Who Yields Power in 2096?

by | Culture

Culture

Inside the Dystopian Future of 2096

The question “who holds power?” presupposes a hand holding something. A person, an office, a flag above a building. The world of 2096 requires a harder question: what does power look like when it has become infrastructure? When it is not held but simply — is?

The dystopian fiction of the twentieth century gave us power as a face: Big Brother, the Party, the Committee, the Mustachioed Generalissimo in the portrait above the administrative desk. That face was useful because it was visible, nameable, and in principle replaceable. Kill the tyrant and the tyranny falls. Storm the palace and the system ends. The architecture of opposition was clean.

The world of Shards of a Shattered Sky does not offer that architecture. Its power is not concentrated in a face. It is distributed across systems so interlocking, so normalized, so deeply embedded in the infrastructure of daily life, that locating “where the power is” feels like asking where the weight is in a building. It is everywhere. It is the building.

Here is how that building was constructed.

The Corporation: Power as Infrastructure

The most powerful single category of actor in the world of 2096 is not a government. It is the corporation that controls the infrastructure of daily life — water, healthcare access, data architecture, food distribution, housing — in regions where government has retreated from or been priced out of those functions.

This is not a dramatic privatization story. It is a gradual one. The same incremental drift that characterizes every other system in 2096 characterizes this one: public infrastructure underfunded and undermaintained, corporate alternatives offered and accepted because the public alternative had been allowed to fail, alternative gradually becoming default, default gradually becoming the only option, option gradually becoming so normalized that the question of whether it should be corporate at all stops being asked because the people who would ask it cannot remember a time when it was anything else.

The WEF’s Future of Jobs analysis documents the structural shape of corporate power in the AI economy: 85 million jobs displaced, new value concentrated in the owners of the technology rather than the workers it replaced, the worker-to-retiree ratio collapsing in ways that make the social insurance systems designed to buffer corporate power financially untenable at their current scope. Each trend accelerates the others. The corporate infrastructure fills the vacuum that the weakened public infrastructure leaves.

The corporation in 2096 does not hold power the way a king holds a scepter. It holds power the way a utility holds power — through the infrastructure you cannot live without, the service you cannot opt out of, the terms you accept because the alternative is exclusion.

The Data Economy: Power as Legibility

The second axis of power in 2096 is informational. The entity that holds comprehensive data about a population holds, in a very practical sense, the ability to predict, influence, and shape that population’s behavior with a precision and a comprehensiveness that no prior form of power has achieved.

Pew Research documented in 2023 that eighty-one percent of Americans already understood that their data was being used in ways they were not comfortable with. The Identity Theft Resource Center recorded 1,732 publicly disclosed breaches in the first half of 2025 alone. Neural data — the patterns of thought — had entered the regulatory conversation. By 2096, the entity with comprehensive behavioral and cognitive data on a population has not merely a commercial advantage but a governance advantage: the ability to anticipate resistance before it organizes, to identify dissent before it networks, to intervene in the conditions that produce opposition before the opposition has named itself.

Power as legibility. The ruled are visible. The rulers are not. The asymmetry is so complete and so normalized that it does not require enforcement. It requires only the continuation of the systems that have already made observation the condition of participation.

Power as legibility: when the entity holding your data can predict your behavior, anticipate your resistance, and intervene in the conditions that would produce your opposition — enforcement becomes almost unnecessary. The architecture is the enforcement.

The Biological Tier: Power as Longevity

The third axis of power in 2096 is the most intimate and the most novel: biological. The wealthy Americans of 2096 live into their mid-to-late nineties on precision medicine, gene therapy, and the elaborate biological maintenance of bodies treated as long-term capital investments. The poor Americans live into their mid-to-late seventies on the accumulated physiological consequences of every deferred care and every chronic condition managed inadequately because adequate management requires resources not available.

Power as longevity means that the people who design and maintain the systems of 2096 — who own the infrastructure, who hold the data, who make the policy — simply live longer than the people those systems are designed around. They have more time to compound their advantages. More years to accumulate wealth, to shape institutions, to ensure that the intergenerational transfer of power runs through the channels they have built. The life expectancy gap of 20.4 years documented by the Lancet in 2021, still widening, becomes by 2096 a structural feature of the power landscape: the powerful are, on average, simply alive longer.

Power as longevity: in a world where wealth buys additional decades of life, the powerful have more time to compound their advantages and fewer years in which they experience the consequences of the systems they design for others.

The Political Shell: Power as Performance

The formal political institutions of 2096 — the legislative bodies, the executive offices, the courts — exist and function. Elections are held. Laws are passed. The procedural form of democratic governance is maintained with considerable fidelity. What has changed is the relationship between the procedural form and the substantive distribution of power.

The Vanderbilt Unity Index registered 46.48 on a hundred-point scale in 2023 and was still descending. Gallup documented only thirty-four percent of Americans identifying as moderate. Both parties’ voters described the other as an existential threat. By 2096, this polarization has completed its transformation into a political culture in which governance — the actual work of designing and maintaining systems that serve the public — has been displaced by performance: the continuous dramatization of cultural conflict in which neither side can govern because governing requires compromise and compromise has been defined as betrayal.

The corporation and the data economy and the biological tier do not require the formal political institutions to serve their interests actively. They require only that those institutions remain sufficiently gridlocked to avoid serious regulatory intervention. Paralysis is not failure. For the systems that have already achieved infrastructural status, paralysis is the most favorable possible political condition.

The corporation and the data economy do not require the government to serve them. They require only that it remain too paralyzed to constrain them. Political gridlock, in 2096, is not dysfunction. It is the optimal regulatory environment for every system that has already achieved infrastructural power.

Where Resistance Fits

A question worth asking, in the presence of a power structure this distributed and this normalized, is where resistance fits. Whether it fits at all.

It fits, in the world of 2096, in the gaps. In the places the infrastructure has not yet fully penetrated. In the communities that have maintained or rebuilt local economies of mutual aid and shared resource. In the art made by hand, the handwriting no system can observe in its creation, the human connection conducted in the physical co-presence that the digital architecture cannot fully replicate or monetize.

In the Shards of a Shattered Sky trilogy, resistance is not a revolution. It is an argument. A sustained, specific, costly, and ultimately unresolved argument about whether the building can be rebuilt from the inside, whether the infrastructure can be redirected, whether the normalized can be denormalized.

That argument is worth having. It is, in fact, the only argument that matters. And it begins with knowing, clearly and without euphemism, who holds the building and what it cost to build it.

 

 

Sources Cited

The research and data underlying the power structures described in this post.

Corporate Power and Labor Displacement

Data, Surveillance, and Informational Power

Biological Power and Health Stratification

Political Polarization and Governance Failure

Power, Control, and Dystopian Fiction

 

 

Read the Full United States of 2096 Series — 16 Posts