A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (21 page)

Then these firms will sever themselves from a national base and will become totally nomadic. They will endure in general for much longer than financial
empires or the investment funds that will briefly own them. Businesses will cease to be hierarchic and will become labyrinthine; they will stop being uniform and will become conglomerates of local businesses, producing made-to-measure goods on request.

Some of these “circuses” will go so far (certain of them are already doing it) as to create their own currency in order to gain the loyalty of their suppliers and their clients. They will do so in the form of “points” given as gifts to their partners. Then they will ensure the transferability of these points outside their own circuits. Soon no one, not even the U.S. government, will be able to oppose them.

If (in a half century or less) insurance companies manage to control the leading businesses and impose their norms on states, if private mercenaries replace armies, if business currencies substitute themselves for the leading world currencies, then super-empire will have won the day.

Faced with enfeebled states, states in their death throes, even states that have vanished into thin air, and faced with the negation of law and the impunity implicit in super-empire, two other categories of business will emerge —
piratical
and
relational.

First, the businesses the state no longer has the means to ban will reinforce themselves. On the scene since the beginnings of the mercantile order, pirate businesses will see their market broaden. Some will engage in lawful activities without respecting all the laws (particularly fiscal laws). Others will engage in criminal activities (such as the traffic in drugs, arms, human beings, illegal games, influence, money laundering, copies of
brand-name products), and will not hesitate to use violence. Their turnover will one day outstrip that of the lawful economy. They will launder their money, some of which will turn up on the legal market, which they will increasingly unsettle. They will even interlock with businesses in the market economy, which they will finance and with which they will establish joint enterprises. To emerge triumphant, they will endow themselves with all the attributes of states on the road to escheat: communications networks, instruments for the collection of resources, arms. They will control the means of information and make of them an instrument of propaganda and of lying on their behalf through fear and corruption. They will endow themselves with microfinance systems, fed on dirty money, to attract and finance the most deprived. They will also be (as we shall see in the next chapter) key players and the initiators of the second wave of the future, that of
hyperconflict.

Next, reacting against these contradictions in the globalization of trade, businesses with nonlucrative goals, dealing with human relations, will eventually exercise certain of the functions that states can no longer fulfill: the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and foundations (both South and North) are already allied with them. By recreating no-cost and voluntary services, they too will imbricate themselves with the market, which will finance them and establish joint enterprises with them. By their very existence, they will give birth to the third wave of the future, hyperdemocracy — where, as we shall see, planetary democratic institutions will contribute to shifting the balance of the super-empire.

The masters of the super-empire will be stars of the “circuses” and of the “theater companies” — holders of the capital of the “circus businesses,” financial or business strategists, executives of insurance and leisure companies, software designers, creators, jurists, financiers, authors, designers, artists, creators of nomadic objects. I call them
hypernomads.

There will be several score millions of them, women as much as men, many self-employed, drifting from “theater” to circus, pitiless competitors, neither employees nor employers, but sometimes filling several jobs at once, managing their lives like a stock portfolio.

Through the workings of a very selective competitive process, they will constitute a new innovative class, a
hyperclass,
which will direct super-empire. They will live in every core of the polycentric world. They will have to defend their title to their capital, their creations, their software, their patents, their tricks of the trade, their receipts, and their works of art. They will speak more and more languages with the help of translating machines. At once hypochondriac, paranoid, and megalomaniac, narcissistic and egocentric, the hypernomads will seek access to the most recent self-monitors and the electronic and chemical drugs delivered by the self-repairers. They will want to live much longer than others. They will experiment with techniques promising them hope of doubling their life span. They will pay homage to every recipe for meditation, relaxation, and for an apprenticeship in self-love.

For them, this apprenticeship will be a vital necessity;
curiosity, an absolute requirement; manipulation, a daily habit. Their aesthetic canons, their distraction, their culture will also be specific. The latter will be more labyrinthine than ever. Their need to model and invent will lead them to banish for themselves the borders between working, consuming, creating, and distancing themselves.

They will thus invent the best and the worst of a volatile, carefree, egotistical, and insecure planetary society. Arbiters of elegance, masters of wealth and the media, they will acknowledge no allegiance, whether national or political or cultural. They will increasingly dress like nomads, their garb recalling their adventures, their prostheses, and their networks. They will be patrons of multiform artists who will mingle forms of virtual art in which emotions are aroused, measured, captured, and modified by the self-monitors. They will live in private cities behind walls guarded by mercenaries. They will cause the price of artworks and real estate to soar.

The couple will no longer be their principal base for life and sexuality. They will prefer to choose, in full transparency, polygamous or polyandrous loves. Men and women, all collectors, more interested in the hunt than the prey, accumulating and exhibiting their trophies, constantly on the move in search of distraction, many of them will be the offspring of mobile families without a geographic or cultural base. They will be loyal only to themselves, and will interest themselves more in their conquests, their wine cellars, their self-monitors, their art collections, and the planning of their erotic lives than in the future of their progeny — to whom they will no longer bequeath either money or power. Nor will
they aspire to direct public affairs or to live stage front. In their eyes, celebrity will pass for a curse.

Some of them, more cynical than the others, will serve the pirate economy and become its masters. We will meet them again as lead actors in the second wave of the future.

Others, by contrast, will develop an acute conscience over what is at stake for the planet, and having made their fortunes will invest in humanitarian action. They will become — sometimes just to give themselves a cause to champion — altruists. They will be the inspirers of relational businesses, upholders of a planetary democracy. We shall find them again among the lead players in the third wave of the future.

