The High-Tech Junta
The historical path of the civilization is laid down by the natural evolution of the global world-system.
The road of progress spirals up by following the natural landscape of the evolutionary hill, which hardening surface favors stronger over weaker.
For the social animals there are two parallels species-improvement processes going on simultaneously - on the individual (genes) and the societal (structural) levels.
In order to adapt to Earth's natural boom-bust energy cycles, which cause periodic resources deficit, societal structures (including their governance mechanisms) cyclically change from decentralized (when environmental conditions become more favorable for population growth) to centralized (when those conditions worsen) and back.
During the past 2-3 decades the transition from a period of an overproduction and an excessive consumption, spearheaded by the record population growth, to the next evolutionary stage, when cheep resources deposits base shrinks and intra-species competition rises, has been in progress.
It leads to the gradual centralization of all societal governance mechanisms happening in different parts of the world. It will culminate in the final form of the centralization - the military government.
Regionally this particular form of a societal control system, which precludes the centralized, methodical regulation of all main aspects of human behaviour, takes different forms depending on the type of the historically prevailing governance structures, defined by local natural environmental conditions (historically speaking - the state and availability of the arable land):
On the North, where valleys or isolated regions based small agriculture forms traditionally favored various villages and then cities formations with their professional leagues practicing entrepreneurial types of society-based management structures, military-business dictatorship systems become the most successful ones.
On the West, where arable lands are both scarcer and demand application of more laborious works, small regional productive communities are usually brought together by a charismatic leader. Such macho-military governance systems are easy to form but they are instable and short-lived, which takes the society many attempts to sustain.
On the South with its huge racial diversity, clustered to the size of hundreds blood-related individuals and widely dispersed over millions of small patches of low productive land, military families based dictatorships become the winning governance organizations in times of crisis.
On the East where the gigantic fertile land mass can sustain large numbers of agricultural producers providing the food effective manufacturing and storage forms are centrally adapted and sustained, gigantic military bureaucracies were traditionally practiced the most.
In the Center where nomadic life style made it necessary for rulers to search for unity in ideas and religions rather than try to base it on blood-bonds. Militant clerics are in the rise in those areas of the world.
We still have the big stretch of the earth-land, laterally extended across the large and climatically disadvantaged border area separated North - South and East - West, which has not been mentioned.
We are talking about the most part of the northern continental land mass, which traditionally bad climate can't sustain a large population without recurring to machine-based, chemically intensive forms of agricultural production.
However, because the advanced agricultural technologies (chemistry, hydroponics, harvesting machines etc) are relatively new inventions, the first High-Tech Juntas States are still in its final stages of making on those territories.
The High-Tech Junta's main differentiators:
Replaces charismatic leaders, family ties, powers of corporate businesses and a religion zeal by the latest technologies to consolidate, to control and to lead the society;
An impersonal nature of its governance mechanism does not require a high professional qualification from its nominated rulers;
Fast adaptability to a tactical situation helps it to be sustained long-term in an isolation from the larger societal influencers (politics, ethics, tales, rumors etc);
Its over-concentration of power provokes attacks directed on its centralized data storage and its decision-making center;
A deficit of the human ingenuity, based on the freedom of self-expression, leads to its favoring proven but older technologies in expense of more advanced but riskier ones;
An absence of the long term strategy other than the constant expansion of its power projection sphere, supported by a deliberately accelerating speed of military technologies improvements as well as its productions / consumptions, culminates in a kinetic conflict with other forms of military dictatorship.
That poses the question about the survival tactics of various niche social groups which are considered to be not crucial for an existence and an expansion of the High-Tech Junta. Among others it includes small and medium entrepreneurs as well as non-technical intellectuals added by non-military technical elite.
One of such proposed strategies includes the establishing of city-state on the territory temporarily controlled whether by the weakest or the strongest forms of military governments.
The one example (applied to former) would be one of the countries on the West, where political independence of such a decentralized city from the main-land might be negotiated using financial arguments.
The other example (applied to later) would be an isolated territorial enclave in the Center or on the East. The argument is that it might serve as part of a safety valve mechanism preventing the system from being socially over-heated.