Future Fragments Assumption 1: Human growth continues to despoil the human environment.

Assumption 2: Consumers will want ever-closer-to-instant gratification.
Even if they don't, corporations will assume they do. And life imitates trendspotting.

Assumption 3: Corporations take over the conduct of politics from nation states.
Internecine conflict and Byzantine 'partnerships' are the order of the day.

Assumption 4: Hackers become the new pirates.
In every sense.

Assumption 5: Mind-expanding and experience-enhancing drug use continues to rise.
The acceptability, availability and desire for quick-fix drugs will increase as long as the culture of capitalism does. Eventually we will realize they are one and the same thing. A solution to unhappiness! Buy now!

Assumption 6: Advertising is becoming ever more invasive and ever more intense.
We are building an advertocracy, not a democracy. There will, simply, be no other form of authority as clever or as incessant as advertising. We give it power, elevate it above politicians and pundits, because it informs our base needs far better. Even the US military, which blankets a country with leaflets as a precedent to bombs, recognizes this.

Assumption 7: Human cloning is inevitable.

Assumption 8: Near-infinite bandwidth is inevitable.

Assumption 9: Charismatic and meritocratic institutions will always succeed in the long term.
Call it the marriage of capitalism and Darwinism.

Assumption 10: Cities are, in effect, new life forms.
If social conventions continue on the trajectory of the last hundred years, we'll have tribal cultures -- techno tribal cultures, to be sure -- within fifty years.

Assumption 11: The age of science as we know it is coming to an end.
Traditional science is based on causuality. But only the cause and effect that can be studied, or that flows forward in time. There are other kinds -- and science itself will prove that when it stumbles upon the inexplicable, as it has already begun to do.  ¶ 2:33 AM

  2257: America the Feudal The United States has become a corporate-military, bilingual, white-hispanic dictatorship. Its departmental PR agencies are becoming intertwined with the mainstream media. There are 62 states, including Mexico, Puerto Rico, Quebec, Cuba, Canada, the Philippines and the six-state former UK-and-Eire. Life for its citizens is a never-ending techogical playpen of earthly and virtual pleasures. There are few limits to freedom. Nobody misses the painful duty of voting. Yes, if certain people get their kicks by knowing about the government's corruption, let them find it and rebroadcast it over that old fashioned, free but ghettoized, amateur and nonprofit haven called the Internet (as opposed to the corporation-run, entertainment-filled ExtraNet, which 90% of the citizens use). It won't make much difference.

Patriotism, meanwhile, has become practically feudalized. Corporations, Homeland Security forces (a confluence of the army, airforce, CIA, FBI, NSA and USPD), The Space Navy (which runs all military campaigns through precision airstrikes and lasering from high altitude), large and wealthy families -- all jump at the chance to license their own colorful, heraldic versions of Old Glory.  ¶ 8:33 PM

  2479: Our Sins Come Back The world has been overrun by two of our worst nightmares. Insects and viruses, after hundreds of years of enforced evolution brought on by mankind's pesticides and pharmacology, have become super-potent and resistant to just about everything science throws at them. We are fighting a losing battle against hordes of increasingly diverse and wily insect critters for control of the increasingly tropical global climate and its food supply. We retreat into large domed cities with space for fields of genetically engineered crops, but there we find breeding grounds for myriad super-diseases swifter than influenza, more awful than the Black Death and more misunderstood than AIDS.

Everyone is assumed to be a carrier. For our own safety, we are all kept in individual quarantine. Our apartments -- little more than padded cells -- are swabbed clean every day by nanobots. Society starts to smile on those who conduct all their human affairs over the Internet, and frowns on excessive social contact (indeed, those who indulge in it die out in a matter of generations). Meeting other people for "facetime" is a titilating taboo. Long-term couples are tolerated: if they get to the stage of coupling without catching something lethal from each other, it is generally assumed they have the kind of resistant genes we need to breed into the race. Much more outrageous is the kind of face-to-face contact known as Deathwishing: three or more people holding in-person house parties for a whole evening, sometimes longer. If they locate Deathwishers, the Corpse Cops daren't intervene. They just set up a perimeter around the apartment, and wait to extract the bodies.   ¶ 8:09 PM