Welcome to Psi Earth and the year 2040. There have been some major changes, both in the future society and in the current history.
The history of Psi Earth is slightly different than that of present day Earth. There have been a number of real Earth events that either did not happen, or turned out differently. The impact of these events is one of the major reasons Psi Earth has a different feel than what could be expected.
The first major noticable change is in computers and communications. There is no general public access to the Internet. There are no major, inexpensive on-line services. There is no world wide web or associated protocols. This change from real Earth history occured in the mid to late 1980s through the mid 1990s.
The lack of inexpensive on-line services comes from two major changes. Prodigy loses a major liable suit in court, although not for the originial billion dollars, and the government does not provide protection against such suits. On-line services are held liable for the posts of it's subscribers like a newspaper is instead of being offered common carrier protection. Prodigy is shutdown by Sears. The second change is that America Online goes bankrupt. GEnie, Compuserve and Delphi the other natinal on-line services prior to the public internet all restrict access and eliminate most general access boards and areas. They become primarily used for e-mail and published papers.
The lack of general public internet access was based upon the government never opening up the internet. It was, and still is in 2040, restricted to universities, government agencies and some major companies. The World Wide Web and related protocols and browser are Not invented. With no easy graphical interface for the internet, public interest is minimal and the internet remains a place for geeks and nerds.
The only general public access computer networks are the privately run BBS systems such as FIDONet, WWIV and similar. Boards remain almost exclusively text and file sharing.
Microsoft loses it's case about bundling Windows with DOS. Windows 95 not released.
Clinton health plan passed in 1993.
The world and US economic systems have not significantly changed. The economic landscape is much closer to the 1970s than the later part of the 20th century though.
There is a lot more unemployment than now, while at the same time a greater demand for skilled technical labor. Lack of education is a definite problem for most unemployed people. The gap between workers and unemployed and the middle class has grown greater. Union workers make a good wage, but getting a union job is tough. Making the jump from working class to middle class is very tough. Making the jump from welfare ghetto to working class is even tougher.
Welfare reform has failed, and more people than ever are on the Dole. This is just now being alleviated via colonization efforts on the Moon, Mars and to a lessor extent the asteroid belt. After shrinking in the later part of the 20th century and first part of the 21st, the welfare and bureaucratic state grew back. Training programs are widely available civilian, government and military, but these have had little impact upon poverty and welfare due to poor funding and execution. Workfare had spotty results at best and was abandoned. The middle-class didn’t like the idea of often poorly trained welfare recipients taking away middle class job opportunities. Nor did the middle class like to carry the workload of most of these preferential hires.
Educational reform has also failed. The national standardized testing movement has been continued, but the requirements kept being scaled back. While not everybody graduates from high school, the standard high school diploma is essentially worthless. Fewer teenagers graduate from high school, and many end up on the dole. Some suburban schools are good, but most middle class people send their kids to private schools using various types of vouchers provided by the taxpayers.
For reference, read Pournelle’s Co-Dominion series and Bandersnatch.
The US military is still an all-volunteer force, but has significantly lowered its standards. Military life has gotten much harsher for lower skilled people. The educational differences between the low level enlisted and officers are much greater. The military is one of the few places that uneducated people can make a living though. US forces are deployed overseas again, and the military has little compunction about spending the lives of the poorly educated recruits. Technically savvy enlisted people advance pretty quickly and can make a good life in the military.
The military has both a strong internal security role and is also very active in various small countries. There are wide spread insurgencies around the world. The US military attempts to keep various puppet regimes in power and to keep up the flow of raw materials to the US.
Technology has not significantly changed except for space industries. Key industries are now space related. The boom is in mining, space and extra-terrestrial construction.
Computers are everywhere, but the ability to do much as a normal user is very limited. Access to the Internet for chat and such is easy. E-mail is available, but only middle class and up are able to us it. Most welfare people are effectively illiterate, and many working class people are poor readers and writers at best. Programmers are needed, especially off-Earth, but for creating specialized applications and such. Operating systems are relatively stable in terms of development. The open source movement still exists, but most systems are tightly locked down. It is rare for people to be able to install any programs, let alone create anything.
The physical landscape has changed around the cities. Suburban sprawl is still spreading, but the difference between city and suburb has become much more pronounced. Also, the form of sprawl has changed. There are more green belts around the cities that provide a mixed buffer of non-developed, commercial and industrial land between the city and the suburbs. Roads and mass transit penetrate these greenbelts, but they are much more closely watched. Suburban sprawl has changed. No longer are there infinite rows of stand-alone houses connected by over crowded expressways. Modern suburban housing consists of groups of dense multifamily houses with undeveloped land around the housing complex. Housing developments are connected by high-speed mass transmit. The change in economics and change in attitudes about ecology made this form of development possible.
The ecology aspect is that distributed, concentrated development has less impact than widely spread low-density development. It requires less mass transit, and lots fewer roadways to link sets of apartments together than to keep single family homes connected. The less petroleum used the better the air. Also, the open spaces between complexes are large enough to support a wide variety of animal life and plants. The much smaller yards of single family homes, or worse the large yards with large houses, do not support much more than varmint sized creatures.
The economic aspect is that it is easier to provide police protection and other services to denser, more homogenous communities. It is the ultimate gated community system. This gated community option is very appealing; it keeps the poor people that are on welfare away from the working and middle class. It is also cheaper to provide housing and mass transit to higher density housing developments. It is also cheaper to maintain, or sort of maintain, the welfare recipients in apartments rather than in townhouses or single family homes. Only the very rich have large single family homes, or more often homes that have housing for servants along with the family.
Gasoline is much more expensive and gas or diesel powered private vehicles are now very rare. This is a result of both the scarcities of oil production facilities and oil, and high taxes to discourage pollution.
Technology has continued to grow, but nothing really revolutionary has occurred. Computers are smaller, faster and more powerful but Artificial Intelligence and robots are still a pipe dream. Computers show up everywhere in daily life of non-welfare people.
In response to the Plague, and terrorism in general, law enforcement has changed. The police are much more heavily armed, and most decent housing developments have private guards that inspect everybody entering. The housing developments are all private property so there are no legal issues. Everybody who does not want to get hassled carries identification. While there is no mandatory national ID, every housing development, including government ones, issue Ids and generally require ID or a resident to vouch for the visitor.
Thirty years ago terrorist organizations tried to research the means to initiate biowarfare. The terrorists had an apparently accidental release at a research lab in the Middle East. The Plague wiped out a significant amount of the world population, but mostly in Third World countries where the political and psychological will power to force administration of a vaccine did not exist. The US, Europe and other First World countries lost about 5% of their population; Africa, the Middle East and Asia lost about 30% of their population.
The school system is much more focused and tracks people more than present day schools. While most kids are offered state or public college, the occupational training starts in high school. College does not require the breadth that modern schools do. Students must still take the same breadth of courses, but the academic level is much lower outside of ones major field of study. State colleges are akin to present-day good high schools. The elite private colleges though have not lowered their standards for admission or work.
Aptitude and vocational testing is much more common and is used to put kids into "appropriate" fields of study.
big government world with lots of bureaucracy, high taxes, lots of business rules. poor schools for public. lots of government intervention (clinton's "It Takes a Village") into family in order to "help them". lots of social workers involved in families.