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Description
A commission for BeatBasic: the world of today as it might be imagined from a 1990s outlook.
The weather grows more violent, storms and hurricanes multiply as global warming begins to bite. The walls of buildings gleam and shimmer with holographic images from nanoprojector paint, and people wear clothes that changes color and texture. It is a buzzing, energetic, frantic, even extreme time, and having recovered from the 2000 Slump brought about by the global plague of computer errors, the world is whizzing along faster and faster into an integrated, global, cybernetic, networked future. US politics are lurid, a form of performance art, in which the campaigns are now essentially simultaneous with the term of office, and a constant battle goes on through the ocean of media to dazzle, confuse, needle, annoy and otherwise poke in one direction or another the pin-ball of the voter. “Meme science” plays an important part in the befooling of the public, and as memes compete and multiply some theoreticians make worried noises about “meme viruses”, fears which are written off as another form of anti-technological meme. Even the violent militia terrorism that plagues several western states is another form of entertainment, unreal and incomprehensible to most. Information overload is guaranteed, with innumerable internet, cable, satellite and other channels, sites, information sources. Information gatherers and collators take mind-altering drugs to drink in information from dozens of sources simultaneously, and those with the prized ability to spot important nodal points in otherwise undifferentiated flows of information are corporate superstars.

Population growth has been slower to drop off than OTL, especially in Africa and S/SE Asia, and there will be a billion more people than in our world by the time they both reach 2020. Corporations are bigger and more internationalized than ever. Capitalism has won, and grows and swells monstrous, in India, in China, in a Europe integrating out to the Urals. The Networked (technological, scientific, ultra-capitalist) world is divided into several major blocks: the continued cooperation of the European, North American, and Western Pacific blocks so far insures their continued dominance, especially given the increasing integration of the Russian sphere with the European one, but a coalition of Southern powers is rising to challenge their dominance. It yet remains unclear whether China will join either side or attempt to go by its lonesome.

The North American Federation, the more deeply integrated heir to NAFTA, is inwards-turned, Americans being somewhat ignorant and uninterested in the rest of the globe since the end of the Cold War, more interested in their wildly gyrating culture and entertainment than in geopolitics. It still pushes for global economic integration, and supports peacekeeping initiatives abroad, but is less interested in playing Global Policeman. Europe continues to expand, but its sheer size is increasingly an obstacle to efforts to deepen and more closely integrate the union, and many are worried about bringing in the rather disorderly, anarcho-capitalist Russians (“better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in, yes, but what do you do when they don’t even bother to aim?”) The Indo-Pacific Coordination (dontsaycoprosperityspheredontsaycoprosperityspheredont saycoprosperitysphere) is perhaps the weakest of the three, being basically an alliance against Chinese economic and political expansionism, and hampered by the fact that Japan is its effective leader but nobody wants them to be the official leader. (It’s mere _unofficial_ position has so far kept the Koreans out at least as much as their desire to not piss off the Chinese overly). It would work better as a North America-West Pacific combo, but North America’s inwards attitudes militate against that notion. Japan, OTOH, is recovering from its long slump as a new generation of entrepreneurs and inventors recreate the Japanese technology scene, and push the envelopes of computer intelligence, virtuality, and nanotech further than anywhere else. It is also more “Japan Inc.” than ever, as corporations drag power out of the palsied hands of the fossilized political establishment.

China as OTL is expanding greatly, if somewhat hampered by the continuing presence of a powerful Communist-Maoist Old Guard resistant to the continuing March of Capitalism. The Chinese have started talks on greater autonomy for Tibet, although they warn that those maps showing a Tibet 1/3 the size of China will have to go.

The Alliance of the Global South is a rather rickety coalition of coalitions whose principal interest is challenging the global dominion of European and European-derived states (plus Japan), although their dirty little secret is that corporate influence is rife in most of their major states as well.
Nanotechnology is the new Big Thing, and mysterious stuff bubbles in giant assembler vats which TV spots promise will soon revolutionize the world. Already there is nano-cloth, nano-paint, and a variety of odd new materials: will nano soon build our cars, make our food, clean out our arteries? Stay tuned! Strong AI may not have arrived yet, but computers can fool a Turing test, and a number of actors and pop stars are now entirely computer-generated. A Japanese artist has recently begun legal action to allow him to marry one the most popular Virtual Idols. (India has _literal_ Virtual Idols and online simulated deities).

