
Introduction
By 2035, the notion that humanity is on a steady arc of expanding freedoms, material security, and political progress has been replaced by a paradox of abundance and instability—an epoch of persistent, often overlapping crises that batter even the most developed societies. Globalization, once celebrated as an engine of mutual benefit, now reveals itself as a carrier for planetary risk: a disruption in one region—be it a cyberattack, a climate event, or a new pathogen—sends shockwaves through fragile supply chains, financial markets, and political systems everywhere.
The United States, once the chief architect and guarantor of liberal order, now epitomizes the hazards of backsliding. Its political transformation into an oligarchic managed democracy has global ripples: international standards weaken as Washington abdicates leadership on climate, human rights, and security; alliances fracture as trust erodes; and autocrats worldwide feel emboldened to tighten their grip without fear of global censure. What happens in America is mirrored in the world: crises of legitimacy, soaring polarization, and the collapse of shared truths become planetary facts of life.
Beneath the surface, the most civilization-endangering data all points toward the relentless convergence of four historic megatrends:
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Ecological Overshoot: Civilizations now run against ever-tighter planetary boundaries. Earth’s biosphere can no longer absorb the externalities of economic expansion, leading to mass species extinctions, topsoil loss, aquifer exhaustion, and climate systems buckling under anthropogenic stress.
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Demographic Explosion and Aging: The population curve has bifurcated between the explosive growth of largely ungovernable urban slums in the Global South and the cascading demographic collapse in wealthy societies, straining both young and old.
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Faltering Legitimacy and Institutional Decay: Public faith in expertise, the rule of law, and even basic national identity is undermined by the very technologies and media once hailed as liberators. Truth and authority grow ever more contested, destabilizing the state’s capacity to respond to collective threats.
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New Forms of Violence: From automated drone warfare to rampant organized crime, violence is being privatized, fragmented, and diffused throughout society, eroding the distinction between war and peace, security and chaos.
This 2035 is not merely “dystopian”—it is a landscape where basic assumptions about progress, order, and security are upended. Yet, as this essay details, adaptation and renewal remain possible—not from above, through heroic intervention, but from below, in networks of resilience that cross old boundaries of nation, class, and ideology. The age of permanent crisis is as much an evolutionary test as it is an epitaph for a passing world.
The New Authoritarian Normal
Executive Supremacy and the Erosion of Checks
By 2035, the collapse of governance is not merely a story of corrupted elections or the loss of institutional checks, but a wholesale transformation of how power is conceived and exercised in society. The U.S. federal government—once an exemplar of constitutional limits—will bear the hallmarks of classical despotism, cloaked in bureaucratic routine and the familiar rituals of democracy. Descent into executive supremacy means whistleblowers are criminalized, courts are routinely bypassed, and opposition parties exist only to create a façade of pluralism.
The Collapse of Decentralized Innovation
The implications extend far beyond the federal level. State and local agencies, once laboratories for democratic innovation, are financial wards of the central government, kept compliant with the threat of fiscal strangulation. Major media outlets, consolidated into a handful of conglomerates, self-censor or amplify the party line, amplifying “manufactured consensus.” Technology platforms, both public and private, become tools of mass surveillance and algorithmic control: dissenters are deplatformed, protest is digitally cordoned and rendered ineffectual, and the line between social science and behavioral control blurs into irrelevance.
Global Wave of Managed Democracy
Globally, America’s self-demolition catalyzes a wave of competitive authoritarianism and “managed democracy.” In states such as Russia, Turkey, and China, the ascendant model mixes relentless technological monitoring, legalistic suppression, and the co-optation or destruction of civil society. Even in places like India, the judicial system is packed, the press is threatened, and security agencies operate as extensions of the leader’s will rather than the rule of law.
Paralysis of International Governance
International governance enters a state of paralysis. Increasingly, powerful states ignore treaties, rewrite trade and security arrangements for narrow nationalist interests, and wield global institutions as weapons for retaliatory politics, not as arenas for global problem-solving. UN peacekeepers mutely witness atrocities, the World Health Organization is blocked from pandemic zones, and the WTO is stuck in endless deadlock over climate-related trade barriers.
