A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (27 page)

Together, these relational enterprises will make up a new economy, as marginal today as capitalism at the start of the thirteenth century, and just as clearly a harbinger of the future.

Before the middle of the twenty-first century, hyper-democracy will begin to make itself known in the institutional reality of the world. We shall begin to debate the installation of coherent global institutions, making it possible for humanity to avoid succumbing to the assaults of super-empire and to avoid the potential ravages of hyperconflict.

It would serve no purpose to attempt to describe these institutions in detail. Too much time will have gone by before their day dawns, too many storms will break, too many technologies will emerge. And too many surprises will come along to divert (temporarily) the course of history.

But we can sketch its broad outlines without too much danger of making a mistake, from a knowledge of past history and of the first two waves of the future.

These future institutions will be made up of a grab bag of local, national, continental, and global organizations. Within their bosom, each human being will be worth as much and be as influential as any other.

The city will be the principal living space of the bulk of humanity. Hundreds of cities will be more heavily populated in 2100 than a hundred countries today. Since more than two-thirds of humanity will live there, gigantic sums will be required for their infrastructure. The city will be the area of the biggest collective investments and the principal tax collector. Urban planning will become a major science. Digital infrastructure will help make the city a site for encounters, for trading, for living. Using the technologies of nomadic ubiquity, a participative and
associative democracy will connect all who live there, all who work there, all who will be its users or who will in one way or another be affected by its development. Whole neighborhoods will arise there autonomically.

To fight off the assaults of the market, states will need to focus on a few sovereign functions: security, public order, freedom, defense of language, universal access for both permanent and transient residents to health and knowledge, the right to a training-indexed minimum income. To fulfill these functions equitably, states (like cities) will be subsidized if necessary on a continental and even global scale. Borders will fade away. Everyone will be a citizen of several entities at once, and it will become possible to defend one’s identity without seeking to destroy one’s neighbor’s. Nations will little by little succeed in finding the conditions favorable to pacific coexistence. New forms of democratic control will appear, based on autonomous regulatory agencies, permanently monitoring the work of elected officials thanks to the methods of nomadic ubiquity and of hypersurveillance.

Each continent or subcontinent will group its market democracies in a union, as the European Union has already done. Each such union will be responsible for its currency, the transparency of its markets, the harmonization of its members’ social conditions, environmental protection, domestic security, civil rights, health, education, immigration, foreign policy, and regional defense. It must create for itself a continental parliament and government. It must also possess (as is already the case with Europe) a body empowered to resolve conflicts between nations of the same continent. Such a future 267
could become possible, especially in the Middle East, which must one day unite all its nations — including Israel and Palestine — in a regional union. The European Union, standard-bearer of hyperdemocracy, will become a nation of a new kind, probably expanding one day to include Turkey and Russia. It is there that the conditions for equilibrium between market and democracy will best be met. It is in Europe that hyperdemocracy will begin.

New institutions must be created — will be created — on a global scale, expanding those already in existence. The United Nations will be their base. A Constitution for the planet will pick up and extend the current United Nations Charter. For this to happen, the UN will have to assume a supranational (and no longer just multilateral) dimension. Its preamble will list all the rights and duties of every human in relation to nature, to other humans, and to life. It will include rights not foreseen in the present charter, especially the new right — essential, groundbreaking — to a decent childhood, with implications for the duties of parents. Other rights and obligations will mandate the protection of life, nature, and diversity, and will impose absolute boundaries on the market.

The UN General Assembly, which will include more and more states, will be progressively supported first by a second chamber, where leaders elected by universal suffrage will each represent an equal number of human beings, and then by a third chamber, where mercantile and relational enterprises will foregather. This global parliament will collect taxes, based on each member country’s GDP, its weapons budget, and its greenhouse gas emissions.

The UN Security Council will merge with the G8 and will expand to include a few of the Eleven, including India, Brazil, and Indonesia. It will later be made up solely of representatives of the continental unions.

The Security Council will serve as the executive body of a planetary government built around the current secretary-general. This planetary government will devote many more resources to the protection of humanity than all the planet’s governments do today. It will dictate social norms — such as the principle of the best possible world social regime — which it will gradually impose on all the world’s business enterprises. It will give itself the means to make them respect it.

International financial institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) will be brought directly under its trusteeship, so that they will no longer obey exclusively the instructions of the wealthiest countries. This planetary government will acquire the military means for fighting mafias, the drug trade, sexual exploitation, slavery, climate upheaval, disposal of waste, and attacks (accidental, terrorist, or military) by nanorobots and other self-replicating pathogens that could destroy the biomass — a
blue jelly
(the ultimate nano-technological weapon) held exclusively by the planetary government, will be used in order to combat the gray jelly
.
A planetary assistance and security force with the best equipment (discussed above) will protect the environment and combat piracy.

To support this world government, new organs for control, defense, and regulation will step by step take up a position stemming from the governance bodies of
super-empire and those of relational enterprises: a planetary criminal court will ensure the compatibility of laws enacted on each continent and try the most dangerous pirates; a global authority will ensure the availability of water; a global department of labor will prevent monopolies and require compliance with worker rights. Another authority will verify the quality of consumer goods, in particular of food. Still another will oversee the major insurance companies, other governance bodies, and the very big businesses essential to life. This latter authority will possess the means to combat the pirate economy and to defend intellectual and personal property.

