The Year is 2030

The Year is 2030. The USA did not fight the Vietnam War, and instead invested money into high speed railways, teletext, and 10-storey modernist carpark-trainstation-airport-mall megaplexes. There’s one in every town.

Everybody is an urbanite, all farming is done by agricultural robots with their solar panels glistening under the haze of high-power irrigators.

You can vacation in the countryside, but residing there is illegal. However, penalties being as light as they are (a public spanking during the now-revived festival of Lupercalia), it has become an adolescent rite of passage to play-act as Thoreau.

It is likewise illegal to dress poorly in public. The punishment is a state-funded visit to a public fashion consultant. They have also taken over the role of therapists, with mental illness having been declared eradicated a year after polio.

Prisons have been turned into love hotels for the young, the Japanese interior decorator Marie Kondo made millions doing so. People constantly criticize the decoration-industrial complex, voicing their complaints in haikus and sonnets.

The President of the United States is Sebastian Shakur, the son of Tupac and Madonna.

Soap operas are considered a competitive high-art. In the same vein as the Eurovision song contest, every state in the USA produces a soap opera about life there. Each season is judged and ranked by the ratings. South Dakota’s entry “Pierre, My Love” has been the consecutive winner for the last decade.

Psychedelics were successfully weaponized, finally. Turns out, it’s a lack of access to them that is more dangerous. As a part of the new Cold War, shipments of psychoactive substances to China is subject to a government embargo.

Most of Canada has been annexed by the United States. Most of Mexico, too. The three states of the North American Union are The United States of America, The Republic of Quebec, and The Free Territory of Yucatan.

Welcome to 2030!