Excerpts from the Encyclopedia of the Divided States of America
A design project exploring possible futures
Worldbuilder’s note:
A disclaimer for this age of rampant misinformation and confusion: this article serves as documentation for a collaborative speculative design project, imagining a future world in which COVID-19 is the driving force behind several large-scale political and structural shifts. The statistics and statements in this article are very loosely based on what we have researched about the current situation, but they are inherently fictionalised. Please refer to public health institutes for verified and trustworthy information about and guidance for this time!
Below are a handful of entries excerpted from the 2091 preprint of Encyclopedia of the Divided States of America, a monumental undertaking by an independent multinational group of researchers to document all physical and cultural aspects of the Divided States.
Coronavirus disease 2019
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), commonly known as “the virus”, is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Following the initial wave of outbreak, remission, and relapse in 2019–2020, a strain of the virus mutated, with researchers in 2085 reporting an infection rate of 40% and a mortality rate of 20%.
Effective vaccines against COVID-19 were developed successfully, paralleling broader developments in advanced gene editing. Additionally, many groups have been found to be displaying naturally-evolved immunity against the disease.
The Divided States of America
The Divided States of America, commonly known as the Divided States (D.S. or DS) or America, is a geographical region consisting of eight countries or self-governing territories.
The region was established in the global upheaval following the COVID-19 pandemic. Known collectively at the time as the United States of America, the region dissolved into geographically grouped and ideologically aligned territories, recalling its originally fragmented state.
Each country is self-governing and independently operating, but not entirely isolated. As technology is embraced or rejected to varying extents in each territory of the Divided States, countries and territories in the Divided States utilise a different range of communication methods from traditional pre-virus communication methods, ranging in technological degree from virtual reality to carrier pigeon.
Republic of Cascadia
See entry by fellow collaborator Alec Fisher:
The Kingdoms
Redirects from the Kingdom of Utah, the Kingdom of Wyoming, the Kingdom of Montana, and the Kingdom of Idaho.
See entry by fellow collaborator Kris Yuan:
The Communes
See entry by fellow collaborator Luke Greenwood:
The Federated States of Reagan
See entry by fellow collaborator Jose Guaraco:
Unitary Republic of America
The Unitary Republic of America (URA) is a country located on the eastern coast of the Divided States.
Geography
The URA comprises a region consisting of 20 states within the former United States of America, extending from Maine in the northeast, to North Carolina and Kentucky in the south, to Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin in the west.
Politics
The political ideology and structure of the URA government is identified as authoritarian-right or fascist, visualised as center-right on the political spectrum.
Economy
Driven by its economic and political capital, New York City, and the capital’s economic center, Wall Street, the URA has experienced accelerated economic growth since its founding. Its primary ideal is to aim for maximum economic productivity and efficiency without risking physical health. To that end, work is disembodied and worker-consumers are greatly datafied.
Pre-virus modes of business and service featured a considerable amount of human-to-human interaction in customer service, even in the early 21st century, when the interaction began to move to digital spheres but maintained the need for human input on both ends. In the URA, self-service has become the norm, in the forms of automated customer service, drone delivery, and other technologies.
Architecture
Physically, the URA has maintained many landscaping and architectural features of the metropolitan east of the United States of America. Dense populations occupy cities of skyscrapers. As pioneered by the second wave of digital architecture, many buildings in the URA are pyramid-shaped. In these buildings, lower levels operate as major servers and data storage centers, higher levels contain premium living spaces, and both the crowning spike and the subterranean cables of the building connect to the city — the spike by transmitting and receiving long-range signals and the cables by integrating with the physical city grid.
Worldbuilder’s note:
As a creative working in tech and data, I often feel conflicting excitement and unease about emerging technologies. A prevailing goal of technology and design is to identify problems or “pain points” and create solutions that aim to fix them or introduce better alternatives. Naturally, this leads to the invention of many useful and desired products, but more and more, we see, with the deepening entrenchment of both neoliberal capitalism and move-fast-break-things innovation, that technologies are non-neutral. They are often just tools, yes, but within tools are embedded ideologies and worldviews: what is the intended purpose of the technology, and what kind of world does it exist in that led to its creation?
With influential political and economic leaders in the current day calling for a hasty return to normal operation and production, regardless of the inevitable risk and harm towards vulnerable populations, the imagined URA is an extrapolation of an extortionist market-servicing and technology-driven ideology.
My initial presentation for the URA was a collection of architectural sketches. Drawing from examples of the 1920s Art Deco style, I imagined a city that operated as a technological system. Not only would it be visually glossy and polished, like the glamorous Chrysler Building in New York or like an App Store–full of apps with perfectly designed user interfaces, it would also take full advantage physical structures to functionally maximise the technological capability of the city itself. However, even with intensive optimisations, a city built upon data and technology must find or make space. In these buildings, level and space thus reflect status. The wealthy upper class afford to live in open upper-level apartments, while much of society is relegated to cramped living spaces among and within data centers, and, coincidentally, are more closely tied to the servers as individual data sources.
