Back when I was doing a lot of conspiracy-genre writing, I never got too terribly interested in the concept of the New World Order. Global governmental and territorial reorganization never really titillated me too much positively or negatively. I was always much more interested in things like the mechanics of media, and how culture is used to “grow” predictable “crops” of human beings. Things like that happen across arbitrary lines drawn on a map to separate people from each other. Advanced computing technology capable of grouping and predicting the behaviors of groups and individuals, whether we like it or not, will one day sweep away the current concept of the nation state, replacing it with something more akin to marketing segments or people reduced to keyword/behavioral clusters.

While still on the subject of regional trade zones, I wanted to grab a little more text from the site about “citistates” (note modernized spelling of city-state to something more akin to Citibank):

A citistate isn’t defined by political boundaries. Instead, it’s organic. A citistate is reality — a labor market, a commute-shed, a broadcast area, the circulation area of the lead newspaper. A citistate is what the economy does. […]

Citistates would have made little sense under the old paradigm of American thinking federal, state, local. But they emerge as the centerpiece of a new paradigm global, regional, and neighborhood. Citistates become the focus of how our world is now organizing itself.

As economic actors, major U.S. citistates compete in size with major world nations. In gross product, the New York region ranks 13th among the world’s top economies, just ahead of Australia, Argentina and Russia. The Los Angeles citistate is bigger than Korea, Chicago greater than Taiwan or Switzerland, Washington ahead of Hong Kong, while Minneapolis-St. Paul exceeds Israel.

The notion of social re-organization happening around citistates seems to dovetail PERFECTLY with the current “green” trends of a return to local food and materials production (the 100-Mile Diet, etc). What we’re looking at, essentially, is a revived corporatized version of late feudalism: you have a geographic region of farms and resource production areas which are united by a shared culture and language which allows them to trade. Mercantile interests consolidate their power in trade regions through the creation of cities, trade-hubs. (Aside: within such a context, something like “national culture” may only be carried - one day in the future - by the business people who operate between regions…) Something like the Greek city-states - but weren’t they always going to war with one another?

Anyway, my point is that I see what’s being described on that website I see as being very likely. The mechanisms, globally, that would be required to bring about such a change may already be in the works as well. And I’m not saying that as a reformed conspiracy theorist, but as someone who reads the news once in a while. They’re talking about shutting down the global markets. The global economy is in a tailspin, the likes of which may only be resolved by holding in and re-setting the power switch on the NES box of life. If it reaches such a point, we’re likely to begin hearing strong talk driven by the media about improving the “design” of our economies, and of the countries which are supported by them. Cue the entrance music for wave after wave of analysts & scientific experts (paid, as always by landed business interests) who say they have a “better way”, who have finally come up with a better design for techno-utopia, for the perfect universal human community system. It may not happen in our life-times, but it may happen. Star Trek predicts it, anyway. “Global Warming”, seen as just a PR stunt made of language, seems to point the human community towards an identity of us as a whole, that we are one people united under problems which affect us all. And we are: whatever happens, we shouldn’t lose sight of that. We’re humans first and foremost, though the things they’ll call us will come and go. Take care of your friends and family; be kind to strangers because they are someone else’s friends and family.