs. It is now widely accepted that there is a useful cross-fertilization between memetics and artificial intelligence, one that SAIs are well-equipped to exploit.
Despite all the change of the past century, the transition to the “modern era” can be pinned to one event. The Pacific War of 2099 brought the specter of mass warfare back into the world, and made it clear that Earth’s conflicts were about to escalate to a new level.
The origins of the war were rooted in the pattern of Chinese settlement overseas. For centuries, Chinese had been settling all over Southeast Asia, forming expatriate communities that often dominated local business. Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand all had particularly large Chinese communities. This Chinese diaspora was further reinforced around the turn of the century, as people fled from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan just ahead of reunification with the People’s Republic.
It was among these Chinese middle-class communities that nanosocialism found its most fertile ground in the revolutionary 2070s. Most of the new nanosocialist regimes of Southeast Asia were driven by the enthusiasm of non-Chinese majorities, but their political and economic leaders tended to be ethnic Chinese. On the other hand, nanosocialism was completely incompatible with the odd blend of Confucianism, communism, and capitalism that had taken root in the Chinese homeland. What followed was a People’s Republic that was at odds with most of the nations of Southeast Asia. Relations between China and the TSA, and especially between China and TSA leader Thailand, deteriorated steadily.
The situation became particularly bad in 2098, when the PRC withdrew diplomatic contact from Thailand and imposed a complete embargo on all communications, web exchange, and travel to the TSA bloc. Efforts by the Pacific Rim Alliance to mediate the dispute went nowhere, and for the first time in decades a major war seemed possible.
In June 2099, war finally came, with a Chinese strike against TSA communications and powersat facilities in Earth orbit. The PRC announced its discovery of a TSA “black” research program, developing contagious nanoviruses and other genetic atrocities. Chinese propaganda claimed that these nanoviruses could be released to redesign the genetics of billions of people, or (even more insidiously) to alter their beliefs and make them more susceptible to nanosocialist dogma. The TSA rejected these allegations and vowed to carry on the war by all possible means.
At first, it seemed likely that the war would spread, but a few days after the first Chinese strike the Pacific Rim Alliance and the United States declared themselves neutral. They applied diplomatic pressure to insure that no other powers involved themselves in the conflict; the United States imposed an embargo on helium-3 shipments to both sides. These steps kept the war “limited” in scope – if such a term can be applied to a conflict stretching all the way across the Pacific basin, into Earth orbit and out to the planetary colonies.
The war was fought in many theaters. The People’s Liberation Army moved against Bangkok, Hanoi, and Rangoon, making steady progress despite fierce TSA resistance in the mountains of northern Indochina. The navies of both sides, equipped with fast supercavitating submarines and hydrofoils, mounted lightning campaigns in the South China Sea. Even thousands of miles from the front lines, facilities were destroyed by commando raids, network intrusion attacks, and the delivery of “devourer” microbot swarms. The TSA’s orbital facilities were destroyed or occupied in the first Chinese attack wave, but sabotage of Chinese space facilities continued throughout the war and a number of nanosocialist AKVs remain unaccounted for even now. Propaganda campaigns promoted internal rebellion on both sides. Casualties were light in comparison with the great mass conflicts of the 20th century, but even so millions of civilians died in the course of the war.
By early 2100, it was clear that China had the upper hand. Hanoi had fallen to Chinese troops, driving the Vietnamese government into the south of the country. The TSA navies had failed to hold the South China Sea, and an invasion of Indonesia or Malaysia seemed imminent. Chinese propaganda was threatening to split the TSA in half, as the South American members of the alliance began quietly to suggest capitulation.
On March 12, about a hundred scientists and political leaders fled Bangkok, apparently traveling to Indonesia but in fact vanishing. The Thai government collapsed the next day, as an alliance of business leaders and second-tier military officers seized power and ejected the remaining nanosocialists. After several hours of confusion, the government of Indonesia seized the leadership of the TSA and opened peace negotiations. The war was over.
The long-term implications of the Pacific War have been difficult to assess. China apparently succeeded in its official objectives, destroying the TSA’s black weapons program and bringing down the revolutionary Thai government. Still, for all the violence and destruction, the war settled few issues. If anything it has set off a new period of international tension and conflict. China’s victory in the war established it as the leading power in world affairs, but it has also energized China’s potential rivals to improve their own standing.