The Internet is huge, and improved VR means that the three-d virtual space internet is a very busy community with its own distinctive culture, something like Ready Player One but with much more creative avatars. Oddly enough there isn’t as much in the way of OTL social media (nobody would imagine a medium as narrow-bandwidth as OTL Twitter or Facebook could be a hit, although smart nano-paper means that nowadays one can get newspapers even more personalized than your OTL internet feed).

Immune rejection techniques have improved to the point where not only are transplants far more frequent and successful, a lot of people are carrying animal organs around, and some wealthy oddballs have gone further (say, fur or horns). Cybernetic implants (of various levels of usefulness) are also something of a fad, and Tokyo and Los Angeles teens compete for the most elaborate body mods, the most important difference being that the Japanese modifications are inevitable more “kawaii.” (For the best in creepy cyber-goths, try Berlin or Moscow).

In the Middle East, the Second Iranian Revolution has swept a democratic government into power, which to everyone’s annoyance has made it clear that they still don’t like the Jews. Iran has allied with India and is moving to expand its regional influence, and is poking the Taliban hornet’s nest to the east. Saddam Hussein was finally successfully assassinated in by Iran-backed Shi’a agents in 2014, only to be replaced by “Chemical Ali”, who has made considerable progress in negotiating an end to sanctions because nobody in the US really cares anymore.

A Palestinian state has been created in the West Bank and the Gaza strip, and receives a steady stream of financial aid AKA bribe money to keep it peaceful. The hard-liners have mostly been broken, although assassinations by Palestinians of “collaborator” Palestinians making up the ruling party continue intermittently, along with assassinations by Jewish Israelis of the Israeli officials who forcibly evacuated the more indefensible settlements on the West bank. The rail and road connection between the Gaza strip and the West Bank is nice, fast, and runs in a ditch sided by 20-foot sheer retaining walls topped by barbed wire, which the Palestinians find oddly insulting.

Russia is wealthier and less repressive than OTL, but also more corrupt and gangster-ridden. The wealth gap between a few ultra-rich urban centers and much of the more rural areas is alarming, and is one of the factors interfering with efforts to join the European Union. It has also swallowed Belorussia. Siberia is the Wild East, capitalism at its most Gangsta, with its own independence movement (whose leaders come and go as they regular turn out to be in someone’s pay) and local support for a Russian plan to set aside a big chunk of land (whose inhabitants are few and not ethnically Russian) as a storage site for radioactive waste – for a reasonable rent, of course!

The World Environmental Council, founded in the early 2000s, is an increasingly important institution as nations get serious about arresting global warming and ecological decay. Currently massive loans are being raised through international financial institutions to help large and rapidly growing nations move to cleaner power systems and less polluting industry, something increasingly urgent in a world even more polluted than OTL. Refuge arks are being set up worldwide for endangered species, and efforts are ongoing to get enough cell samples for cloning every species in existence in the case of them becoming extinct.

All-AI highways are increasingly abundant in North America, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, although Americans (and Greeks) _will_ keep trying to hack the manual override. Cyborg combat dogs and “genius” smart missiles and bullets. Everyone has google glass type glasses, with the difference of 1. Being useful and 2. Not making you look like a total dork. (Old People: always watching. And recording, at a physically remote safe site). Mammoths have been successfully cloned and grown to adulthood: no word on dinosaurs yet.

An international consortium of nations led by the US has signed on to a long-term Zubrin-type effort to colonize Mars, and has landed automated fuel-making ships on the Red Planet, and the first human-carrying ship is in orbital construction, although there’s that radiation shielding issue to perfect. The International Space station has gone through a burst of reconstruction and expansion, and the Chinese have sent a man to the Moon. Fusion power is only 20 years away.