The New Normal: Apathy and Episodic Unrest
What is most civilization-endangering is the normalization of this collapse: the world’s “new normal” is not civic engagement and shared progress, but widespread apathy, episodic unrest, and the durable expectation that force, not consensus or legality, determines outcomes. The project of liberal modernity, far from inevitable or self-sustaining, stands revealed as a historical exception—now rapidly fading.
Environmental Havoc and Resource Wars
Climate Chaos and the Politicization of Survival
By 2035, environmental havoc and resource wars have blurred the line between “natural disaster” and “political emergency.” The steady drumbeat of climate models has given way to a reality of accelerating feedbacks and unexpected cascades. Unprecedented heatwaves—frequently surpassing 50°C (122°F) in parts of South Asia and the Middle East—render entire regions intermittently uninhabitable, forcing the temporary or permanent displacement of millions. In North America and Europe, “once-in-500-year” mega-fires and crop failures are now recurring events, decimating both food supplies and public confidence in the state’s capacity to respond.
Saltwater intrusion renders freshwater aquifers unusable along entire coastlines, from Egypt’s Nile Delta and the Mekong to the American Gulf Coast, causing small and medium-sized cities to literally run out of water for weeks or months at a time. Strategic infrastructure—power plants, data centers, food storage, and ports—require militarized protection or forced abandonment, as gangs or desperate populations seize whatever can be used or sold.
Urban Exodus and Fortress Civilization
Urban flooding is not just a story of coastal megacities. Inland cities too are battered by swelling rivers, overwhelmed storm drains, and crumbling infrastructure built for a vanished climate. Jakarta, Mumbai, Miami, and parts of New York see regular “climate exodus” periods where millions temporarily shelter in manufactured tent cities or move in with relatives, overwhelming already strained services.
The lens of “environmental security” now shapes geopolitics as much as traditional military doctrines. China’s damming of upstream rivers amplifies irredentist tension with India and Southeast Asia; the U.S.-Mexico border is as much a climate barrier as a geopolitical one, and North African states deploy special forces to secure dwindling wells and desalination plants. Meanwhile, black-market trade in water, food, precious metals, and even genetic seeds rivals the revenue of drugs or arms.
Martial Law and the New Order
Internal security responses are often indistinguishable from martial law: climate emergencies become pretexts for indefinite curfews, aggressive suppression of civic protest, biometric monitoring of population flows, and even the suspension of core civil liberties. Governing elites frequently retreat behind fortress infrastructure, triggering a new “archipelago” model of civilization: stable, heavily protected islands of privilege floating in a sea of ever-accelerating collapse.
Planetary Megaslums and Urban Fragmentation
The Rise of Global Megaslums
By the mid-2030s, the relentless surge toward urbanization has collided with chronic underinvestment, ecological strain, and state retreat—creating the unprecedented phenomenon of planetary megaslums. Globally, over 70% of people live in cities, and well over one billion reside in informal settlements or slum-like conditions—zones marked by makeshift structures, lack of secure tenure, and irregular or absent municipal services. In Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America, entire megacities have become mosaics of walled enclaves standing amid vast districts abandoned by formal governance.
Engines of Ingenuity, Laboratories of Dysfunction
These urban margins are both engines of resilience and laboratories of dysfunction. On the one hand, their citizens display extraordinary ingenuity: underground economies thrive, mutual-aid societies emerge, and digital connectivity brings global influence. Yet daily life is increasingly shaped by overlapping “stress tests”—gang violence, erratic electricity and water, forced evictions, and outbreaks of disease or food riots.
Digital Tools as Double-Edged Swords
The spread of digital technology has done little to democratize or liberate. Instead, smartphones and social platforms have become double-edged weapons—ubiquitous tools for controlling population flows, suppressing unrest, and maintaining new forms of extortion and digital kidnapping. In states where governance survives, policing is marked by algorithms that profile entire communities; in those where it has failed, criminal cyber-cartels fill the void, wielding both digital power and street violence.
