Remembering Thomas P.M. Barnett's life

A deleted, futuristic scene from "Great Powers"

Dec 24, 2024

A note of explanation: In my “new map trilogy” of books (2004’s Pentagon’s New Map, 2005’s Blueprint for Acton, and 2009’s Great Powers), I sought to end each with some fun, futuristic projection. In Map, I ended with this “Hope Without Guarantees” final chapter where I listed ten steps (world developments) to a “future worth creating.” Then, in Blueprint, I ended with a “Heroes Yet Discovered” conclusion where I provided thumbnails of future figures I’d be on the lookout for — yet again, in that future worth creating. I also presented an afterword called “Blogging the Future,” where I presented headlines from the future.

So, when I got to Great Powers, I wanted to swing for the fences and project something across the rest of the 21st Century. And I came up with this weird idea of having my son deliver my eulogy for this amazing life my character would represent across the century’s remaining decades and to use that artifact as a means for dropping all manner of hints of the world ahead — sort of a end-of-century history looking backwards to what is still our future.

Well, I had fun writing it, just like I enjoyed writing and delivering the eulogies for both of my parents, John (from which the below eulogy clearly steals) and Colleen (which I wrote years later). I find that form of writing to be very powerful, and I like writing as though the text is meant to be delivered as a speech. I also just like the solemnity of the setting — a moment of great meaning.

Anyway … Neil Nyren, my publisher and the head of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, wasn’t buying it. He said it was too weird and would hijack the book for readers and become an easy target for critics to dismiss the entire work.

So, instead, I penned a coda entitled, “The Future Perfect Tense,” where I riffed a bit on the future, leveraging H.G. Wells’ book, The Shape of Things to Come (likewise a favorite movie of mine). It seemed to fit the mood of the book and the moment, which was, we’re screwed right now (Great Recession) but there’s a better future out there to be had (my constant, north-star theme).

I share it today as a little Christmas Eve present which you can return to the store if it doesn’t work for you, or regift to someone you think might like it.

Bigger present on same theme tomorrow, under the tree.

Remembering Thomas P.M. Barnett’s life

by

Dr. Jerome E. Barnett

April 20, 2099

Delivered in the Free Community of Boscobel, Northern Association (U.S.)

First, let me thank you all for traveling to our father’s humble hometown for this event. I realize that some of you have returned to Earth especially for this occasion, and we are humbled by your presence.

Our mother, Vonne, represented by her private avatar here today, knew my dad wanted to have his bio-forms fed into the fish stocks of the Wisconsin River, providing one last strand of life to the watershed where he grew up as a child. We realize that many of you had to undergo numerous bio-screens to access this Wilderness Space, and we hope none were too uncomfortable.

Before his third death, our father joked that only his best friends would show up this time, given the location, and so I hope all of you consider yourselves to be among those he loved best. You have our deepest thanks and my personal assurance that the weather will be maintained at this comfort level throughout the length of your stay here in the park.

Our father’s lives (natural, resurrected, simultaned) all conclude here today, stretching to a combined 137 years and 327 days. Dad had hoped to maintain his latest avatar onplane, in collaboration with Vonne, his wife, through the 120^thanniversary of their marriage in 2106, but decided, in consultation with us, his children, to forego the attempt, given the decline in fidelity my mother’s avatar has suffered over the past few years. As he told me last week, “I feel like Vonne has moved on and I should finally too.” Unlike our mother, whose public avatar still teaches the food communion, my father’s avatar is being deconstructed and distributed according to his will.

P: So it let be consumed and connected, according to Your will O Lord.

All: Making the soul of our loved one complete.

Our father’s first life, which he often said did not truly begin until the 21^st century, spanned it like few others. It was a life of great contradictions and reversals, great accomplishments and failures, great journeys and discovery. I know many historians consider our father to have been a chaser of sense fads and a naive instigator of radical movements, and he was all of those things. But he was also a man who, despite never quite growing up, also never stopped growing and challenging those around him to do the same.

Let me now walk you through the last century of this amazing man’s lives.

Our father made his great fortune in the Network Age of the 2010s, in collaboration with his partner and lifelong friend, Stephen DeAngelis, whose private avatar joins us today. Together, their Enterra cluster pioneered some of Earth’s first great surface nets, leading to the age of ubiquitous sensing for which both of them were awarded the Gates Prize in the year 2035.