There are plenty of problems along with the progress. Corruption and corporate capture of the political process is on the rise, the unemployed and unemployable are growing in number as more are left behind by a future speeding out of control. Terrorism – Islamic, fundamentalist Christian, Deep Green, Militia, Krazy Kults – is on the rise, as the nihilistic and the outraged find ways to network and develop their technique, although as yet there hasn’t been a show-stopper on the scale of OTL 9/11. Africa remains a mess, and international forces under UN auspices have occupied some chunks of it. Neo-Maoist revolutionary movements have cropped up in a number of nations where the governments have not done well in handling the new Global Economy, and Anachists are becoming once again a bomb-throwing menace in the first world after a century’s absence. Climate instability is leading to increased food insecurity, although the biotechnicians claim we’ll have all the seaweed bacon we can eat in a few years time.

The Taliban have spread to Central Asia, which is increasingly wracked by religious unrest. Much of Former Yugoslavia remains a bit of a mess, with Serbia now a neo-fascist dictatorship which somehow seems to have gained some WMDs for intimidation purposes (some ultra-nationalist Russian moguls are under suspicions).

Biotech workers in advanced countries are known to be doing funny things with single-celled life, the Chinese have biotech research labs where few tourists go which they claim are not labs at all, nosiree, and nature itself has not been idle: a new and more contagious version of AIDS has emerged in southern Africa, and the international community is struggling to keep it contained, terrified of the possibility of it spreading globally.

The US is corrupt, brilliant, creative, schlocky. It produces endless movies with fabulous special effects and no plots to speak of, produces endless identical boy bands and some of the blackest and grimmest alternative music outside the Germanic countries (see, Death Grunge), creates the world’s most elaborate virtual realities and the most dire reality shows. Extremeness remains in, with the fourth movie in the Youngblood Expanded Universe coming out this summer. Modern sports include Olympic Skateboarding and Battle Baseball, and, of course, Rollerball, while Surge Red Extreme Energy is available at your local grocers in the 3 liter bottle. Gated suburbs are now “walled with razor wire and motion sensors on top, plus cyborgs guard dogs” suburbs, but just try and tell the inhabitants they’re paranoid. The Republican Party is distinctly more libertarian and less theocratic than OTL, if crazy enough in other ways, while the Democrats remain stubbornly Third Way (AKA, Republicans Lite). AOL still controls a lot of internet traffic, although their transmission rates are a wee bit faster now. The Simpsons are, of course, still on the air.

Description
A commission for BeatBasic: the world of today as it might be imagined from a 1990s outlook.
The weather grows more violent, storms and hurricanes multiply as global warming begins to bite. The walls of buildings gleam and shimmer with holographic images from nanoprojector paint, and people wear clothes that changes color and texture. It is a buzzing, energetic, frantic, even extreme time, and having recovered from the 2000 Slump brought about by the global plague of computer errors, the world is whizzing along faster and faster into an integrated, global, cybernetic, networked future. US politics are lurid, a form of performance art, in which the campaigns are now essentially simultaneous with the term of office, and a constant battle goes on through the ocean of media to dazzle, confuse, needle, annoy and otherwise poke in one direction or another the pin-ball of the voter. “Meme science” plays an important part in the befooling of the public, and as memes compete and multiply some theoreticians make worried noises about “meme viruses”, fears which are written off as another form of anti-technological meme. Even the violent militia terrorism that plagues several western states is another form of entertainment, unreal and incomprehensible to most. Information overload is guaranteed, with innumerable internet, cable, satellite and other channels, sites, information sources. Information gatherers and collators take mind-altering drugs to drink in information from dozens of sources simultaneously, and those with the prized ability to spot important nodal points in otherwise undifferentiated flows of information are corporate superstars.

Population growth has been slower to drop off than OTL, especially in Africa and S/SE Asia, and there will be a billion more people than in our world by the time they both reach 2020. Corporations are bigger and more internationalized than ever. Capitalism has won, and grows and swells monstrous, in India, in China, in a Europe integrating out to the Urals. The Networked (technological, scientific, ultra-capitalist) world is divided into several major blocks: the continued cooperation of the European, North American, and Western Pacific blocks so far insures their continued dominance, especially given the increasing integration of the Russian sphere with the European one, but a coalition of Southern powers is rising to challenge their dominance. It yet remains unclear whether China will join either side or attempt to go by its lonesome.