Nanosocialism and the Transpacific Socialist Alliance were not destroyed in the conflict. Indeed, under Indonesian management the TSA has recovered much prestige. The “crimes against humanity” committed by the prewar Thai leadership have been repudiated, and the alliance’s economy has recovered to better than prewar levels. As an ideology, nanosocialism continues to gain new adherents, especially in Africa, India and the Americas.
India’s role in world affairs appears ready to take on unique significance. Its massive population and growing economy have already brought it into the Great Power ranks. It also seems possible that India will go nanosocialist in the near future, a prospect which frightens many around the world. India’s admission to the TSA would more than double the alliance’s population and economic output, putting it in rough parity with China itself and shifting the balance of power worldwide.
Chinese dominance has been challenged once again by the Pacific Rim Alliance. After the war, the new Thai government quickly reached an understanding with the PRA, negotiating for entry into the alliance even while the final peace accord with China remained to be signed. When these arrangements became public in 2086, relations between China and the PRA cooled dramatically. Today, Asia and the Pacific basin are the main flashpoint for future world conflict, as a three-cornered “cold war” is under way between China and its two rival alliances.
The last major power to enjoy a resurgence in the postwar era has been the United States. Long considered to be in decline, the U.S. has been greatly energized by a string of recent military and diplomatic successes. The American economy has been growing rapidly in recent years, and it seems possible that the U.S. will regain the technological lead it lost in the early 2080s. All of this has encouraged the United States to return to an activist stance, aggressively seeking influence and prestige around the world.
While humanity has become more and more diverse, new forms of sentience have appeared on Earth. Among these are the final achievement of Third Wave digital civilization: fully sapient computers.
The arrival of sapient AI has actually been a long process. The first computers capable of passing the socalled “Turing test” appeared as early as 2030, depending on how strictly one applies Turing’s criteria. Certainly the most advanced machines of the time could run software granting them the ability to interact with humans in idiomatic “natural” language, developing distinctive personalities of their own. In the course of the 21st century, computer hardware and software continued to advance, and such personality simulations became commonplace. By the 2050s even a typical personal computer could interact with its user as if it were a friendly and cooperative sapient being.
Such machines were certainly intelligent, but the question of whether they were sapient beings remained open. In some sense, that question remains open to the present day. The nature of consciousness remains obscure, so it remains impossible to prove or disprove the selfawareness of any advanced computer. Asking the machines themselves is no help – some claim to be selfaware, others (sometimes of the same model, with the same software base) claim not to be. Hard-line “vitalists” continue to maintain that only biological organisms can be said to be creative, sapient beings, but this position is harder to defend with each passing year. Today, most people simply don’t worry about it, and treat anything that behaves intelligently as a human-equivalent. In any case, about the time of the Pacific War, machines of human-level intelligence became cheap and widely available. Today almost any desktop, vehicle or cybershell “brain” has the potential for intelligence about equal to that of an unmodified human being. Such computers can be built and maintained for much lower cost than that necessary to “build” and maintain a human being. The most advanced machines have attained what would be considered genius-level intelligence in a human. Although such computers are extremely expensive, they have certain advantages over human beings – they are much better at concentrating on a specific task, they can correlate vast amounts of information very quickly, and they can use a much wider variety of sensory equipment.
As a result, the long rear-guard action fought by human labor against the advance of automation is entering its last stages. Machine intelligence can now replace biological intelligence in a tremendous variety of occupations, including creative and decision-making tasks. Indeed, it is now possible for biological intelligence to become machine intelligence, using the new “downloading” technologies.
This situation is bringing many of the most developed nations to the point of crisis. In most of these societies, unemployment is rising very rapidly and putting considerable strain on society. Most futurists believe that Earth is moving toward a global “leisure society,” in which most human beings need not work at all. How to attain such a goal remains unclear. Some nations are building massive social-spending programs, ensuring that the chronically underemployed have a minimum income sufficient even for a few luxuries. Others, less accustomed to running a welfare state, are suffering serious social tensions. These are often generational (as young unemployed find themselves envying the older investor class) or ethnic (as unemployed immigrants find themselves envying wealthy natives). There is also a strong anti-technological bias in some of today’s labor movements, as the unemployed violently resist the further spread of automation.
Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether the machines themselves are willing to support an “unproductive” class of biological citizens. Most intelligent computers are simply programmed to work loyally, but many of the most intelligent are self-programming, and are liable to question their place in society. So far there has been no organized machine resistance, but there are a number of “machine liberation” movements worldwide, supported by both intelligent machines and biological citizens. Some nations have responded by defining categories of citizenship for emancipated computers, or even by giving advanced infomorphs a role in government.
