On A New Kind of Globe and The Things Which Find Their Way Into Your Hands.

Most of the things people worry about have already happened.

The year is 2014. A young man in the American military with several tours under his belt is nearing separation. An older friend of his recommends that he join a company comprised of mercenaries, or private military contractors, so that he can make more than a $1000 a day doing only a fraction of the duties which he performed in military service, for only a few months a year, and with the ability to walk away at any time. Having enjoyed his military service, being mostly-free of any mental or physical disabilities gained therein, and knowing his GI bill is good forever, he joins and over a few years is paid an amount of money which is several times larger than his father’s net income from the time he was born until he turned 18 and enlisted.

The year is 2014. A young woman in Argentina who has a fiancée and an actuary degree decides that she can do better and, thanks to visa agreements which have been worked out in boardrooms and at embassies, decides to come to America and enter into a deal wherein she will work as an au pair for a wealthy family while attending English and business classes at what is referred to colloquially as a “degree mill.” She becomes involved in Facebook groups comprised of young women from all over the world with similar backgrounds and desires all involved in the same kind of labor force. They help each other navigate life in the United States, coordinate au pair gigs, plan travel excursions, and give life advice for navigating their new status in their new country. She eventually marries an American man who works in IT and is awarded her permanent residency through their marriage.

The year is 2014. A young man in Angola is one of the smartest and most ambitious men in what someone in the West would recognize as a “small town,”,however the analogy is an imperfect one. He gets a smartphone and begins talking over Facebook and WhatsApp with other Angolan emigres and learns that if he makes it to France and tells the right story to the right people he can be awarded an apartment and a job and some money to get on his feet. He earns enough money to pay a smuggler to bring him to Italy and eventually makes his way to France. In 2021, after a mysterious pandemic sweeps over the world, he will be employed by a supermarket as a security guard to keep people who haven’t received a government mandate injection from shopping for food. He is seen on video without wearing a mask, pushing a woman wearing a mask out of a grocery store.

The year is 2014. A young woman in Ohio grows up watching political-intrigue movies and TV shows. She becomes enamored with the power and prestige projected in these media products and, being of above average intelligence in her cohort, she decides that she will do whatever it takes to become part of this power structure. The media she consumes convinces her that her father is boorish and that her mother sold herself short by chaining her life to this crude man and that having kids and working a series of part-time jobs in the community is far beneath her and a crime against womanhood. She tries very hard in school and after a series of summer internships in several cities receives a degree in Public Policy which qualifies her to work in a political ecosystem based in Washington, DC where she helps run the day-to-day operations of a congressman or congresswoman. Her perceived status among her peers is based on how well she separates herself from her hometown and so she begins to regard her hometown and the kinds of people she imagines inhabit it with disdain despite her never spending much time talking to her neighbors and most of the town being hollowed out by deindustrialization and opiates. She will eventually marry a man who is equal to her in ecosystem-status but below her in looks and will write a politically-themed children’s book which is self-published on Amazon while she is locked in her home after a mysterious virus sweeps the nation in 2020.

How and why has it come to be that you can go to a 7/11 and see 4 different kinds of milk being sold in three different sized containers?

If you go to a grocery store it can be twice that, along with kinds of milk which have emerged recently which are made from various grains and nuts that are shipped from disparate places, processed, adulterated, and refined in a system which is proprietary to a company who is very cheerful towards you.

If you go to Whole Foods you can find even more, some in glass bottles, and from animals (animals) whose milk you, or at least The Author, wouldn’t have considered drinking regularly in 2014.

On Facebook you can even find groups of people who buy milk which the government has deemed to be illegal and live out your dreams of being a renegade smuggler by meeting with other likeminded people in parking lots to trade jars or purchase milk which is labeled as “bath milk” to get around regulations in the same way that people sell billets of aircraft-grade aluminum as “doorstops” to get around import tariffs.

Was it the love that a Nation has for you which brought these good before you?

Or was it the happenstance of a global trade and banking system you benefit from (having won an opaque lottery that awards you a lifetime of not an amount of money but a specific type of money by which you find it easy to conduct your transactions)?

The Author has presented you with a patchwork of human-social vignettes intended to illustrate a gestalt view of global and social relations that, having now been birthed on the back of the internet, are in the process of disrupting a system that has been in place since roughly The Peace of Westphalia.