In all these cases whatever happens to social life -- suspension, dissolution, balkanization, implosion, a state of emergency -- what happens to normal citizens is that citizenship (bios) evaporates. But ruling elites -- political, economic, financial -- don't care about citizenship. They're only interested in passive consumers.
Pick your dystopia
The dystopias of the New Global Disorder are all being normalized. We're familiar with state terrorism -- as in the CIA's "secret" drone war over tribal areas in Pakistan, in Yemen, Somalia and soon in other African latitudes. And we're also familiar with non-state terrorism, as applied by that nebula that we in the West describe as "al-Qaeda," with its myriad franchises and copycats.
We have a bunch of hyper-states -- such as the US, China and Russia and the EU as whole -- and myriad infra-states or failed states, some by design (Libya, and Syria is on the way), as well as satellite states, some essential to the Western-controlled system such as the Gulf Counter-Revolution Club (GCC -- Gulf Cooperation Council).
For the non-integrated gap, it's Hobbes all the way. In the case of Africa -- until virtually yesterday derided as a black hole -- there's an added geopolitical power play; how to counter-attack the extraordinary penetration of Chinese mercantilism over the last decade. The Pentagon's response is to deploy Africom everywhere; to subdue nations that are too independent, such as Libya; and in the case of the French elite, also on the bandwagon, to try to regain some imperial muscle in Mali, profiting exactly from the implosion and balkanization of Libya.
The look of post-history, its aesthetic ideal, is the city as theme park. Los Angeles may have been the archetype but the best examples are Las Vegas, Dubai and Macao. In the absence of Umberto Eco and Baudrillard, who reveled in the mirror images of simulacra, we may follow master architect Rem Koolhaas -- a keen observer of the urban dementia in southern China -- to learn what junk space is all about.
Then there's the security obsession -- from cities like London turning into a sprawling version of Bentham's Panopticum to the pathetic striptease ritual at every airport, not to mention the gated condo or "community," more like gated atoms, as the emblem of capsular civilization. Guerrilla counter-attacks, though, may be as lethal as Sunni Iraqis fighting the Americans in the "triangle of death" in the mid-2000s. In Sao Paulo, Brazil -- the ultimate violent megalopolis -- gangs "clone" cars and license plates, fool security at the door of gated condos, drive to the garage, and proceed to systematically rob each apartment in every floor.
You're history
Conceptually, post-history cuts all corners. The flow of history is degraded as fake. Simulacrum trumps reality. We see history repeating not as tragedy and farce but as a double farce; an overlapping example is jihadis in Syria weaponized just like the former "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan in the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad conflating with the Western gang in the UN Security Council trying to apply to Syria what they got away with in Libya; regime change.
We also have history repeating itself as cloning; neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics beating the West in its industrialization game -- in terms of speed -- while at the same time repeating the same mistakes, from the mindless excesses of an acquisition mentality to no respect for the environment.
It goes without saying that post-history buries the Enlightenment -- as favoring the emergence of all sorts of fundamentalisms. So it had also to bury international law; from bypassing the UN to launch a war on Iraq in 2003 to using a UN resolution to launch a war on Libya in 2011. And now Britain and France are taking no prisoners trying to bypass the UN or even NATO itself and weaponize the "rebels" in Syria.
So we have a New Medievalism that cannot but fit wealthy neo-theocracy -- as in Saudi Arabia and Qatar; because they are Western allies, or puppets, internally they may remain medieval. Superimposed, we have the politics of fear - which essentially rules Fortress America and Fortress Europe; fear of The Other, which can be occasionally Asian but most of the time Islamic.
What we don't have is a political/philosophical vision of the future. Or a historical political program; political parties are only worried about winning the next election.
How would a post-state system look like? Independent minds don't trust mammoth, asymmetrical, wobbly blocs like the EU, or the G-20, or even aspiring multipolars such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa -- which still do not represent a real alternative to the Western-controlled system). No one is thinking in terms of a structural mutation of the system. Marx was beyond right on this: what determines history are objective, concrete, palpable processes -- some of them very complex -- affecting the economic and technological infrastructure.
What is possible to infer is that the real historical subject from now on is technology -- as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Paul Virilio were already conceptualizing in the 1980s and 1990s. Technology will keep advancing way beyond the capitalist system. Techno-science is on the driving seat of history. But that also means war.
War and technology are Siamese twins; virtually all technology gets going as military technology. The best example is how the Internet completely changed our lives, with immense geo-economic and political ramifications; Beijing, in a 2010 white paper, may have hailed the Internet as a "crystallization of human wisdom," but no state filters more information on the Internet than China. Pushing the scenario to a dystopian limit, Google's Eric Schmidt argues, correctly, that with a flip of a switch, soon an entire country could even disappear from the Internet.
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