A central bank will ensure the stability of the principal currencies, then will manage a single currency. It will exclude from the international financial community any institution permitting drug-money laundering. A global development bank will finance major infrastructure projects in cities and countries that respect the planetary Constitution. It will support countries that convert their drug- or organized-crime-dependent economies and will reinforce them in their war against pirates. A specialist institution will help structure relational businesses and verify that they are not covers for pirate or terrorist organizations. Another planetary institution will focus on the development of microfinance.

Obviously, the headquarters of these institutions will not all have to be located in the same place — even though we spoke earlier of Jerusalem for some of them, as the capital of believers in the god shared by half mankind, the god of Abraham. Their lives may be as nomadic as the super-empire it will be their mission to counterbalance.

Market and democracy will thus gradually restore a planetary equilibrium. On the one hand, hyperdemocracy’s institutions will allow the market to function effectively and to avoid the underemployment of productive capacities by launching major worldwide energy, digital, and urban infrastructure projects. On the other hand, the market — regulated and globalized — will stop penetrating the sanctuary of democracy. It will even find it in its own interest to develop tools to serve democracy and to create urban infrastructure, antipollution methodologies, and methods for fighting obesity and poverty. New technologies will make possible a new abundance of energy and water within a protected environment and stabilized climate. Architects and urban planners will invent cities on a human scale; artists will raise awareness that the world’s beauty deserves protection and development.

Microcredit will dominate the banking system. Mercantile relational businesses (that is to say, businesses having profit as a final goal and human relations as a byproduct) will provide personal services (from health to education by way of entertainment) and at-home services (including assistance to populations in difficulty, the elderly and infirm). Markets will redirect technical progress toward the health industries, in particular the food industry, as well as toward knowledge and the environment. They will value lived time rather than stored time, and services rather than industrial products. They will offer the presentation of stored time free of charge, and will require payment for live entertainment. Movies
will be presented gratis, and film buffs will pay to see the same actors onstage. Music files will be free, and music lovers will pay to attend concerts. Books and periodicals will be free, and readers will pay the publishers for the privilege of debating their authors and hearing them speak. Publishers will sell lectures given by their authors and books of very high quality. Such costlessness will come to permeate all fields essential to life.

The relational economy and the market will each have much to gain from the other’s success. The relational economy will have everything to gain from the most effective possible functioning of the market, while the market’s effectiveness will depend crucially on the social climate engendered by the relational economy. And finally, the market’s major business entities will increasingly be judged, by their own shareholders, according to their capacity to serve the general interest and to promote relational activities.

Hyperdemocracy will develop a
common good
, which will create
collective intelligence.

Humanity’s common good, the ultimate objective of hyperdemocracy, will be neither greatness, nor wealth, nor even happiness, but protection of the things that make life possible and worthwhile — climate, air, water, freedom, democracy, culture, languages, fields of knowledge . . . This common good will be like a library that needs to be updated and maintained, a natural park,
to be passed on after cultivating and enriching it without having modified it in any irreversible way. The way in which Namibia fosters its wildlife, or France protects its forests, or in which certain peoples protect their culture, suggests what might be a foretaste of this common good. This can never be a market commodity, nor a state property, nor a multilateral good: it must be a
supranational good.

The chief intellectual dimension of the common good will be a
universal intelligence
peculiar to the human species, and different from the sum of human intelligences.

The collective intelligence of a group is not the sum of the knowledge of its members, nor even the sum of their capacities to think: it is an intelligence peculiar to itself, which thinks differently from each member of the group. Thus a network of neurons becomes a learning machine; a telephone grid performs other functions than those of each telephone exchange; a computer thinks differently from each microprocessor. A city is a being distinct from each of its inhabitants; an orchestra is something beyond the sum of its musicians; a play is different from the role played by each actor; and the results of research are worth more than the contribution of each researcher working on the project. All collective intelligence is the result of bridges, of links between individual intelligences, essential for creating the new.

In the same way, humanity creates a collective intelligence, universal, distinct from the sum of the particular intelligences of the beings who make it up, and distinct from the collective intelligences of groups or of nations.

The ultimate objective of this collective intelligence
will not be utilitarian. It will be unknowable, priceless. It will be able to translate itself in diverse works: numberless global cooperative networks will permit the creation of a corpus of knowledge and universal works of art, transcending the knowledge and the works of all who take part in them. In fact, this universal intelligence has existed forever in embryonic state. It has allowed the human species to survive through adaptation. With the arrival of new technologies, it is developing ever faster. It will create an entirely new relationship with intellectual property, which can be absolute no longer but must be shared with humanity as a whole, essential to each individual’s creativity.

For example, the development of freeware will form an exemplar of universal intelligence as a kind of global brain network, a collective golem. Similarly, while Wikipedia at the moment is no more than a weak and often unreliable aggregate of the intelligences of its authors, we shall see in it (we are already seeing) the birth (made possible by the work of all) of a collective result different from what each contributor intended.