The Night Glider
An editorial insert, produced in collaboration with the Night Glider.
In the Unitary Republic of America, physicality is an inconvenient chore at best, a distasteful blight on the quality of life at worst. Digitality and data are the number one priority: with every consumer-citizen tied into the state-market through advanced autonomous technology and rich digital worlds, the state-market not only keeps people safe, it maintains a extremely robust and productive economy as well as a lively society.
The Night Glider slip-on was the brainchild of a footwear company that began soon after the government of the URA settled into relative stability. The company existed as a small start-up at the time and has seen accelerated growth that has led it to become one of the leading mega-corporations working to provide society with many essential services. As expressed by the Night Glider founder, the problem that inspired the product was that, while a majority of the population preferred not to interact with the physical world if they had a choice, there still exist physical spaces and bodies that must interface. This utilitarian product allows for this physical interaction in a cutting-edge way by building in smart and subtle evasion algorithms into the user’s physical ventures.
As is standard in the URA, the product is highly integrative. It connects with the user’s physical body, the user’s digital presence, the fabric of the city, and the the corporation storing the data. Consumer reports have consistently shown high demand for the product and positive sentiment towards it. Moreover, it is one of the select consumer products often endorsed by the government in public health and safety efforts.
The shoe takes its name from the nickname for the flying squirrel — rodents in the rainforest can both move fast and anticipate predators through tremors. Additionally, the name of the shoe type, “slip-on”, suggests slipping away. It utilises a highly developed electronic chip that is flexible, durable, and comfortable, in contrast to precursory embedded or wearable electronics, the chip is not merely embedded in the sole — it is, indeed, the sole.
The Night Glider records a wealth of useful information, such as weight, gait, and timestamped geolocations. It communicates with the user’s digital presence by sending unobtrusive electromagnetic pulses into the sole, through the body, to any of (in order of degree of physical integration): user’s implanted chip, user’s bionic device(s), or user’s non-attached physical device(s). The user’s digital presence can be any of (in order of degree of physical integration): user’s in-brain augmented memory storage, user’s in-home digital interface (commonly a wall or mirror), or user’s mobile app. Night Glider collects this data to collate and share with government services and other relevant corporations. Finally, as with all transportation technologies, the data is embedded in the electrified and digitised grid underfoot as the user moves through the city, allowing other technologies, including other Night Gliders, to detect and learn from the data originating from the shoe in question.
The product has been a success among consumers for two major reasons. Firstly, users can be receive unobtrusive “nudges”, accompanied by optional digital alerts, through mechanisms in the shoe that physically guide them onto uncrowded paths and into uncrowded areas. This enables consumers to be outside without fear of coming into physical proximity with other people. On a more fun note, the shoe features popular mobility enhancements, such as a speed boost — enacted through manipulation of air in the material of the sole for a more elastic bounce — which allows for greater speed in evading external physical presences that are detected within a radius.
Finally, it has been warmly embraced by the state for economic and health reasons, specifically in tracking foot activity to limit physical interactions and in tracking geolocation data for use in targeted advertising.
Ultimately, as the state, every company, and every person benefits from people staying safe, products such as Night Glider not only are practical essentials but furthermore are exemplars of the tenacious and entrepreneurial spirit of the URA.
Worldbuilder’s note:
This speculative object, especially its physical nudge feature, was inspired by many innocuous design patterns present in objects and interfaces around us. There are typically benign patterns, such as a filled in “OK” button standing out more than an outlined “Cancel” button to match expected behaviour, and there are dark patterns, such as a pop-up recommending a store newsletter, with the refusal button text written as a guilt-tripping “No, I want to keep shopping at high prices”. They exist in the physical world, too: we are more drawn to walk on a wide, well-lit main street at night than on a narrow, dark side alley. These patterns implicitly guide us towards behaving in certain ways, often without us consciously noticing their design-ness.
Through this object, I imagine an extrapolation of this pattern, where the product design and flow is so streamlined and abstracted away that the user has no choice in being persuaded to behave a certain way —to move in a different direction when an incoming presence is detected. This is justified and accepted because no user would choose to behave differently; therefore, this behaviour is not a choice that the user needs.
Or, perhaps more accurately to the speculated reality, this is a reasoning held by the corporation and only a portion of the population.
Worldbuilder’s note:
As a first stab at speculative thinking and worldbuilding, this was a challenging exercise. “Living in a society” with systems upon systems within more systems of complexity, the task of creating new worlds is daunting. At the same time, it is also liberating and thought-provoking to take long-simmering frustrations and what-ifs and channel them into speculation — not to predict, but merely to explore.
The pandemic has been an overwhelming event, and this project leaves me with hopes that we will be galvanised to enact change through it.
