The state is dead. There is no government any more. President is merely a figure as a Queen of England once was. Yet, the life we have can hardly be called an anarchy. Since rulers are everywhere and the world looks more Orwellian than Orwell ever thought it would be possible.
Most people live in Managed Communities, which perverted Saint-Simon's ideas of Utopia, trading their personal freedoms for organized and well maintained life: "ByteCity", as dubbed by cyberyuppies some twenty years ago, ruled by "Brain Lords". Safety above all, as the corporate slogans would proclaim. This of course comes expensive. And the money is earned by maintaining the system, that is there just to be maintained. The minority, as media would have it, lives, however, outside of the system, and they are free - there is not even a police force to oppress them any more - but they have no means to exercise their peculiar freedom. They are not part of OUR world.
The world is split in two. Not exactly geographically. There are glimpses of the "First World" everywhere, as there are swats of what was once called Third World and was confined to the Southern hemisphere and "colored" continents. They are mixed, and in some regions (since there are no countries any more) there are enclaves of Third World in the First World type of Managed Neighborhoods, while in some regions there are enclaves of First World in the sea of Third World hopeless poverty. What was once known as a Second World, was defeated by Cold War which ended early in 1990s. Now, it is mostly Third World with a few enclaves of the First.
The power is impersonal. Corporate directors (Brain Lords) and major stock-holders of the society earn enormous sums. But they do not really hold the power any more. They became prisoners of their own greed. They can be replaced as easy as anybody else. The system can actually work without them. Humans are just a burden to the system. So, the system is letting more and more of them go, setting them free, laying them off. Power escaped the structure in which it was built. Workers are enslaved by their machines. Of course, they still have the power to destroy. But they are too much seduced with the illusion of benefits provided by machines, and too much frightened from the Outer Worlds. Long ago they stopped scaring their children with the boogie-man (even black teenagers got out of fashion as rapists and murderers), in favor of the outcastes.
Then, there are renegades. Those who voluntarily abandoned the obscene, obstructive abundance of the First World, and moved to the Third World. The webs of power are equally accessible from any geographic point on the planet, given the proper technology and bandwidth is available. They stole technology and hacked the bandwidth. Some of them were Brain Lords before themselves. Then, they digged themselves into a shithole of police-less Outer Worlds, where Corporate Security Officers are afraid of going to. People there accepted them. They are also known as Wizards. Because of their knowledge how to manipulate the levers of power from the outside. Realms around their secret sanctuaries cleaned up and prospered. More people moved in. A sort of twilight zone was created, more spiritual world, like a Second Foundation, was formed: a Second World - something between the First and the Third.
People learned from the past about the horrors and devastation of war. Yet, the will for power did not rescind among them. The system found impractical and too expensive to wage war against the Second World, which it did see as a serious threat to its power. Instead a sophisticated blitzkrieg was engineered in virtual reality, which was supposed to kill all the Wizards. They, however, anticipated the attack, and sent their avatars to seize important posts in the attack armies, substituting their autobots for attackers' autobots, and finally turning formidable armies against their masters. Microsoft Corporations were dismantled in the backlash. World lost its standards, its set of values, its religion. The system tried to reorganize to absorb the attack. A great vacuum was created, ironically protected by firewalls, as if the World didn't want to allow any outside ideas in, even when it lost all of its own ideas.
The World was about to reboot, loosing all its memory about the present. The system hoped that would restore order, loading the default values. System's main engineers were working overtime on cleaning the net's drives from Wizards' viruses, before the reboot sequence was initiated. The new system would be restricted, and the outsiders will not be able to use it. Unless of course they manage to interrupt the power supply to the system while it is rebooting and set the system under their configuration. History remembered the year 2020 as the great crash of the system - pretty much like the great crash of the stock market hundred years ago: then it marked the end of one way of life, liberal capitalism, and now the crash of Internet marked the end of another - the corporate capitalism. Monopolies dissolved. And for the moment everything seemed to be all right.
But humans were still there, to spoil everything. The crime was on the rise, and a monstrous neo-Luddist movement - New World Order - seized the moment to organize impoverished and disenchanted masses to destroy machines. They wanted to return to the hunters and gatherers society. The slogan they chanted in frenzy, when they would break in some cybergathering, was: take them their PDA-s away and crush them, awh Lord. Their environmentalist appeal was mixed with their authoritarian, sexist and racist manners. The idea is to form a society of ignorant, brainwashed slaves which would heel to their commands. Which was not much different from the earlier society of information overload slavery. It was another challenge for the Wizards. Leaders of the New World Order exposed the Wizards as the remnants of the old, the remnants that should be dealt with swiftly and assertively. The Wizards were to be eliminated. The world was to return to its origins.
Twenty thousand years later archeologists and historians squabbled over a preposterous notion of some young fellow who argued that the popular prejudice, that some higly developed society called America existed thousands of years ago, before the Great Flood, was right. And he was just starting to digitize his work. Rob and Ron never came back.