Setting Overview: The year is 2030. In 2017 TTIP came in to force, and the twenty of so biggest conglomerates used the legal frame work to bootstrap themselves to a position roughly equivalent to no territorial states, powerful, independent politys over whom TTIP signatories have no legal authority.
Neo-liberal economists are calling this the second renaissance; and everyone who isn't an elite is feeling the pinch in a ways that make the great western recession of the 2010's feel like the good old days.
Drastically shifting weather patterns and attendant ecological disaster have compounded this, as the hollow shells of the nation states, now devoid of almost all tax income from major Corporate entities and their high level employees, piss away the last of their moral authority and economic independence of resource wars, trying to ensure that their is enough water and food for their citizens.
Increased automation has decimated job markets, the truck drivers and cabbies where the first to go, but not the last. Domestic service is now the median occupation in the united states.
Meanwhile, vastly strengthened intellectual property rights laws and improvements in drone technology and AI has led to a almost complete collapse of independent media and arts. The new generation of artists and creatives have moved underground, making unauthorized remixes of existing works, because when their original work is as likely to be the subject of prosecution for copy right infringement, aqs their remix, they have defaulted to the old adage "your in for a penny, in for a pound."
There is good news the maturation of late Generation X and millennials to many positions of authority thanks to the long over due senescence of most boomers, the culture wars are mostly dead. Civil rights for the majority of the members of the LGBTQA community are largely assured. The new fights here is regarding polyamory and gender fluidity.
However, the issue on everyone's lips right now is fabrication technology. The Corporations have decided to stamp out the first generation of nano-factories, and the synthetic biology derived feed stocks that fuel them. They sound the old battle cry of intellectual property rights and fighting piracy.