I know many people still consider our father one of the original “big brothers” on that basis, declaring that the loss of freedom to kill and destroy tamed humanity beyond all recognition, but it was our father’s belief that this outcome was better than forced sterilization of all violent tendencies through genetic treatment. He believed, as he once wrote, that “humans must be left with their conscience intact, choosing violence where they must and suffering the immediate and inescapable consequences.”

So where others saw behavior modification beyond all reason, a life’s freedom under constant assault, first by cameras and aerial drones and later by robots and onplane guardian avatars, our father saw moral choices made transparent beyond all emotion, and lives kept real by the abolishment of prisons and forced incarceration.

That our father was forced to give back his Gates because of the discovery, years later, of his heavy use of soma-enhancing* elements, thus revealing his long-term intention to resurrect his natural form, bothered him not one whit. As he quipped at the time, “I wouldn’t join any club that will have my corpse as a member.”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: “Soma” refers to that portion of the human body other than the reproductive cells/organs; it is considered the “disposable” portion, subject to non-transfer beyond the life of the individual human.]

Our father, in his first life at least, was far from a pacifist, as his short stint in the Ramirez Administration proved. When the Worldwide Crash occurred in 2029, and services were disrupted throughout the netted planet, he was the first to advocate resuming the War on Disruptors. He did not view their destruction as “genocide,” as many then claimed, but rather as a genetic cleansing in line with all we now know to be true in mankind’s achieved purity of heart and head.

The lack of any significant mass violence across the Earth Order since that time suggests that he, and others like him, were correct in this harsh choice. For without such measures, the Union of Unions, which marked the end of regional competition among the great Associations, would never have occurred, and humanity would still be beholden to the mistaken notions of “resource wars” and “clashes among civilizations.” We’d still have a walled-off European Union, whose “great barrier” had long kept out so-called Unnaturals committed to improving humanity through genetic design. We’d still have an antagonistic Asian Union, whose frantic experiments in environmental engineering merely hastened the collapse of Old China’s biosphere, thus triggering the Near Space War of 2034 (which our father had a hand in quelling). And we’d still see the African Union relegated to second-tier economic status, instead of becoming home to the world’s first great Wilderness Zone and the many “bedroom countries” found therein.

Our father’s career across the 2020s and 2030s presaged many of his elder-statesman roles in the 21^st century’s latter decades:

In 2021, our father helped write Cuba’s state constitution, which set the standard for the expansion of the United States southward across the next four decades. Can anyone doubt that the doubling of “these United States,” as our father called America, would have proceeded so smoothly without the efforts of “brown” Democrats and Republicans to forge ever more perfect unions in these newborn states? Did our country not suffer immeasurable shame over the tens of thousands needlessly killed at our Southern Barrier? My father said he was never prouder to be an American as when he demanded, in his famous Panama City speech of 2037, “Madame President, tear down this wall!”
After the great prison riots of 2027, our father helped lead the national effort to amend the U.S. Constitution’s definition of “cruel and unusual punishment,” thus leading to the 30^th Amendment outlining the pharmacological rights of all citizens. With all drug-use then made legal, thanks to the curing of drug addiction, America’s prison system subsequently became the envy of the world over its remaining years, and the great shift toward extended and resurrected lives began.
After the pandemic of 2018 had killed tens of millions, our father argued that real-time health screening at all transportation nodes was not enough. And so, with Stephen DeAngelis, our father dramatically expanded and codified the then-emerging science of Mass Catastrophe Response, designing and teaching Carnegie Mellon’s first PhD program and personally overseeing the education of an entire generation of practitioners.
Our father participated in the Hague Knowledge-League Conventions of the early 2030s, which forged the first series of Free Content Treaties between the American, Mediterranean, and Asian unions, setting in motion the “talent wars” that subsequently led to the emergence of Free Citizenship bargaining rights. Our father held one of the first “blended passports,” as they were then known, splitting his citizenship evenly among the three unions. When that system later evolved through the rise of real-time bidding markets, Father used to joke that he never let his Asian share dip below 40 percent, no matter how much it cost him in dollars, because two of his five children were Chinese and so he too would keep his weighted value at four-tenths Asian. Dad and Mother routinely lived in Asia each winter to maintain their profile rights, so committed was each of them to our blended family structure. I know all my American and Asian cousins remember with fondness the many family “DNA reunions” we held in Guangzhou over the decades.
When membership in the United Nations topped 300 states in 2039, our father was among those technocrats who wrote the first UN Privacy Accords, which facilitated the differentiation of member states by protections accorded. When the transnational parties known as the Engineers and Naturalists began appearing in numerous “free association” colonies in the late 2030s, our father became convinced that “citizenship by IQ” must be ended, and so he spent the rest of his political life, which culminated in his first death in 2062, working to expand the rights of those who refused brain enhancement due to their spiritual belief systems to live and work in the non-netted colonies of their choice.