The North American Federation, the more deeply integrated heir to NAFTA, is inwards-turned, Americans being somewhat ignorant and uninterested in the rest of the globe since the end of the Cold War, more interested in their wildly gyrating culture and entertainment than in geopolitics. It still pushes for global economic integration, and supports peacekeeping initiatives abroad, but is less interested in playing Global Policeman. Europe continues to expand, but its sheer size is increasingly an obstacle to efforts to deepen and more closely integrate the union, and many are worried about bringing in the rather disorderly, anarcho-capitalist Russians (“better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in, yes, but what do you do when they don’t even bother to aim?”) The Indo-Pacific Coordination (dontsaycoprosperityspheredontsaycoprosperityspheredont saycoprosperitysphere) is perhaps the weakest of the three, being basically an alliance against Chinese economic and political expansionism, and hampered by the fact that Japan is its effective leader but nobody wants them to be the official leader. (It’s mere _unofficial_ position has so far kept the Koreans out at least as much as their desire to not piss off the Chinese overly). It would work better as a North America-West Pacific combo, but North America’s inwards attitudes militate against that notion. Japan, OTOH, is recovering from its long slump as a new generation of entrepreneurs and inventors recreate the Japanese technology scene, and push the envelopes of computer intelligence, virtuality, and nanotech further than anywhere else. It is also more “Japan Inc.” than ever, as corporations drag power out of the palsied hands of the fossilized political establishment.

China as OTL is expanding greatly, if somewhat hampered by the continuing presence of a powerful Communist-Maoist Old Guard resistant to the continuing March of Capitalism. The Chinese have started talks on greater autonomy for Tibet, although they warn that those maps showing a Tibet 1/3 the size of China will have to go.

The Alliance of the Global South is a rather rickety coalition of coalitions whose principal interest is challenging the global dominion of European and European-derived states (plus Japan), although their dirty little secret is that corporate influence is rife in most of their major states as well.
Nanotechnology is the new Big Thing, and mysterious stuff bubbles in giant assembler vats which TV spots promise will soon revolutionize the world. Already there is nano-cloth, nano-paint, and a variety of odd new materials: will nano soon build our cars, make our food, clean out our arteries? Stay tuned! Strong AI may not have arrived yet, but computers can fool a Turing test, and a number of actors and pop stars are now entirely computer-generated. A Japanese artist has recently begun legal action to allow him to marry one the most popular Virtual Idols. (India has _literal_ Virtual Idols and online simulated deities).

The Internet is huge, and improved VR means that the three-d virtual space internet is a very busy community with its own distinctive culture, something like Ready Player One but with much more creative avatars. Oddly enough there isn’t as much in the way of OTL social media (nobody would imagine a medium as narrow-bandwidth as OTL Twitter or Facebook could be a hit, although smart nano-paper means that nowadays one can get newspapers even more personalized than your OTL internet feed).

Immune rejection techniques have improved to the point where not only are transplants far more frequent and successful, a lot of people are carrying animal organs around, and some wealthy oddballs have gone further (say, fur or horns). Cybernetic implants (of various levels of usefulness) are also something of a fad, and Tokyo and Los Angeles teens compete for the most elaborate body mods, the most important difference being that the Japanese modifications are inevitable more “kawaii.” (For the best in creepy cyber-goths, try Berlin or Moscow).

In the Middle East, the Second Iranian Revolution has swept a democratic government into power, which to everyone’s annoyance has made it clear that they still don’t like the Jews. Iran has allied with India and is moving to expand its regional influence, and is poking the Taliban hornet’s nest to the east. Saddam Hussein was finally successfully assassinated in by Iran-backed Shi’a agents in 2014, only to be replaced by “Chemical Ali”, who has made considerable progress in negotiating an end to sanctions because nobody in the US really cares anymore.

A Palestinian state has been created in the West Bank and the Gaza strip, and receives a steady stream of financial aid AKA bribe money to keep it peaceful. The hard-liners have mostly been broken, although assassinations by Palestinians of “collaborator” Palestinians making up the ruling party continue intermittently, along with assassinations by Jewish Israelis of the Israeli officials who forcibly evacuated the more indefensible settlements on the West bank. The rail and road connection between the Gaza strip and the West Bank is nice, fast, and runs in a ditch sided by 20-foot sheer retaining walls topped by barbed wire, which the Palestinians find oddly insulting.