Fortress Zones and Escalating Division
For the wealthiest and best-connected, the solution is flight: the “fortress zone”—hypermodern compounds secured by private security and ringed with digital exclusion zones—becomes the new urban ideal. Meanwhile, rising migration from ecological collapse zones only sharpens these divisions, sparking fear, nationalism, and militarized borders in the North, and periodic xenophobic violence within the cities of the Global South.
Erosion of trust is the defining feature. Urban dwellers expect more from governments and receive less, and even basic hopes for upward mobility are focused on gaining entry—however fleeting—into the world’s shrinking islands of stability and privilege. The result is the central paradox of the 2030s: in the most densely networked, information-rich century in history, billions of city dwellers feel more isolated, vulnerable, and cynical than ever before.
Permanent Crisis and the Patchwork Planet
Crisis as Equilibrium
The “Permanent Crisis” of the 2030s is now the default operating condition of the planet, a structural reality as consequential as the global order that followed World War II or the industrial revolution. The word “interregnum”—once used for a brief transitional chaos—no longer applies: humanity inhabits a permanent state of layering and competing crises, where expectations of lasting equilibrium have been extinguished.
Survivalism and Adaptation
In this world, society oscillates between brief, localized moments of renewal and periods of profound collapse. The collapse of international norms—evident in the unraveling of treaties, the rise of mercenary warfare, and “might makes right” trade politics—has forced both nations and individuals to adopt a stance of constant adaptation, risk management, and survivalism. There is broad acceptance that large-scale progress is no longer inevitable and that the best outcomes may now be defined in starkly relative or even negative terms: avoiding collapse, staving off famine, slowing the pace of decline.
The Patchwork of Inequality
This “patchwork” planet creates radically uneven daily realities. Technology and wealth allow some cities, regions, and enclaves to create small “islands of stability”—carbon-neutral eco-communities, resilient supply webs, and even cultural mini-renaissances. But there is no systemic reintegration. Most of the world’s population must navigate precarity, disorder, and eroding trust—hope and progress forced to compete with anxiety and status anxiety.
2035 Scenarios by Region
United States: The day-to-day reality is one of constant “triage governance.” Elite-protected zones thrive with private security, gated supply lines, and fully digitized citizenship, while vast swathes of exurban and rural America fade into managed neglect. Civil unrest—and separatist or “autonomy” rhetoric from states—flares episodically. The continuity of the union is maintained more by digital surveillance and economic dependency than by shared civic purpose.
China: Though the Communist Party asserts stability, the background is roiling: water riots in the north, worker and ethnic protests in the west, and renewed tensions in Hong Kong and with Taiwan. Large internal migrations outpace the state’s ability to plan. The “social credit” system, once an instrument of discipline, now breeds subtle resistance, and digital workarounds. Belt and Road projects abroad have become leverage points for new forms of debt peonage and regional backlash.
European Union: The EU’s borders are “soft” for the rich and “hard” for the desperate. Schengen collapses periodically under pressure from megadroughts and failed states on the periphery; military walls and surveillance zones proliferate in the Mediterranean and Balkans. The ongoing viability of the euro depends on regular bailouts, forced migration quotas, and fractious summitry, as right-nationalist parties score wins by exploiting the cycle of chaos and fear. Mediterranean summers regularly claim thousands of lives from heat alone.
Africa: Nearly 800 million people under age 25 scramble for work, water, and stability. Some growth hubs leverage renewable energy and digital services, creating pockets of prosperity, yet conflict and mass displacement are routine. Interstate boundaries matter less; power and security often devolve to armed factions, resource consortiums, or faith-based movements. Africa’s urban revolutions are both celebrated (in creative economies, fintech, and pan-African organizing) and feared (in flash-mob riots, slumlord-sponsored violence, and porous borders for trafficking).
South Asia: Here, the “perfect storm” of demographic, water, and heat crises drives continuous humanitarian emergencies. The Indian subcontinent experiences annual internal displacements of tens of millions, with flood and drought cycles punctuated by border clashes. Political polarization becomes radicalized by algorithm and AI-driven media, accelerating sectarianism. Shadow governance by organized crime, insurgent populists, or multinational firms recasts what “sovereignty” means for hundreds of millions.