Our father liked to say that he suffered from “strategic Alzheimers,” meaning he had outlived the training of his youth in state-on-state conflicts and was forced, in his later decades, to “re-engineer” himself (Dad loved quaint phrases like that) for the mass-movement struggles of 2040s. With high-netted governments rising and falling over their knowledge edge (much to the delight of global speculators), and low-netted retiree and “bedroom” countries emerging as the bastion of tranquility in an increasingly frantic world, Thomas Barnett stepped into the fray of that tumultuous decade, playing much the same role globally that one of his personal heroes, Henry Clay, had played for his beloved United States in the first half of the 19^th century — that of grand compromiser.

As personal and religious life became more manic in those years, in large part because social behavior in the “watched society” had evolved to the point of extreme politeness and guarded emotion, our father began warning in his writings of the danger of the “stationary soul”—a human whose personal growth had become imprisoned by the tightening boundaries of overly regulated, overly medicated, and overly sanctified life.

Decrying the death of creativity, Father switched his allegiances from the Engineers to the Naturalists, ending his long-time professional collaboration with DeAngelis and, fortified by our mother’s guiding wisdom, he soon emerged as the one of the Naturalists' most popular global spokespersons. With genetic therapies ending all excuses for physical differentiation and defect, and robots increasingly managing our daily lives, our father and mother went “back to nature” as so many radical generations had before, moving deep into the non-agricultural communal archipelago of the Northern Association (U.S.), living in what used to be known as the Canadian province of Manitoba.

While Father never associated with those who advocated violent separation from technology, his principled libertarian defense of those who refused bio-engineered enhancements is legitimately described as a wellspring for some of their terrorist acts. Still, if you’ve ever experienced the sheer joy of tasting an un-medicated apple, you know what drove these impassioned individuals.

Our father’s political philosophy during this period of great religious awakening was straightforward in its goals: humans should be able to associate freely on the basis of their acceptance or refusal of life-enhancing/extending therapies, but likewise according to their desired levels of transparency.

The Great Compromise of 2047 bore much of this logic, resulting in three community classifications: 1) the Unabridged or so-called Asian Methodism by which enhancements are ubiquitous and known; 2) the Abridged or Mediterranean Puritanism by which enhancements are outlawed and proof visibly maintained (except among Orthodox Jews); and 3) the American Compact within which the Enhanced and Un-enhanced live together freely, with privacy maintained. By making these distinctions clear, the UN-sponsored Parliament of Humanity not only quelled the social violence of that era, but likewise provided the Earth with the Bio-Immigration Rights that we all hold so dearly today, especially as climate change continues to challenge our weather-management systems.

Then, in the year 2051, to the surprise of many of his followers but not to those of us who knew him well, our father reversed himself yet again when our mother suffered a serious health crisis in her 91st year and Father was faced with the only prospect that, in his words, “frightened me to my very soul” — the loss of her soma presence. When it became clear that Mother would not survive without full somatic conversion, and Father donated some of his own genetic material to her rehabilitation, it became public knowledge that he had been taking life-extending therapies for several decades, to include brain performance-enhancing compounds.

While this was viewed by most of the Naturalist movement as a betrayal of the cause, Father was completely nonplussed by their angry denunciations, stating clearly and true to his onspace record, that he “had never argued against the use of life enhancement technologies, but merely for the freedom to choose and not suffer life-path penalty on that basis.” Joking, as he often did, that he was merely “pro forma pro-soma,” Father liked to quote the filmmaker Woody Allen, who once said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

While it is sometimes hard to remember the public unrest over these issues from today’s perspective, one must remember the highly charged nature of the subsequent 2050s, when most of our surviving religions underwent “conversions” of their own. The combination of the universally acknowledged Singularity, by which all human technological progress appeared to converge on the redefinition of human life, and the Peak Human Moment of 2053, during which our world’s population reached its pinnacle on the 13^th of May, sent most of the world’s religions into “a spiritual death spiral,” as Father famously described it.

