The Fall of America

How'd It Get So Bad?

By the end of the 1980s, it was evident that the United States was in trouble. Most social norms had dissolved under an all-engulfing wave of competing special interest groups, media-fueled fads, and an overall "me first" worldview.

By 1994, the number of homeless on the streets had skyrocketed to 21 million. The technical revolution had further torn the economy apart, creating two radically divergent classes—a wealthy, technically oriented, materially acquisitive group of Corporate profession- als; and a down-class of homeless, unskilled, blue-col- lar workers. The middle class was nearly eradicated. It was this dismal beginning that led to the American landscape of the 2000s.

Here are just a few of the major trends leading to the collapse of the American Nation.

Urban Collapse

In large cities, business areas were clean, neat, well- lit showcases, free of crime and poverty, controlled by powerful Corporations. Ringing the central areas were the Combat Zones—decrepit, squalid suburbs, and burned-out ghettos teeming with boostergangs and other violent sociopaths. The outer suburbs were also Corporate-controlled zones; safe, well-guarded tracts where executives raised their families in relative security.

Corrupt and Ineffective Government

Under the corrupt rule of the Gang of Four (a cabal of four government agencies: the NSA, the CIA, the DEA, and the FBI, all led by the brilliant and psychopathic Vice President), American government descended into the realm of mobster rule. Ruthlessly pursuing its agenda of illicit profit above all, the Gang hollowed out Social Security and Medicare, eliminated Welfare (unless tied to one of their Corporate clients) and plundered the resources of the United States like a giant personal piggybank. The only untouched area of the government was the military, which the Gang lavished money upon to maintain service loyalty and to finance the Gang's expansive policy of war-based imperialism.

By the time the Gang was ousted, the U.S. Senate was no longer functional (having been suborned or intimidated by the Gang over years), the Supreme Court was no longer the law of the land for the increasing number of self-declared "Free States," and most of the federal bureaucracy was in shambles, leaving the country unable to cope with the waves of crises devastating the population.

The Rise of the Free States

Individual states, fed up with the ineffectual and dicta- torial actions of the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. (and the recently exposed machinations of the Gang of Four), began to break away from the main body of the country; first California, north and later south, then Texas, Oregon, Washington and the Dakotas. These new "Free States" set their own laws (although most were remarkably similar), trade arrangements, and most importantly, no longer sent their collected taxes back to Washington, D.C. This only hurried the collapse of the unified nation.

The New Rustbowl

Unprepared to deal with the effects of worldwide global warming, vast areas of the northern hemi- sphere began to suffer unending years of back-to- back drought. Throughout the Midwestern states, many small towns were abandoned, as local farms, businesses, and banks collapsed in the wake of this drought, famine, and economic chaos.

What farms that survived were eventually bought up by huge Agricorporations, and were maintained with Corporate-controlled wells, hired workers, machine labor, and well-equipped guards. Midwest urban zones also suffered during this time; not from drought, but a collapse of manufacturing jobs and industries fleeing the country for cheaper labor in Asia and Africa. Unchecked Corporate mergers and acquisitions destabilized entire areas of production, especially as well-heeled investors bought successful companies, then pillaged their assets and sold the dried husks at pennies on the dollar to finance their debts.

But the hollowing out of the center of the country had an unexpected series of costs; millions became homeless, and were forced to travel the open roads to seek shelter in the urban zones in a latter-day version of the Dust Bowl period of the American 1930s. The open freeways soon became battlegrounds, as armed packs of booster gangs also traveled from city to city, looting and pillaging the homeless travelers like mech- anized Visigoths.

The Plagues

An already overtaxed medical system found itself inundated by a series of plagues that swept the planet. Aided by easy and rapid transportation between countries, densely packed urban zones, and a willful tendency for the broken governments of the period to ignore or downplay the effects of medical emergencies, the "hot zones" spread like fusion-fed explosions, devastating entire continents. For example, the Wasting Plague of 1999, a horrible infection that attacked the intestines of its victims and made them starve to death no matter how much food they ate, tore across Europe and landed in the United States, where, ignored in the chaos of the Gang of Four's rule, it killed an estimated 14 million people before a vaccine was finally developed in Japan. The Wasting Plague was only one of a series of epidemiological disasters that hammered the planet, some natural, some bioengineered as part of various national pro- grams. Each one was just another nail in the coffin of a society already out of control.

The Rise of Cybernetics

Humanity has always pushed back against its limits. Poor eyesight? Get glasses. Hearing failing or poor? Get a cochlear implant. Hip going out? Replace it with a steel one. But by the late 20th century, the explosive levels of achievements in cybernetics (from cyber = machine + netics = control) opened up a new world of human potential. Now, it became: Poor eyesight? Replace those meat eyes with cyberoptics that can see for miles, in the dark, and maybe even shoot lasers like a superhero. Hearing failing or poor? Time to level up to an enhanced audio suite that can hear sounds that only dogs—or whales—can hear. Hip going out? Replace your entire skeleton with unbreakable, never-wearing-out steel. It's a new age, and you can become part of it by endlessly improving yourself.

But this brave new world backfired. Corporations and governments began to employ cybernetically enhanced warriors to patrol the streets and fight their wars. People with cybernetic enhancements found themselves becoming impatient with the unenhanced and their (to the cybered-up) painfully slow pace. Cybernetic speed also allowed the rate of change— or engagement with the rush of a shifting world of endless information—to move still faster, leading to greater levels of technoshock (below) in society. People began to show signs of psychotic breaks, even- tually culminating in a plague of cybernetically driven, murderous rampages called cyberpsychosis. And so, one more log was added to the inferno consuming society at the end of the 20th century.

Endless War

With the option to deploy cybernetically boosted super-soldiers and an unlimited military budget, the Gang of Four was able to prosecute a series of foreign wars to start its new era of imperialism. But even with these advantages, the United States found itself dragged into a series of military quagmires with echoes of the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Old U.S. in Vietnam. This became even worse as the targeted nations began to use terrorist strikes (such as a pocket nuke in New York) to hit back at the Gang. By the time the Cyber Soldier Ten Thousand fought its way back from the SouthAm hellhole, the citizens of the United States were exceptionally tired of the endless battles filling their nightly news.

And Finally, Technoshock

When technological change outstrips people's ability to comprehend or fit it into their lives, it creates tech- noshock, one of the major contributors to the social chaos that brought about the Collapse of the pre-Cy- berpunk world. Technoshock always starts small. A useful gadget or tool here. A new and very directed communications method there. Information systems that allow governments and Megacorps to watch and track you with surveillance or targeted advertis- ing that delivers what you want when you don't even know you want it...for your own good. Machines that adjust your sense of time and place to fit their needs. And all of it happening faster and faster, so that your mind is unable to process the changes and how it's affected. The younger you are, the easier it is for you to deal with the accelerating change; you're used to it because you were born to it. But sooner or later, even the kids can't keep up. Suddenly, people freak out. They get irrational, violent. Families shatter; rela- tionships tear apart. People feel helpless in the face of the Universe. Eventually, the whole society grinds to a halt, the victim of a mass psychosis. The vast majority of people, their lives uprooted and changed by the advancements, sat passively waiting for their leaders to tell them what to do next. Megacorporations provided a neo-feudal alternative to the new and incomprehensible reality. One smaller group tried to turn back the pace, by founding the anti-technolog- ical Neo–Luddite movement. Still others decided to immerse themselves in the technological change. They coped by adding machines to themselves, enhancing their abilities and perceptions to allow themselves to catch up to the dizzying pace of the New.

And earned themselves the nickname of "Edgerunners" or "Cyberpunks."