The Fragmentation of Conflict—Warfare in the Age of Permanent Crisis
The Rise of Revolutionary Chieftains
These revolutionary chieftains are not only military warlords, but also charismatic populists, cyber leaders, and even corporate oligarchs whose main legitimacy comes from providing security, survival, or social “goods” amid systemic collapse or deepening state illegitimacy. Their power is as much digital as territorial—ranging from local water mafias and resource militias to online movement leaders with loyal flash mobs and access to drone swarms.
Proxy Wars and the Blurring of Boundaries
Proxy wars—ostensibly fought for national or ideological objectives—are increasingly indistinguishable from battles over resources such as lithium, cobalt, and water, or from large-scale criminal operations like cyber-extortion, ransomware, or control of food and fuel supply. As armed groups seize territory and control infrastructure, “governance” becomes a service for hire rather than a shared social contract.
The New Military Terrain: Tech and Disruption
At the same time, great-power rivalries (US-China, India-China, Russia-Europe) remain acutely dangerous, especially as military technologies have proliferated to weak and failing states, and warfare now extends to space, cyberspace, and even commercial supply networks. Drones, AI-driven decision systems, and cyberattacks reconfigure the battlefield, making it possible for even small actors to paralyze entire cities—or for rival superpowers to threaten global catastrophe almost instantaneously.
Chronic, Decentralized Violence
Perhaps most destabilizing, violence itself is now chronic, low-intensity, and decentralized—manifesting as paramilitary policing, gang warfare, ethnic cleansing, cyber-assault, and algorithmic control more often than as outright traditional war. No population—whether in Lagos, Lviv, Los Angeles, or Lahore—is entirely immune from the friction of unpredictably shifting alliances and the sudden rise of new armed “security entrepreneurs.”
Technological Acceleration and Social Unrest
Algorithms, Surveillance, and the New Social Divide
By 2035, the fusion of AI, automation, and pervasive surveillance has become the scaffolding of most societies—enabling both unprecedented technocratic power and profound social dislocation. From the public sphere to daily domestic life, predictive algorithms and real-time monitoring shape opportunities, behavior, and even perceptions of reality. The gap between “insider” and “outsider” is enforced by digital means: the privileged enjoy frictionless access, personalized services, and algorithmic advantage, while outsiders face opaque scoring, employment exclusion, and algorithmic policing.
The Psychic Toll of Automation
Mass unemployment, or permanent underemployment, is now a structural feature in many economies. Whole professions vanish in a single policy cycle; retraining cannot keep pace, and universal basic income schemes, where they exist, serve more to pacify than empower. As a result, the psychic toll—alienation, status anxiety, resentment—becomes a potent source of unrest.
Misinformation, Flash Protest, and Automated Repression
Digital technologies intensify polarization and mistrust. AI-generated mis/disinformation, deepfakes, and hyper-personalized propaganda saturate both public discourse and private lives, eroding even basic agreement on facts or moral legitimacy. “Flash mob democracy” emerges, with protest coordinated through encrypted messaging or viral memes—only to be quickly fragmented by automated, preemptive policing and digital containment. In authoritarian settings, AI-based surveillance is so granular—tracking biometrics, movement, and digital interactions—that the very possibility of anonymous dissent is quashed before it can take root.
Cyberspace as Battlefield
Cyberspace is a contested, multipolar warzone: states, insurgent groups, criminal syndicates, and global firms all use “cyber weapons” ranging from ransomware and blackmail to manipulation of supply chains and infrastructure. As AI systems play a larger role in national security and politics, questions of accountability, transparency, and bias reach existential levels, yet legal and democratic oversight fails to keep pace. Many people’s only recourse is to withdraw—turning to privacy countermeasures, analog subcultures, or intentional ignorance, deepening the cycle of social arrest and fragmentation.
