What if the Technocrats get just enough right?

Fifty years ago, the Boston Globe imagined a technocratic future where world government had solved disease, war, money, and weather. It was satire then... today it reads like a warning.

What the future might have looked like to someone in the 1970s (AI image).

The day after America’s bicentennial in 1976, the Boston Globe printed a zany, futuristic insert and included it with the normal Sunday edition. It was forward looking by 100 years, declaring:

Tu our reders:

In honor of the Tricentennial, we ar sending u an anniversary copi of The Boston Globe printed on paper used in yers past, insted of through yor hom computer readout.

As a special treat, we hav also riten it in the old english and spelling in use befor the Language Reform Act of 2013.

Pleez see key (left) for instrucshon on how tu reciv extended reports on ur hom holograf sets.

The publisher and staf of the Globe join in wishing us a hapy Tricentennial.

Aside from the very obvious and rather accurate prediction of… let’s say, the ‘evolution’ of the English language (something we’re all living through at the moment), the entire insert showcased eerie accuracy in predicting things to come, in particular, technocratic global governance.

In one of the articles, a man named Alexander Holz has just been reanimated after being held in cryogenic suspension for 90 years. He is pleasantly surprised to find there is still someone around to thaw him out, and delighted at the state of the world in which he awakes.

“When I had myself frozen back in 1986, everybody was convinced we were all going to hell in a handbasket,” said the 68-year-old former scientist, who froze himself out of concern for an imminent nuclear war over natural resources.

“I had no desire to experience a holocaust, and yet I was not so totally without hope that I could feel comfortable with suicide, so this seemed the most responsible course to me.”

Upon learning the earth is now managed by a technocratic world government, Holz said he is pleased that this once-elusive idea had at last come to pass. On a personal note, he is also overjoyed that, after a lifetime of tooth pain, that small mundane suffering has been permanently eradicated.

The fictional paper is at once funny, sinister, and unsettling. The editors anticipated the development of universal vaccines, the rise of socialism and global governance, weather modification gone wrong, and space travel to Mars at a time when Elon Musk was still in kindergarten.

They highlighted resistance movements and remnants that persisted outside the clutches of the rising technocracy, but also showcased how the new controlling powers were successful in solving some of the world’s most intractable problems.

In 1976, human travel to Mars seemed like an inevitability by 2076. (AI image)

In its imagined 2076 scenario, the economy never collapsed, it was just absorbed into technocratic management. In a story headlined: “Quality of Life Council says world economy up,” (with a dateline of Tehran[!] oddly enough) human life has been reorganized into indicators, pools, units, cards, credits, debits, sabbaticals, service obligations, cooperatives, production sectors, and quality-of-life dashboards.

Quality of Life Council says world economy up

TEHERAN — The World Quality of Life Council released its monthly indicators yesterday and reported that it is encouraged by general upgrading of the standards of living in all nations.

“As of June 30, the number of people in the International Income Subsistence Pool had dropped 1.2 percent,” said Alice Jones Istani, council coordinator. “That brings the number of world unemployed down to 1 million, the lowest since the pool’s formation in 2004. We feel this is indicative of an ever-increasing community and whole-Earth consciousness.”

Istani also reported that 22.6 percent of the world’s population has returned from one-year leisure-time sabbaticals to public service.

She said that there had been a 4 percent increase in people applying for and receiving Unit Transaction identification Cards from the Universal Banking System, and that credit units were up 31 percent and debits down 15 percent.

Istani reported the formation of five new cooperatives in the synthetic materials sector and said production of synthetic fibers was up 7 percent for June.

“World Quality of Life Council” sounds so benevolent. Even boring. Who could be against quality of life? But the language that follows describes a managed system, not a free society with a flourishing economy.

A few details jump out:

• “International Income Subsistence Pool”: Sounds a lot like Universal Basic Income, doesn’t it?

• “Unit Transaction identification Cards”: Universal digital IDs and digital payment systems jump to mind, dressed up in 1976 sci-fi language. The fact that applications for the cards are treated as a positive economic indicator is… well, creepy. Compliance with the system has become evidence of progress.

