Futurismic

John Robb has just re-posted “USA Inc.“, a speculative future-history essay he wrote back in 2007, meant to be read as if “written from the perspective of a think tank that’s operating in support of the status quo economic elites in 2025.” He saw the recession coming, predicted an increasing entrenchment of US forces in unwinnable open-source guerrilla conflicts, and riffed on these themes to predict a future where massive government debt leads to the privatisation of… well, pretty much everything. [image by szlea]

Roads, waterworks, military bases, schools, parks, and much more were quickly sold at appropriate prices. Attempts by government’s to retain ownership and rent them as multi-year leases were initially successful, but as the crisis deepened the market cooled to these schemes. Within a year of the start of what is incorrectly but popularly termed “The Great Theft,” outright sales of assets to global investment funds, corporations and individuals were by far more common. The speed of this transfer in ownership has been unmatched by any example prior or since. By 2015, less than three years after the panic began, upwards of 60% of all public assets from the national to the local levels were formally in private hands.

Note that Robb says this is not a future he desires or advocates, but that it seems nonetheless more plausible as events develop; for extra chewiness, compare and contrast with Tim Maly’s “The Free Freeways” Futurismic essay about the seccession of the US highway system.

I think I can safely predict that a lot of you will say Robb’s USA Inc. could never happen, and those of you who are American citizens would be better qualified to make that judgemnet than I… but I’d be very interested to hear your reasoning. Is Robb’s style of doomsaying just a symptom of the inherently self-critical character of American politics, and hence an indication that the problems he’s flagging up are already being grappled with at a subliminal level?

Or is the feeling that it couldn’t happen merely a form of knee-jerk wishful thinking and denial – “too big to fail” scaled up to a whole nation?

People can be very quick to make jokes about the lack of knowledge some Americans have about the countries beyond their borders, but the opposite can also be true. Damien Walter recalls a discussion he had with Neil Gaiman at last year’s Clarion writer’s workshop about “Americaland” – the bundle of cultural shorthands and cliches that go to make up the fictional USA where British (and other) writers tend to set their stories:

Americaland is real place for British writers, it is built from thousands of fragments of American TV, films, music, comics and other cultural artefacts. It’s a place filled with 1950’s dinners and long desolate highways among other things. And its just as imaginary as a Britain filled with red telephone boxes and bowler hatted business men.

(One draw of Americaland is the British tendency towards naffness…IE…any story that seems fascinating and dark in Americaland becomes utterly naff if you transplant it to the UK. Batman in Gotham = Dark Knight. Batman in Birmingham = mentalist in tights. If you are British and want to write Batman, or any other American archetype, then welcome to Americaland.)

[Batman in Birmingham... I'd buy that comic, personally. DC should give the franchise to Grant Morrison for a few years... "Mentalist in Tights" = Best Tagline Ever.]

Americaland is as much a fantasy world as Middle Earth or Dune. Some of the most fascinating fantasy worlds are the ones that overlap our reality so closely that the reader can almost accept them as real. Perhaps that’s why Americaland, with all its inaccuracies and cliches, can be such a compelling place to set stories in. Whenever I turn my hand to any story of the horrific or dark fantasy variety, I find Americaland creeping in from the edges. However hard I try to root these stories in the Britain I know, American locations and characters crop up again and again. When I turned to my imagination for material this weekend, it gave me a man and woman meeting in a diner and going on a road trip. It’s a story that can only take place in Americaland. So do I accept where my imagination is taking me, for all its flaws, or rail against it and force myself to write in British settings?

It’s a good question – should you only write what you know? And if not, how would you recommend a non-native get a feel for the real USA without the expense of a pair of plane tickets and a few months of travelling? [image by dno1967]

And to our American readers: what are the most egregious Americaland cliches you see in the writing of non-American authors, and how should they be corrected?