Patchwork Resilience and Local Renaissance
City-State Innovation and Place-Based Solutions
Even in a world steered by uncertainty and fragmentation, renewal takes root in local and adaptive initiatives that defy the old logic of top-down governance. Across the globe, city-states and distinctive regions—especially those in Scandinavia, East Asia, and Central America—lead the transition toward resilient, place-based experimentation. These societies emphasize circular economies, risk-aware planning, and public participation; in China, for example, dozens of pilot cities now act as laboratories for comprehensive climate adaption, combining digital innovation with ecological restoration and community mobilization.
Grassroots Adaptation and Community Networks
The most dynamic forms of renewal emerge at the grassroots. Where state order has receded, mutual-aid networks organize everything from food banks to neighborhood security to underground medical care. Polycentric technology collectives and open-source innovation hubs—often operating beneath official notice—recombine skills and resources to make communities more self-sufficient and information more resilient to censorship. Local journalism and independent digital platforms flourish in “failed” states or abandoned zones, providing vital transparency and narrative amid state propaganda or silence.
Episodic Global Coordination, Persistent Localism
Though global efforts at coordination falter, necessity sparks episodic bursts of effective collective action: consortia of nations, corporations, and NGOs do at times marshal the resources to confront pandemics, hacktivist campaigns, cyberattacks, or climate-fueled disasters. These moments of partial unity tend to arrive late, last briefly, and leave uneven legacies—but they prove that global cooperation, while fragile, is not extinct.
The Mosaic Planet—Uneven Resilience as the New Hope
Most critically, the pattern of resilience is patchwork, not uniform. The “mosaic planet” of city-scale resilience and regional adaptation, not universal reform, defines hope in the 2030s. Ordinary people—facing what once would have been insuperable crises—are catalyzing new forms of survival and flourishing, often out of sight of the world’s remaining “big systems.”
Comprehensive Reference List:
Introduction / Permanent Crisis
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Atlantic Council. 2025. “Welcome to 2035: What the World Could Look Like in Ten Years.” https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-council-strategy-paper-series/welcome-to-2035/
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World Economic Forum. 2025. “Global Risks Report 2025.” https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2025/
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IPCC. 2023. “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report.” https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
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UN. 2020. “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda
The New Authoritarian Normal
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Kaplan, Robert D. The Coming Anarchy. New York: Random House, 2000.
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“The Quiet Collapse: Institutional Decay and Elite Consolidation.”
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Goodman, Ryan, Siven Watt, Audrey Balliette, Maggie Lin, Michael Pusic, and Jeremy Venook. “The Presumption of Regularity in Trump Administration Litigation.” Just Security, October 15, 2025. https://www.justsecurity.org/120547/presumption-regularity-trump-administration-litigation/
Environmental Havoc and Resource Wars
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Climate Action Tracker. 2024. “Release: The Climate Is Warming and Sea Levels Rising Way Faster Than Governments Are Acting.” https://climateactiontracker.org/press/release-the-climate-is-warming-and-sea-levels-rising-way-faster-than-governments-are-acting/
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IPCC. 2023. “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report.” https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
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FAO. 2025. “Global Food Security Update.” https://www.fao.org/3/cc7604en/cc7604en.pdf
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World Resources Institute. 2025. “Water Scarcity.” https://www.wri.org/initiatives/aqueduct
Planetary Megaslums and Urban Fragmentation
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UN-Habitat. 2022. “World Cities Report 2022: Envisaging the Future of Cities.” https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/2022/06/wcr_2022.pdf
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World Population History. 2022. “Urbanization and the Megacity.” https://worldpopulationhistory.org/urbanization-and-the-megacity/
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UN Statistics Division. 2024. “SDG Goals: Global Urbanization and Megacities.” https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2024/Goal-11/
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Kaplan, Robert D. Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. New York: Random House, 2025.
Permanent Crisis and the Patchwork Planet
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Atlantic Council. 2025. “Three Worlds in 2035.” https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-council-strategy-paper-series/three-worlds-in-2035/
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World Economic Forum. 2025. “Global Risks Report 2025.” https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2025/
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UN. 2020. “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda
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Kaplan, Robert D. Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. New York: Random House, 2025.
Regional 2035 Scenarios
The Fragmentation of Conflict
Technological Acceleration and Social Unrest
Patchwork Resilience and Local Renaissance