Russia is wealthier and less repressive than OTL, but also more corrupt and gangster-ridden. The wealth gap between a few ultra-rich urban centers and much of the more rural areas is alarming, and is one of the factors interfering with efforts to join the European Union. It has also swallowed Belorussia. Siberia is the Wild East, capitalism at its most Gangsta, with its own independence movement (whose leaders come and go as they regular turn out to be in someone’s pay) and local support for a Russian plan to set aside a big chunk of land (whose inhabitants are few and not ethnically Russian) as a storage site for radioactive waste – for a reasonable rent, of course!

The World Environmental Council, founded in the early 2000s, is an increasingly important institution as nations get serious about arresting global warming and ecological decay. Currently massive loans are being raised through international financial institutions to help large and rapidly growing nations move to cleaner power systems and less polluting industry, something increasingly urgent in a world even more polluted than OTL. Refuge arks are being set up worldwide for endangered species, and efforts are ongoing to get enough cell samples for cloning every species in existence in the case of them becoming extinct.

All-AI highways are increasingly abundant in North America, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, although Americans (and Greeks) _will_ keep trying to hack the manual override. Cyborg combat dogs and “genius” smart missiles and bullets. Everyone has google glass type glasses, with the difference of 1. Being useful and 2. Not making you look like a total dork. (Old People: always watching. And recording, at a physically remote safe site). Mammoths have been successfully cloned and grown to adulthood: no word on dinosaurs yet.

An international consortium of nations led by the US has signed on to a long-term Zubrin-type effort to colonize Mars, and has landed automated fuel-making ships on the Red Planet, and the first human-carrying ship is in orbital construction, although there’s that radiation shielding issue to perfect. The International Space station has gone through a burst of reconstruction and expansion, and the Chinese have sent a man to the Moon. Fusion power is only 20 years away.

There are plenty of problems along with the progress. Corruption and corporate capture of the political process is on the rise, the unemployed and unemployable are growing in number as more are left behind by a future speeding out of control. Terrorism – Islamic, fundamentalist Christian, Deep Green, Militia, Krazy Kults – is on the rise, as the nihilistic and the outraged find ways to network and develop their technique, although as yet there hasn’t been a show-stopper on the scale of OTL 9/11. Africa remains a mess, and international forces under UN auspices have occupied some chunks of it. Neo-Maoist revolutionary movements have cropped up in a number of nations where the governments have not done well in handling the new Global Economy, and Anachists are becoming once again a bomb-throwing menace in the first world after a century’s absence. Climate instability is leading to increased food insecurity, although the biotechnicians claim we’ll have all the seaweed bacon we can eat in a few years time.

The Taliban have spread to Central Asia, which is increasingly wracked by religious unrest. Much of Former Yugoslavia remains a bit of a mess, with Serbia now a neo-fascist dictatorship which somehow seems to have gained some WMDs for intimidation purposes (some ultra-nationalist Russian moguls are under suspicions).

Biotech workers in advanced countries are known to be doing funny things with single-celled life, the Chinese have biotech research labs where few tourists go which they claim are not labs at all, nosiree, and nature itself has not been idle: a new and more contagious version of AIDS has emerged in southern Africa, and the international community is struggling to keep it contained, terrified of the possibility of it spreading globally.

The US is corrupt, brilliant, creative, schlocky. It produces endless movies with fabulous special effects and no plots to speak of, produces endless identical boy bands and some of the blackest and grimmest alternative music outside the Germanic countries (see, Death Grunge), creates the world’s most elaborate virtual realities and the most dire reality shows. Extremeness remains in, with the fourth movie in the Youngblood Expanded Universe coming out this summer. Modern sports include Olympic Skateboarding and Battle Baseball, and, of course, Rollerball, while Surge Red Extreme Energy is available at your local grocers in the 3 liter bottle. Gated suburbs are now “walled with razor wire and motion sensors on top, plus cyborgs guard dogs” suburbs, but just try and tell the inhabitants they’re paranoid. The Republican Party is distinctly more libertarian and less theocratic than OTL, if crazy enough in other ways, while the Democrats remain stubbornly Third Way (AKA, Republicans Lite). AOL still controls a lot of internet traffic, although their transmission rates are a wee bit faster now. The Simpsons are, of course, still on the air.