When the Apocalyptics had all been cleared out and/or brought back to health, the schisms in most major faiths had become permanent, to include our Roman/American Catholicism. Siding with the so-called “blue Pope,” Father largely withdrew from public life as he prepared his soul to cross over into the Resurrected Life that his wife, our mother, had already achieved under duress and without sanctification (because no such sacrament yet existed). While it had not mattered to Mother to receive Catholic dispensation for her act (she had secretly been dual-souled as an Episcopalian for decades), it did matter to our father, and so he spent the requisite five years in spiritual training before rejoining Mother in New Nova Scotia, following his own somatic conversion in his 100^th year of first life.

P: May we all pass into resurrection at the time of your choosing O Lord.

All: Achieving Your everlasting blessing in return.

Their human forms recast and reinvigorated, and their souls connected to our Savior as never before, having shared his death and resurrection, our father and mother embarked on a decade-long off-world journey to find their new places in this galaxy. Father finally mastered the piano and most of the dead languages, including Cantonese (in deference to his Asian relatives), but to his final, dying day, insisted that his greatest achievement during these years was to master the intricacies of his wife’s zero-gravity cheesecake recipe!

Our parents found for themselves great and lasting peace during these years, accomplishing little but learning much.

Returning to Earth in 2073 and having dissipated much of their fortune, our father and mother entered into post-public lives as the teachers of youth, as was the general custom for people of leisure in that era. Our father wrote his complete memoirs during that decade, and despite many calls from admirers to re-enter political life, refused to do so, believing that the remainder of his second days should be spent on spiritual exploration. To that end, Father completed all of the stages of training to become an American Catholic priest, only to refuse the vows in 2084 when the opportunity was extended, saying he believed priests must maintain their somatic forms.

As our father was then entering his 22^nd year of resurrected life, he, along with our mother, made the decision to surrender their soma in order to achieve full induction onto the Simultanic Plane. In his space years, Father had long experimented with the earliest virtual environments designed to replicate spiritual suffering and epiphanies, becoming, or so he claimed (for one never knew with Father) the first American Catholic to experience and survive the Passion simulacrum over 100 times. As such, it was his dream to become a spiritual sherpa to those who sought similar enlightenment on the Simultanic Plane.

Our mother and father ended their resurrected lives according to the teachings of their faith in the year of Our Lord 2085.

P: As You have permitted in Your wisdom.

All: So shall some come to know by Your presence.

Since 2085, our parents have been maintained in simultaned forms on a number of Planes. Their soma, housed in a facility only miles from here, were kept in stasis until two years ago, when our mother severed all synaptic connections of her avatar’s own accord, and completed full memory transfer onto the Plane. As I noted earlier, it was her intention to remain in generated avatar form following this transference, so, in keeping with her wishes, her third funeral has yet to be held. But our father, believing, as he put it last week in his final transmission to his progeny, that “content without human connection is an existence I cannot bear,” has decided otherwise, and so his avatar is being reintegrated into the Plane’s matrix as I speak.

P: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

All: Our soma and soul now connected, we rely on your strength O God.

Our father’s lives were spent in service to his fellow humans. Whether it was defending the rights of climate-change victims to emigrate on demand or facilitating the elimination of food-borne disease, our father’s many companies, many comrades, and many concepts were always put to maximum use for the betterment of others. While at many times across his tumultuous decades, he created more waves than wake, those who were inspired by his attempts to forge a more complete understanding of humanity’s strategic challenges (a favorite phrase of his) often went on to accomplish far greater things.

Father believed, in the end, that the greatest example of a life well-led was one that embraced every last ounce of sensation to be had, imparting to others the need to extend themselves similarly. He believed that humans were only alive during such sensing, and that all human progress stemmed from such sensing of, and thinking about, and responding to the world around us.

His was a life worth emulating: a life of great faith and generosity, a life of service to others, a life of complex passions. Our father couldn’t end a conversation without laughter, couldn’t pass a stranger without signaling welcome, couldn’t sense a need without extending his help.

My dad will always remain to me the man I hope someday to become.

My wife tells a story about hiding Resurrection eggs with Dad at some parish event several decades ago. He followed her around, constantly fussing over every single placement, carefully laying tablets in each. Then, as their task neared completion, he stuffed a host of extra eggs into the pockets of his sweater, telling her that these were for the kids who wouldn’t be able to find any on their own.

That is the existence Thomas P.M. Barnett saw.

This was his life.

As we enter the 22^nd century, I know my father would wish us all the best possible challenges, the most commanding uncertainty, and the mental strength to enjoy it all.

I thank you coming here today and celebrating with us three lives worth living.