Like all the other innovative classes before it, this one will exercise a decisive influence on the way of life of those who struggle to imitate it.

Just below the hypernomads, some four billion salary-earners and their families will be the chief solvent consumers by 2040 — white-collar workers, merchants, doctors, nurses, lawyers, judges, police officers, administrators, teachers, developers, lab research workers, industrial technicians, skilled workers, service employees. Most of them will no longer have a fixed workplace. Accessible at all times, they must permanently monitor their employability, in other words their state of fitness (to perform physical tasks) and their knowledge (for intellectual work). For the youngest, traveling will be a
sign of progress toward the hyperclass: the more a sedentary employee travels, the swifter he will climb in his firm’s hierarchy.

Just as unskilled manual workers were the dominant social and political force in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, masses of skilled sedentary workers will dominate the social and political stage over the next three decades.

With the return of nomadism, they will have to suffer. The delocalization of businesses and immigrant workers will push their incomes down. They will miss the days when frontiers were closed and lifetime employment was guaranteed, objects were long-lasting, marriages were sealed and remained sealed, the laws were unbreakable. They will idealize the bureaucrat’s status; they will regard guaranteed lifetime employment as an inheritance, and the corresponding salary as a private income. Those who work for what survives of the state or its dependencies will be fewer and fewer, and their status will become more and more precarious. These will use everything to delay the deconstruction of states, including violence.

The middle classes, sedentary by nature, will be fearful of the diseases whose propagation will be accelerated by the nomadic. They will claim the right to grow roots, to work slowly. Some will cloister themselves in the autism of an assiduous use of nomadic objects. They will be narcissistically obsessed by the self-monitors, like the Japanese
otaku
— those fanatics of virtual nomadism, of autistic listening to music, and of the self-monitoring of the body. Others will refuse movement because of obesity: more than a quarter of American
adults (31 percent) and a tenth of Europeans are today considered obese. In the long run, more than half of the sedentary population could be affected by this scourge, a reflection of the rejection of the coming nomadism.

For these middle classes, staying insured and entertaining oneself will be the chief response to the world’s risks. Insuring oneself will be their obsession, and distracting oneself will be their way of forgetting.

For these billions of sedentaries, insurance industrialists will develop specific products covering the risks of insecurity, joblessness, illness, movement, uncertainty, disorder, in every economic, financial, and cultural field. One day they may even be able to insure themselves against a broken heart, sexual impotence, intellectual shortcomings, or the denial of maternal love.

Entertainment industrialists will invent new ways of letting them share (virtually) the existence of hyper-nomads and thus allow them access to a
virtual nomadism
.

The middle classes in particular will live the life of the hypernomads by proxy. They will do this by practicing four principal sports, all of them simulating movement, all solitary, all idealized mockups of competition in super-empire, where everyone will be supposed to have a chance. All will be practiced by former elites of previous cores, all will be practicable and will allow progress — horseback riding, golf, sailing, and dance. These travel-simulators will allow them to mime a break with the world while still profiting from its logistics: along secure trails, in domesticated forests, along pirateless shores, with efficient rescue services, clubhouses, havens, and welcoming shelters. To become a good
rider, a good golfer, a good sailor or dancer, they will have to display the traveler’s qualities (skill, intuition, tolerance, grace, tenacity, courage, clearheadedness, prudence, readiness to share, equilibrium) without having to endure travel’s inconveniences. For each of these home sports, self-monitors will allow them to surround themselves with virtual, three-dimensional universes, or else to practice them virtually. These sports will also allow sedentaries to play-act through the demands of competition, to find pleasure in making progress, to familiarize themselves with the self-monitors, to experience the illusion of being hypernomads (although the latter will have abandoned these distractions long since). They will have to give proof of ever stronger emotions.

The sedentaries will also pay increasingly dear to watch (in real time) team sports, themselves sophisticated simulations of hypernomad life. The players in these matches, contested in a spirit of merciless competition, obey increasingly violent, swift, and murderous rules as they try to penetrate the enemy’s citadel. This is defended by a sedentary (the goal in soccer) or by other nomads (basketball, American football, rugby, or baseball). These games, the last areas of encounter, will also be the ultimate subjects of conversation. New technologies will make it possible to gain access to them on all media, two- or three-dimensional, and even to use them in order to self-monitor their own emotions. The spectators will be able to join in soccer matches involving thousands of players. The major competitions in these sports (and especially the most popular of them, soccer) will open broad markets for the “business circuses” that manage them.

Still imitating the hypernomads, some of these virtual nomads will also go to swell the ranks of drug consumers: alcohol, cannabis, opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine, synthetic products (amphetamines, methamphetamines, Ecstasy). Chemical, biological, or electronic drugs, distributed by “self-repairers,” will become consumer products in a world without law or police, whose chief victims will be the infranomads.

Super-empire will in fact raise the market in triumph on a global scale. But it will not bring about the disappearance of poverty, which will afflict a disconcerting share of the planet’s population. In 2015, the number of those I call infranomads
,
who live below the poverty threshold, in other words on less than $1.25 a day, will still be roughly a billion as against 1.4 billion in 2006 and 1.9 billion in 1980. Increasing, yes, but not enough.

Weakened, states will no longer be able to finance decent assistance incomes. Attempts to reduce the number of the poorest through the working of market forces alone will end in failure. Growth will not supply enough jobs; production of specific goods intended for this category will not suffice to give it access to basic goods; on its own, the market will be unable to equip the megalopolises with the infrastructures made necessary by the increased numbers of the citizenry.