An apocalyptic religious cult has captured an area the size of Syria in an effort to bring about the end of the world. It conducts mass executions of “apostates” about once a month, and enslaves many of the people it conquers. This year, it says, the Mahdi will appear; he will lead them to victory against Rome’s crusader armies in Dabiq.
The United States routinely uses tele-operated flying military robots to incinerate people suspected of opposing it in areas far from any battlefield. A repentant US robot operator has just gone public with his story after personally killing some 1600 people, many of them innocent. A repentant CIA agent has just been released from prison, where he was serving a sentence for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s illegal torture program. No other participants in the torture program have yet been charged with crimes by a court.
A resurgent undemocratic Russia has just revealed that, for the last fourteen years, rogue intelligence agents in the United States has been inserting undetected spying software into computers around the globe, including reprogramming the controllers in their hard disk drives.
A year and a half ago, a soft-spoken ex-CIA employee fled the US, first to Hong Kong and then to Russia, having released a massive collection of classified documents showing the extent of the US’s illegal spying programs at home and abroad. He is still in hiding in Russia. Among other things, he showed that US spies had broken into all of the data centers of many US technology companies and stolen their customers’ information. Now, US tech companies are in open conflict with the intelligence agencies. Many of them are redesigning their products and systems to frustrate intelligence agencies.
At about the same time, the founder of Russia’s biggest online social networking system, through which hundreds of millions of users maintain contact with their friends, fled to the US after legal harassment by the Russian government. Today he is working on an encrypted messaging system.
Meanwhile, in a room in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, there lives an Australian hacker and award-winning journalist whose hair went white in his thirties. He has not left the embassy for years. The Ecuadorean government granted him political asylum three years ago when the British government sought to extradite him to Sweden, from which he claims he would be extradited to the US. A secret US grand jury investigation of his journalism started years ago, after it published a large collection of classified US embassy cables which have been a crucial source for journalists and scholars of international relations ever since.
The political assassination of nearly the entire staff of a satirical weekly newspaper in France has resulted in a wave of anti-Muslim violence throughout the country and new restrictions on speech and freedom of association throughout the continent.
In Argentina, where the currency is collapsing, the president has just been indicted by a state’s attorney for covering up an Iranian terrorist attack on a Jewish building. The previous state’s attorney was found dead in his apartment the day before he was to present the charges against her.
The Pope and the president of Russia both announced last year that the Third World War had begun.
A volatile, pseudonymous virtual currency built on cryptography, implemented by software written by a mysterious figure known only by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, has a US$3 billion market capitalization (down from US$17 billion) and half a billion dollars a month in trading volume. Many countries have outlawed it. Custom chips designed only to process this virtual currency now populate multi-megawatt data centers throughout the world.
Meanwhile, prominent technologists warn that artificial intelligence is likely to end the human race, and that automation will destroy most jobs even sooner.
US citizens seeking solace in traditional belief systems have begun to shun vaccination, and diseases such as measles that were eradicated generations ago have begun to return to the nation. Polio begins to spread internationally in areas afflicted by armed insurrection, especially Pakistan, where many polio vaccination workers have been killed since the US hunted down jihadist leader Osama bin Laden in 2011 using a fake vaccination program.
A US movie studio shut down a couple of months ago for a period of time and pulled a satirical movie about North Korea after all its internal emails were stolen and released. The US government blames the attack on North Korea, but an anonymous group of bored teenagers seems more likely.
A worldwide conspiracy of anonymous bored teenagers known as Anonymous has been temporarily politically neutralized by, primarily, US law enforcement, after they began to uncover and publish information about illegal conspiracies within large US companies. The US has one journalist imprisoned for attempting to report on the group. A splinter group numbering a few hundred thousand has been honing harassment tactics against US feminists, particularly those who criticize video games.
Uruguay, Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, DC legalize recreational marijuana. Belgium legalizes euthanasia for the terminally ill, and the Queen of Belgium, who has been sick for years, dies.
A year ago, Ukraine exploded in protests that overthrow its pro-Russian government; Russia annexes part of Ukraine. US elites are debating the merits of arming Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists are using hand-launched artisanal flying robots made in Dnepropetrovsk to surveil pro-Russian forces from the air, but not yet to kill them. Ukrainian children collect fresh remnants of artillery shells.
Switzerland unpegs the Swiss franc from the Euro, immediately bankrupting several major foreign-exchange brokerage firms who had offered their customers extreme leverage with which to speculate.
Greece, suffering a worse economic downturn than the Great Depression, elects a party that claims to be a coalition of the radical left, which immediately begins to reverse privatization and government downsizing, and plan to shut down the concentration camps into which the previous government had herded asylum seekers. The new government hires a video game company’s Economist-In-Residence as its finance minister, and the continent is full of speculation that Greece will withdraw from the Euro. Greek banks seem to be collapsing as a result.
Australia, by contrast, continues to herd asylum seekers into concentration camps, where they are imprisoned for the rest of their lives for the crime of not being Australian.
The US continues to lead the world in imprisoning its own citizens with 1% of its adults in prison, rivaling the Stalin-era USSR on a per-capita basis, and remains the only country in the Americas to execute them. Although it continues not to publish any official statistics on the matter, its police continue to extrajudicially execute several times as many US citizens (Wikipedia counts 593 cases in 2014) as are executed legally (Wikipedia counts 39 cases in 2013), a practice that has provoked widespread protests for the last several months, centering around the execution of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. China, however, leads the world in executions, executing thousands of people per year, more than the rest of the world combined.
Amidst all of this, the total installed volume of photovoltaic panels (almost entirely made in China, which is now the world’s biggest economy) is increasing by 30% per year, and oil prices have fallen by more than half to their lowest price in years, plunging Venezuela into a serious economic crisis and putting economic pressure on Russia. After adopting controversial new mining techniques that cause frequent earthquakes in previously seismically stable areas, the US has returned its oil production to their peak levels in the 1970s, and now its oil production is exceeded only by Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Meanwhile, atmospheric CO₂ has shot past 400 ppm, higher than it has been in 4.5 million years, 120 ppm higher than before the Industrial Revolution, due to burning fossil fuels. As a consequence, 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history; NASA reports that the southwestern US is almost certain to face “megadroughts” lasting decades, droughts unmatched in a millennium.
This is the political landscape of the early 20th century.
A quarter of the world’s population has Linux-based personal computers in their pockets, running at microwave frequencies and always wirelessly connected to the internet. This number doubles every year. These computers are not secure, and their users do not have root, so they can be used to spy on the users without their knowledge. The US commonly does this to target people for assassination by flying robot.
We have a free encyclopedia universally available to anyone on the internet, and that anyone can edit. It continues to grow linearly, reaching almost 5 billion articles, the equivalent of about 2000 volumes. Against all odds, it continues to remain more reliable than any previously written encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Britannica has ceased print publication. Many newspapers have also ceased publication.
All new luxury cars now come with onboard supercomputers that record GPS traces of their travels. This data is sent back to the manufacturer to analyze.