To a nominal Brit like myself, reading about the American governmental system is a constant stream of surprises. It’s one thing to understand that a country comprised of fifty-odd states (which are themselves the size of some sovereign countries) will have baked a certain degree of local independence into its legislature, but entirely another to read about the ways that such an arrangement can manifest itself. Case in point: North Dakota is suing Minnesota over its newly-introduced carbon taxation laws, which (so North Dakota claims) “unfairly discourage coal-powered electricity sales in favor of renewably powered electricity”. [via BoingBoing]

I’m seeing this legislation described as the first real-world example of a carbon tariff, which suggests that such measures are going to have a rocky reception when they become more widespread… but that was a given, I suppose. What’s rreally interesting as an outsider is the way this case highlights the increasingly fragmentary nature of the United States; I have no idea how it looks from within, but from this side of the pond, some form of religio-econo-political schism splitting the US into geographically-defined factions (remember the Jesusland map?) doesn’t seem like a massive leap of the imagination.

But that’s massively uninformed armchair punditry on my part, so it’s over to Futurismic’s American readership: to a citizen of the United States, does it feel like the Union is becoming increasingly strained by hyperpolarised political ideologies and economic difficulties? Or are we just seeing something that has always been there? (Feel free to sound off on political issues, but keep it friendly, please.)

George Friedman, writing in The New Statesman magazine, has an article up on the next 100 years, as seen through the theoretical prism of geopolitics. This is a doctrine that emphasises the importance of the permanently operating factors of geography in determining global dominance:

Thus, the question is how these geopolitical and strategic realities shape the rest of the century. Eurasia, broadly understood, is being hollowed out. China is far weaker than it appears and is threatened with internal instability. The Europeans are divided by old national patterns that prevent them from moving in a uniform direction. Russia is using the window of opportunity presented by the US absorption in disrupting the Islamic world to reclaim its sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union, but its underlying weakness will reassert itself over the next generation.

New powers will emerge. In the 19th century, Germany, Italy and Japan began to emerge as great powers, while in the 20th century global powers such as Britain and France declined to secondary status. Each century, a new constellation of powers forms that might strike observers at the beginning of the century as unthinkable. Let us therefore think about the unthinkable.

Friedman paints a rather pessimistic picture of a future of exactly the same kind of nationalistic war that took up most of the 20th century.

I’ve never been comfortable with tub-thumping nationalism/patriotism as something to dictate beliefs and action. To me the future of the people living on Earth is as much about cultures, attitudes, and society as it is about the fight for power between specific nation states [1].

But states will remain the single most powerful entity on Earth over the next few decades, and as such it is worth thinking about which of them might gain greater influence in the future.

The central conclusion of Friedman’s article is that “they that control the North American continent, control the world” as they will have access to both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans as well as the vast wealth of the North American continent. As such he posits Mexico as a potential rival to US power. He also suggests that Japan might engage on further military ventures. Turkey may become the core of an Islamic sphere of influence in the Mediterranean and Middle East.

[1]: Inasmuch as particular states have particular cultures and attitudes (e.g. pluralism, rule of law, liberalism, democracy, individual freedom) I think that it is a mistake to support a nation state because of the attitudes it purports to value, rather than the reality of its actions. You support the people and the ideals first, the countries second.

[from the New Statesman][image from here on Wikimedia]

Alternate-history fans will appreciate these US Department of Defense maps of a projected Soviet invasion of Western Europe, heralding as they would have done the beginning of WWIII:

This map is a really a picture in macro-scale of the epic tank battle for the plains of Germany, that entire generations of Western and Soviet officers built careers around planning and preparing for. In the history of human civilization, the Soviet Western TVD invasion was probably the most researched, contemplated, and gamed out battle that was never actually to take place. Fifty years of voluminous strategic studies were compiled by both sides on this very subject, as both sides searched for advantages in a truly enormous field chess game.

I don’t know enough about the history to say if this is paranoiac or just horrific.

[via the Exile][image and article from TechConex]