Since the early 20th century, most representative democracies have seen the rise of mass media as a tool of politics. Politicians advertise themselves to the electorate. Access to the media costs money, usually far more than an individual politician can supply for himself. The result has been the rise of a class of professional politicians, beholden to the wealthy interests which donate money to election campaigns.
Further, even the best (and most honest) professional politicians are only human. The sheer complexity of modern society means that few laws are without unintended consequences, some of them drastic.
One possible solution to these problems has become increasingly popular: cyberdemocracy. Cyberdemocracy incorporates certain political forms that have until now been used only by small communities. It draws most of its inspiration from the political constitution of ancient Athens and the structure of New England “town-meeting” democracy. In order to make these institutions work at the nation-state level, cyberdemocracy makes intensive use of AI.
There is a great deal of diversity in cyberdemocratic systems, but most of them share a few common features.
Under a cyberdemocratic system, some political offices are no longer filled by direct popular vote. Instead, citizens are chosen to fill each office at random from a list of eligible candidates. Eligibility may be limited to citizens who have reached a certain age, who can pass minimal education requirements, who have not been convicted of any crimes, or who fit other reasonable criteria. The selected citizen holds office for a fixed term, after which he returns to private life.
Office-holders selected by lot are almost always political novices. To fill this gap, each official may select a human staff and a set of advanced AI to advise him. This support team collects information, provides legal counsel, helps to draft legislation, and so on. The AI team member is particularly important, designed to avoid bias and give clear, thorough advice. Of course, even with cybernetic support some “amateur politicians” fail as wise and effective officials. For this reason, selection by lot is usually applied only to large councils, such as regional or national legislatures. In such large groups, individuals who are incompetent or politically extreme will tend to be checked by their colleagues.
One variation on this system is to select candidates for office at random. For example, if a legislative seat is open, a fixed number of candidates are selected by lot from among the eligible citizens. Each candidate is given AI and human staff support in order to run his campaign, and an equal amount of funding to spend on the media. Campaigns are usually quite short, lasting no more than a few weeks. At the end of this time, the citizens select their legislator through direct popular vote in the traditional fashion. This system does not prevent the intrusion of money into politics – moneyed interests can still use their own funding to influence the vote. Still, it minimizes the effect of machine politics and preserves the role of citizen voting in the selection process.
Selection of public officials partially or completely by lot is the most distinctive (and controversial) aspect of cyberdemocracy. More fundamental to the system is the mechanism by which law is made.
Most cyberdemocratic systems require the citizens as a whole to take on the bulk of law-making duties. All citizens are permitted to propose new laws. AI trained in the law are available to help citizens frame sound proposals, and the web is used to make the citizenry aware of proposals under consideration. The level of public support for a proposed law is constantly measured by web-based polling. If a proposal appears to have sufficient support, it can be voted on by the whole citizenry, again through the web.
With the primary responsibility for law-making shifted to the citizens, the formal legislature’s role is reduced. In most cyberdemocracies, the legislature has only limited authority to pass laws without citizen involvement. Instead, it helps review proposed laws, killing some proposals and sending others back for reformulation. The citizenry can always override these decisions, given enough public support.
Cyberdemocracy has only recently become feasible, with the appearance of AI sophisticated enough to administer elections and provide the necessary advisory support. The system was first tried in Switzerland, where several canton parliaments were reorganized in the late 2080s. Since then, cyberdemocracy has been adopted by a number of European nations. The European Parliament is itself experimenting with cyberdemocracy; half the delegates are selected by lot, while all receive extensive AI support.
Cyberdemocracy is not without its critics. Many question whether the form can be called “democratic” at all, given the radical change in the way public officials are selected. The fact that AI is so integral to the system at every level is also a matter for concern. Some critics call cyberdemocracy a thin veneer over oligarchic rule by infomorphs. Others point out that the lawmaking and voting processes can be subverted by manipulation of the controlling AI systems.
In Europe, cyberdemocracy has generally been adopted peacefully, as a natural evolution of liberal democracy. In the Americas, the concept has often served as a trigger for political violence. This has been particularly true in the United States, where the growing “People’s Choice” movement faces stiff resistance from the entrenched political class. The movement’s supporters include several urban-insurgency groups, which have fought small but fierce battles against federal forces.