I'm talking about Grunch of Giants, by a Medal of Freedom winner and celebrated poet, associated with the Aquarian Conspiracy, in turn inheriting from the New England Transcendentalist movement: R. Buckminster Fuller.
In that book, Fuller forecasts how the mumbo jumbo might go from there, were the USA to retire its debt payment responsibilities in favor of a fresh start, as some kind of post nationalist nation, an oxymoron for sure, but perhaps with more staying power vs-a-vs the imposter state that would otherwise persist.
I called this post nationalist design USA OS in my own writings, OS for Operating System. Others worked on a complementary OS Earth as a meme. We were anticipating the continued rise of computer science, with "operating system" a next metaphor for governance.
After Grunch of Giants, Fuller forecast that the post-USA imposter state would try to bury his work in an Orwellian memory hole, by smudging history. He passed this anticipatory narrative on to Patricia Ravasio, who later wrote a book about their meetings. His premonitions were on target as usual.
Fuller was an evolutionary more than a revolutionary in that he wasn't a Robin Hood hoping to steal from the rich and redistribute all that cash to his cronies, in exchange for blind loyalty.
On the contrary, his "gross universal cash heist" (aka GRUNCH) was about voodoo people (e.g. J.P. Morgan types, masters of the soulless corporate personhood zombies) continuing to undermine the ultimate authority of national sovereignties (descended from "divine right" dogmas) by becoming their underwriter sponsors. The East India Company runs through all his writings as the boilerplate prototype of the limited liability operation, of privatized profits and socialized loss.
Fuller spells out a similar pattern in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, wherein landlubber royalty received their principal backing from offshore and not solely from internal revenue. Ocean-savvy pirate networks shored up the city-states. A monarch would have tools and trinkets no one could produce only locally, adding to their "divine right" aura. Who wants to be beholden to the people, after all?
Flag waving tin horn patriotism was another form of organized religion in Fuller's accounts, semi-transparently designed and field tested by his much anticipated World Livingry Service Industry (WLSI). Supranational giants, corporate personhoods, now run the show, at least on paper. Their cash heist is complete.
The UN, in contrast, pays the corporations as contractors (as do the state-funded
militaries), effectively returning any money paid to states, and then
some, in the form of profits. The Grunch is self-irrigating, although it's not a closed system, as neither is Spaceship Earth (its principal theater of operations).
Most readers probably understood this outcome as dystopian, but in Fuller's case we need to remember he had long projected a nation-free world in the form of his Dymaxion Projection. The political data layer might still persist on Google Earth, but in seeming even a little less diminished, it would lose persuasive power. People would find themselves increasingly unable to suspend their sense of disbelief.
That's about where we are today. Phony Intelligence (so-called AI) is always in danger of ringing hollow, popping its own bubble, and leaving its followers to wander off in search of something more secure. Keeping the show on the road takes work, including the manufacture of consent. Real intelligence (RI) is still needed.
The propped up legalistic framework known as the Federation (in my scifi: the FSNA or Federated States of North America, or USSA for mocking purposes), continues to teeter on the brink of fiscal meltdown in a kind of ritualistic political theater. It leans on the EU and UK, and to some extent the UN, for continued credibility and legitimacy. These bureaucracies prop up each other. Lets not forget NATO either.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Grunch continues to wrestle with its new responsibilities as the defacto experimental prototype community maker (military bases get much of their attention). Refugees, both documented and undocumented, pour across borders here and there, sometimes as invaders in uniform, other times as medical tourists seeking affordable healthcare.
The camps many of them get herded into tend to be more like prisons than like transitional prototypical housing (ala Burning Man), with no free journalists permitted. Even members of the congress in DC don't get to see much of what goes on, when it comes to the TexMex region for example, the province of narco-terrorism.
For-profit prisons answer to the actual stakeholders, not so much to the taxpayers. Gitmo defies any attempts by any White House to close it. AI has a lot of autonomy. The feared takeover seems a lot in the rear view mirror already. Planet of the Apes Я Us.
Conventionally, the Grunch has used its PЯ shield of tax-funded nation states to conceal its activities. The state is the responsible actor whereas the private sector merely does what is asked of it, patriotically of course.
With the shrinkage of the public sector comes the loss of this veneer. Again, the outcome sounds dystopian, whereas Fuller continued to insist we could do better than choose oblivion.
Grunch of Giants points back to Critical Path, which does more to take up the war in Vietnam and even anticipates Afghanistan. Both were written in the 1980s.
In that thicker book, Fuller does more to make his case, that our transition to a post nationalist era need not spell an end to our awareness of either history or ethnicity ("race" might have to go). On the contrary, he expected many more museums to return their stolen loot to the indigenous. Hegemony and imperialism were falling by the wayside.
