THE UNITED MICRO-KINGDOMDS: A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

In an effort to reinvent itself for the twenty-first century, England devolved into four supershires inhabited by digitarians, bioliberals, anarcho-evolutionists, and communo-nuclearists. 

Each county became an experimental zone free to develop its own form of governance, economy, and lifestyle. England became a deregulated laboratory for competing social, ideological, and economic models. Its aim was to discover through experimentation the best social, political, and economic structure to ensure its existence in the new postcrash world order—a sort of preapocalyptic experiment designed to avoid the thing itself, which increasingly, seemed inevitable.

DIGITARIANS
As their name suggests, digitarians depend on digital technology and all its implicit totalitarianism—tagging, metrics, total surveillance, tracking, data logging, and 100 percent transparency. Their society is organized entirely by market forces; citizen and consumer are the same. For them, nature is there to be used up as necessary. They are governed by technocrats, or algorithms—no one is entirely sure or cares—as long as everything runs smoothly and people are presented with choices, even if illusionary. It is the most dystopian yet familiar of all the micro-kingdoms.

BIOLIBERALS
Whereas digitarians use digital technology to manage supply and demand of diminishing resources and to create an illusion of unlimited access for all, the bioliberals who are social democrats, pursue biotechnology, and with it, new values.28 They, too, want freedom and choice for all but they want it to last. Bioliberals live in a world in which the hype of synthetic biology has come true and delivered on its promises. Massive government investment in biotechnology has led to a society in symbiosis with the natural world. Biology is at the center of their worldview, giving rise to a radically different technological landscape to our own. Nature is enhanced to meet growing human needs but people also adjust their needs to match available resources. Each person produces his or her own energy according to their needs. Bioliberals are essentially farmers, cooks, and gardeners. Not just of plants and food, but of products too. Gardens, kitchens, and farms replace factories and workshops.

ANARCHO-EVOLUTIONISTS
The anarcho-evolutionists abandon most technologies, or at least stop developing them, and concentrate on using science to maximize their own capabilities through training, DIY biohacking, and self-experimentation. They believe that humans should modify themselves to exist within the limits of the planet rather than modifying the planet to meet their ever-growing needs. There is a high number of trans- and posthumanists among anarcho evolutionists. They essentially take evolution into their own hands. Very little is regulated; citizens can do as they please as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. The anarcho-evolutionists have little trust in government and tend to self-organize. Citizen’s rights are based only on trust and agreement between individuals and groups. They are the opposite of digitarians. The human is at the center of their world, along with freedom from being told what to do.

COMMUNO-NUCLEARISTS
The communo-nuclearist society is a no-growth, limited population experiment. They live on a three-kilometer-long, nuclear-powered, mobile landscape that crawls from one end of the country to the other, straddling two sets of three-meter-wide tracks. Each carriage is twenty by forty meters, and there are seventy-five of them.30 The environment surrounding the tracks, like a demilitarized zone, is fully naturalized, a sort of nature paradise to be enjoyed by nature-loving communo-nuclearists from the safety of their train The state provides everything. They depend on nuclear energy for their continued survival and, although they are energy rich it comes at a price—no one wants to live near them and they are under constant threat of attack or accident, even though their energy source uses a relatively safe thorium reactor. Consequently, they are organized as a highly disciplined mobile micro-state. Fully centralized, everything is planned and regulated. They are voluntary prisoners of pleasure, free from the pressures of daily survival, communists sharing in luxury not poverty. Like a popular night club there is a one-out one-in policy but for life. Inhabitants live inside the mountains, which contain labs, factories, hydroponic gardens, gyms, dorms, kitchens, nightclubs, and everything else they need. On the mountains are swimming pools, fish farms, and bookable huts for periods of isolation

DUNNE & RABY 



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