Imagine a city where every glance is tracked, every whisper monetized, and freedom feels like a glitch in the system.
This is Nova Alliance, not some distant sci-fi horizon, but our world amplified by the choices we make today.
1. Nova Alliance: a future a few clicks ahead of us
The future isn’t a fixed destination. It’s a project under constant revision.
In a not-so-distant future, the city of Nova Alliance rises as a symbol of transformation.
The skyline is clean, efficient, and almost serene. But beneath that polished surface, something else is happening.
Sensors along every street quietly log:
- every movement,
- every conversation,
- every purchase,
- every flicker of attention.
Privacy has been reframed as a threat to the public good. “You have nothing to hide” has become “You have nothing to reserve for yourself.”
Meanwhile, wealth concentrates in glittering vertical enclaves, while other districts live in a permanent state of “almost enough."
In response, small pro-freedom circles began to form.
They:
- Question the idea that surveillance equals safety.
- Design spaces for intentional disconnection.
- Use technology to rebuild empathy and collaboration, not just efficiency.
- Co-create knowledge, art, and tools that strengthen real communities.
As this movement grows, the Nova Alliance gradually shifts. The city becomes a living lab where a new story is tested:
The line between utopia and dystopia doesn’t appear overnight. It’s drawn—quietly—by the choices we normalize.
Here’s the twist: Nova Alliance isn’t “the future." It’s just our present turned up by a few degrees.
2. “Are we becoming a dystopia?”
People ask this more and more:
“Do you think our civilization is turning into a dystopia?”
The honest answer is uncomfortable.
It depends on what we tolerate, what we design, and what we’re willing to fight for right now.
There is no morning when we wake up and receive an official notification:
“Congratulations, you now live in a dystopia.”
What actually happens is slower and quieter:
- A bit more surveillance “for your safety."
- A bit more inequality “because the system is just like that."
- A bit more outrage and misinformation “because it drives engagement."
- A bit more dehumanization “because it scales.”
Until one day, the question is no longer:
“Are we going toward a dystopia?”
But:
“How did we already get here, and when did we stop noticing?”
We exist exactly in that in-between space: between the world we inherited and the world we are still capable of designing.
3. The symptoms are already here
If you read sci-fi or play something like Cyberpunk 2077, you know dystopia doesn’t begin with cartoon villains.
It begins with trends we call "normal."
🔍 Surveillance as a default
Every click, every movement, every message creates data.
Governments and corporations act as planetary sensors. This is not fiction. It’s infrastructure.
Even without a visible “Big Brother," we now live under a silent Big Dashboard.
The real question isn’t just:
“Who is watching?”
It’s:
“Who designs the incentives behind what is being watched, stored, and sold?”
Civilizational engineering begins where someone decides:
- what gets measured,
- what gets monitored,
- and what gets monetized.
💰 Inequality as an “inevitable side effect”
Humanity has never been this wealthy. And yet, in many contexts, it has rarely been this unequal.
A small elite accumulates assets, influence, and the ability to shape the rules, while millions fight for basics, time, and mental stability.
This asymmetry is a classic engine of dystopian worlds:
- essential services become privileges,
- dignity becomes a premium subscription,
- and the rest is entertainment to soften revolt.
🧠 Narrative warfare and misinformation
Social platforms have become arenas where:
- attention is currency,
- outrage is fuel, and
- polarization is a business model.
Propaganda, “culture wars” used as a distraction, viral misinformation… All of this corrodes something fundamental: our collective ability to distinguish reality from noise.
When a society loses that, it also loses its ability to make conscious decisions about its own future.
🤖 Dehumanization by technology
Automation, AI, hyperconnectivity. Incredible tools, with very real side effects:
- loneliness in the middle of endless timelines,
- relationships mediated by engagement algorithms,
- people reduced to metrics, profiles, and "segments."
When the dominant logic is:
“Optimize for clicks, retention, conversion” without ever asking “for what purpose?”
Technology stops being an extension of humanity and becomes a platform for extracting attention and compliance.
🌡️ Environmental crisis as the backdrop
The climate crisis is no longer a distant alarm. It’s now:
- geopolitical,
- economic,
- migratory,
- psychological.
Water scarcity, collapsing ecosystems, extreme weather, and failing harvests; these are the perfect backdrops for dystopian stories.
But they’re no longer just stories. They’re the test fields for our civilizational choices.
4. Why we’re not “officially” a dystopia (yet)
To be intellectually honest, we have to hold the other side too:
- We live longer than any previous generation.
- We have access to treatments, knowledge, and tools unimaginable a century ago.
- In many places, we can criticize governments publicly, build businesses from nothing, and learn from anyone, anywhere.
The point isn’t to paint the world in pure black or pure white.
It’s to recognize that we live in a strange hybrid:
a world with both utopian and dystopian traits, depending on where you stand.
Based on:
- where you were born,
- the color of your skin,
- your passport,
- your bank balance,
You might already live in something very close to a utopia… or a dystopia.
That’s crucial:
There is no single “future of humanity."
There are multiple, simultaneous futures, shaped by invisible infrastructures of power, access, and narrative.
Nova Alliance is not one city in the future. It’s a metaphor for this patchwork we already inhabit.
5. The question that actually matters
So the real question is not:
“Are we heading toward a dystopia?”
But:
“Who is writing the script of the future, and what role have we silently agreed to play?”
Because if we don’t consciously occupy the role of author, we automatically end up in the supporting cast.
This is the core of civilizational engineering:
It’s not about predicting the future. It’s about structuring systems that make certain futures more likely than others.
In practice, that means working on three layers:
- Incentives → What gets rewarded?
- Infrastructure → What’s possible or impossible by default?
- Narratives → What’s imaginable or unthinkable?
If you are a creator, entrepreneur, writer, builder of any kind, you’re already a small-scale civilizational engineer, whether you call yourself that or not.
Everything you design, from a product to a community to a story, is a tiny vote in favor of a specific type of world.
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Thanks for being here.
See you next Tuesday,
Hèrmàn
Find me on LinkedIn
P.S. If you ever want to look back at where we started, [all previous issues are here].
