Narcoluddism ▨
Geopoliflicks series

2032 — Exhausted by the many upheavals that have shaped its political history since 1948 and its independence from the British colonial empire, Myanmar continues to struggle throughout the twenty-first century to overcome its financial difficulties. Its thriving drug trade is sustained by a complicit military junta, the exploitation of a precarious workforce, and growing demand for methamphetamine, whose production has definitively supplanted that of opium. Neighboring countries deploy reconnaissance satellites, counter-trafficking drones, and AI-powered logistics detection systems in an effort to stem the flow across the Mekong region.

2039 — In the northern Shan State, drug lords, aided by the Yellow Unionist Chinthes, a technodissident paramilitary group, develop countermeasures designed to overwhelm the fragile technological ecosystem of the China-led Changbai Coalition. The absence of effective regulation attracts a diverse population that sees drug trafficking as a way out of the poverty affecting more than half the country. A “signal-converted zone” gradually emerges in the mountains bordering the town of Mong-Yu.

2045 — The archipelago of militias that makes up this first post-liberal community struggles to consolidate a network combining drug trafficking, jade smuggling, and the taxation of trade routes. These fragmented, informal economies operating under an opaque regime, supplemented by the financial support networks of the diaspora, nevertheless enable it to fund a professional army and a low-tech healthcare infrastructure. Because any thorough census proves impossible, the population is estimated, in 2048, at between 7,000 and 12,000 inhabitants.

2052 — From this heterogeneous gathering gradually emerges a Grey International that adopts an anti-imperialist stance, denouncing a form of globalization alienated by technology. Despite limited communication and divergent interests, autonomous cross-border regions such as the Darién in Latin America and the Lake Chad Basin in Africa draw inspiration from the Golden Triangle to develop anti-surveillance tactics. International political and military organizations invest vast analog and human resources to contain what they now describe as “narco-Luddism.”