Graham McAleer
Techno-futurists commonly believe that a totally human-made future will advance individual liberty. Bruno Maçães is doubtful, arguing in World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics that the future will more likely see us living inside a metaverse crafted by one of the superpowers. He foresees AI delivering “a radical increase in the centrality of sovereign power” and believes the goal of today’s geopolitics is a hegemonic second genesis where all reside in an artificial cosmos that will be either American or Chinese.
This is not fairyland stuff, argues Maçães, for recent events show that the great powers are trying to scale up the smart city. In the imperialism of the future, a superpower aspires to be “a global system administrator.” A case where, as Maçães puts it, “your opponent is playing a video game. You are coding it.” This will be the consummation of the history of empire, for peoples will live so immersed in a state power metaverse that government and ordinary life are utterly fused: “the culmination of ideological power: a will disguised as thing.”
Maçães works for the consultancy firm Flint Global. A member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and one-time Secretary of State for European Affairs in Portugal, Maçães is the author of numerous highly regarded books on geopolitics. He is linguistically gifted—together with European languages, his research mines Russian and Chinese texts—and his books are characterized by a deft blending of philosophy and prediction. World Builders is sophisticated thinking, and time may prove Maçães right, but I wonder. There are four building blocks to his argument, and each can be queried.
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