Excerpt of 1945–2041 Rise and Demise of American Hyperpower, 2049
The United States of America was the last of the classical hegemonic hyperpowers. The end-point of a line connecting the Achaemenid, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Mongol, Dutch, and British Empires.
The U.S. was not entirely culpable in its own demise, many metafactors intervened to hasten the decline of the nation-state paradigm. However, America was responsible for the largest disruption in world order with the eruption of its Traditionist Backlash.
Traditionalist Backlash
Throughout the 2020s a core demographic that centered on traditional values continued the fight for social and political power in Western and other industrialized nation-states—but none with such significance as the U.S. Even as urbanization rapidly increased, burbclaves and privatized exurbs in America rose in population.
The Reconstituted Grand Party of the Republic (RGPR) came to power in the U.S., creating a crisis unseen since America’s 19th century Civil War. Old geographic boundaries were replaced in the civil-political conflict known as the American Social War, the precursor to the Great Social War. The calamitous transition started in the U.S. and reflects the peculiar American landscape of wildly incompatible suburban and urban worldviews.
First, the “Monster Codes” pass, legislating physical augmentation to one’s body. Then the “Mental Health and Morality Act for Unreal Activities” bill attempts to regulate virtual and real interactions between humans and synthetics.
While replacing a soldier’s lost limb was without controversy—even a reason to celebrate American technological prowess—the growing number of unneeded procedures discarding healthy body parts for biotechnological replacements was viewed by Traditionalists as abhorrent.
Personal Choice advocates, celebrities, and trainloads of lobbyists argued that individuals have the right to do with their bodies and minds whatever they choose. This carried over all of the intensity and vitriol of 19th and 20th-century civil rights leaders fighting discrimination of race, religion, sex, or gender identity.
Advances in programmable matter and AI/SI breakthroughs opened a new front along social battle lines. “People are choosing to become more mechanical while mechanical entities are becoming synthetic people.” Sexbots with realistic-enough intelligence become the biggest boon to pornography since the web browser. Traditionalists’ see synthetic people as soulless automata, even ‘zombies,’ that Humanists treat as if imbued with God’s imprimatur. The Traditionalist belief system would not allow for negotiation on the matter.
In hindsight, 2032 is seen as the year Postmodernism fully gave way to Posthumanism, the aesthetic that technological advancements in VR and cybernetics, which augment the human experience, is natural and good. Robotics, cyberspace-grade VR, and the pursuit of true AI was fait accompli—and disenfranchised Traditionalists broke loose from their political/civic moorings to righteously rebel against the authority of the state.
Questions of morality and spirituality polarized American politics at the city, state, and national levels. “Blatant atheism” and “evil” Humanist and Transhumanist thinking were seen by Traditionalists as a religious and cultural affront. But a new cultural elite had emerged to tout a benign and advantageous extension of the human experience. Virtual worlds encourage collaboration, visualization, productivity, and profit.
Profit being key, as the urban centers had 95 percent of U.S. wealth production. Coastal urban regions actually increased economic productivity with 3D and nano printing breakthroughs and by otherwise completely outsourcing manufacturing to Mexico, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. The American Democratic Coalition (ADC), “Jeffersonian Democracy for the 21st-century”, comes to power with a clear mandate: Stop Internal Terrorism!