• “Credit units” and “debits”: The money system has been abstracted into programmable accounting. Not dollars, wages, savings, or property — just units. (Andy Schectman gave a precise account of a new monetary vehicle being developed by BRICS+ nations called “The Unit” in this 2024 Collapse Life interview.)

• “One-year leisure-time sabbaticals”: Sounds voluntary and humane until you think about it for a minute. A society in which the world’s population cycles between leisure sabbatical and public service is either utopian or total enslavement. (If you ask us, it sounds like the love child of 1984 and Brave New World.)

And then there’s the sickeningly saccharine phrase: “whole-Earth consciousness.” It is basically saying this New World Order proves that mankind has evolved morally into a new planet-oriented sentient state.

Strategic trappings of the old world are still present, however. In this imagined future, America still has presidents, crowds, flags, anniversaries, speeches, newspapers, and patriotic landmarks. But they have all been repurposed to serve a post-national world order.

The president is named Joyce Haas, and she sounds like a respectable managerial-socialist politician rather than a military strong(wo)man. The real nightmare future seems to be bureaucratic rather than tyrannical.

There are dissidents… over 10,000 of them, in fact, lifting high the Stars and Stripes, above the World Confederation flag. So resistance exists, but it has been pushed to the margins — literally across the river, outside the approved ceremony.

Media censorship has been disguised as professional responsibility. The United States Television Network runs “public service and political education messages” at moments when the dissidents might appear on camera or interrupt the President’s speech. Freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.

In the imagined future, the Stars and Stripes are a protest symbol. (AI image)

As an aside, President Haas is planning to “die voluntarily” in 2080. We can just imagine the Boston Globe editors ashing their cigarettes, leaning on their typewriters, and having a chuckle at how ludicrous that idea must have sounded. But here in the real world, in the actual 2026 we inhabit today, the Netherlands has now recorded its first euthanasia death of a child under 12, to say nothing of the euthanasia industrial complex they’re setting up in Canada.

The fake paper does hint at some potential weak points of technocracy. In a story headlined: “Meteorologists may be losing control of weather,” a technician openly admits, “I guess we don’t quite understand the whole system as well as we thought we did.”

The basic goal, he added, was to use ozone molecules afloat at high altitude to keep some of the sun’s ultraviolet light from reaching the Earth’s surface. He said it was hoped that earlier natural levels of ozone could be restored, so that eventually humans might not have to wear protective clothing.

Under questioning, weather service officials admitted that complaints have already been received from some remote farming regions where increased cloud cover has limited production of solar power. Decreased sunlight is also holding down protein production in the Middle East.

In the Boston Globe’s imagined future, technocracy is neither a failure nor a frightening future prospect. It is more like a partial success.

A One World government doesn’t crush everyone under its boot. Rather, it solves things like toothaches and infectious disease. It organizes leisure, labor, banking, food production, energy, and even weather into a single planetary management system. That’s why Holz is happy when he wakes up from his cryogenic freeze, pleased to know the future is not a nuclear wasteland, but a sanitized solution.

But that’s also exactly why it’s so scary.

The price of all this competence is that everything is a point of administration. Money, work, rest, health, weather, history, patriotism, even death. All of it something to be planned in cooperation with the system.

This fake Boston Globe newspaper is not warning us about a future where technocrats get everything wrong. The real warning is that they get just enough of it right, so that resistance looks irrational, dissent look dangerous, and freedom looks sentimental, obsolete, and maybe even selfish.

The New World Order will not look like the tyranny of old. It will look like benevolent management at planetary scale. It will entice people with the promise that experts can remove suffering, disorder, risk, ignorance, scarcity, conflict, and pain — if only we surrender enough of our memory, sovereignty, and moral agency to let them do their job.

Alexander Holz wakes up and blesses world government because his teeth no longer hurt. And fair enough. Toothaches are awful.

Yet the real question remains: isn’t a cage where no pain exists still a cage?

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Read more: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/24/metro/bicentennial-predictions-of-tricentennial/