The Digital Civilizations Interviews

Relocalization

Despite the Altronet, by 2020-2025, globalization was a thing of the past. Individuals, corporations, local communities, countries were all left to fend for themselves. International trade was half of what it was 10 years ago. Some financial markets chose to disconnect from real-time global trading networks. China, India and many developing countries reinstated «One-child» policies. After the UK, Spain and most Scandinavian countries had left it, the EU gave up all pretence of being anything else than an economic space – and even then, countries took to invoking safeguard clauses on all occasions and negotiated their own bilateral agreements. Local conflicts multiplied over access to water, trade routes, pipelines or even trade tariffs, although none have (yet) escalated to nuclear or biological warfare. On the other hand, terrorism was all but extinct, due to border closure and perhaps more importantly, to the departure of all western forces from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. After striking a deal with the Palestinians, even Israel was left alone to manage its enormous economic problems.

The only thing on which developed countries could still agree was the protection of key infrastructures such as the Suez and Panama canals, network nodes and root servers, root identity providers, GPS satellites and, when they could, intercontinental pipelines.

Local communities slowly learned to cope with the new situation. Local currencies emerged, facilitated by electronic networks, contactless cards and simple, open software. After Nike, Sony and LVMH had shown what it cost to still operate as centralized multinationals, firms like Coca Cola, McDonald's, Siemens, Toyota and HSBC reinvented themselves as loose networks of local companies. Using knowledge accumulated by its engineers when they were subcontracting to western firms, plus its own brand of inventiveness, India launched and exported its own, GMO-based «2nd Green Revolution», despite well-grounded fear and protests over health and environmental risks. Many countries developed their own brands of «generic» IT equipments. India's generic or cheap «intelligent» drugs also came in handy when Eastern Europe was struck by a wave of tropical diseases, brought north by global warming and against which the local population had no natural defences.