Planet Earth survived 2050, the predicted date of collapse, or point of no return, and found a new equilibrium.

During the period of environmental, health, economic and socio-political crisis known as the Trembling Age, which began after the Covid19 pandemic of 2020, large cities were gradually abandoned and their inhabitants left in search of a different life: less wasteful, less controlled, safer, healthier. During the period of environmental, health, economic and socio-political crisis known as the Trembling Age, which began after the Covid19 pandemic of 2020, big cities were progressively abandoned and their inhabitants left in search of a different life: less wasteful, less controlled, safer, healthier.

People have begun to inhabit abandoned villages and rural areas, creating small communities where everyone is no longer responsible only for themselves, but also for each other. The previous political and economic systems, which brought humanity close to to disintegration and irreversible disaster, have been defeated . New movements have emerged that have demanded a future based on three principles: humanity, nature and technology. These new collective ideals also found expression in art, philosophy and literature. People have once again believed in progress, in a better future.

In the new course, people started to organise work from home, growing their own food and producing the energy needed with sustainable methods. They have started to use new technologies to improve daily life, making more time for themselves, their families and for themselves, families and friends. They have rediscovered or reinvented their identity, while the shared identity of each community has become increasingly important and has defined the mission of the community itself. These new rural communities have learnt to protect their identity and data, circumventing surveillance and control. Each community has come into contact with each other by associating in a new network, local and global.

Life in the city has also improved: thanks to a lower density population density, both traffic and pollution have been drastically reduced, as has the proliferation of viruses. The flats have been merged to form larger dwellings, which made it easy to work remotely and to create new aggregation spaces.

Technology, no longer conceived as private property, has become open and public. In 2051, in fact, the Big Tech Companies, held responsible for violating human rights, were transformed into non-profit companies and their economic surplus economic surplus was redistributed through the creation of the Common Global Fund for Research and Development. The next thirty years have thus been characterised by new research and great discoveries in the fields of IT, Quantum Computing, AI, biology, medicine, new biology, medicine, new means of transport and communication, energy production. Automation has freed humans from heavy and dangerous work, enabling everyone to devote themselves to study and research. A new technological era, no longer geared towards production and economic enrichment, but to the improvement of human life, animal and plant life. Every aspect of daily life has significantly improved.

During the Trembling Age, seven new rural communities joined together in Tuscany, creating in 2051 the federation RURALIA. Ruralia became the model for a new life on Earth and for a new global political order, no longer based on nation-states but on the nation-states but on the connections between 'real communities', united by the same principles and objectives.

In 2040 the decay of the entire planet began to slow down, in 2050 global warming stopped, in 2060 the Earth began to regenerate, and in 2070 environmental conditions began to improve rapid and unexpected, as did the quality of life. A new balance between nature and man.

 Today, 1 October 2081, humanity and planet Earth are saved.

Welcome to Ruralia.



The Trembling Age is the middle phase of the Anthropocene in which the political and economic crisis of the neo-liberal capitalist system is consolidated and at the same time the climate emergency and the ecological and pandemic crisis are taken to extremes with a succession of events of a destabilising nature. In such conditions of systematic instability, currents of thought and social political activism arise that will be decisive in overcoming the profound state of crisis that will affect the entire planet throughout the Trembling Age.

The Covid19 pandemic of 2020-21, with its long aftermath, triggers a planetary economic crisis that is aggravated by the corporate bond crisis in 2025 and the treasury bonds crisis in 2026. During this period, climate change manifests itself with a sudden and unexpected rise in water levels, while the intensification of violent weather phenomena in many areas of the planet' lead to a continuous state of emergency.

In 2027, the Manifesto of Fragilism is published. Fragilism is a current of thought and activism based on the realisation and acceptance of the definitive fragile condition of human beings and the planet as a consequence of the environmental, health and economic upheavals of the Trembling Age. Initially born as a neo-humanist philosophical avant-garde promoted by radical artistic movements, Fragilism spreads as a true socio-political ideology, which rejects the concept of strength and competition and claims fragility and solidarity as values to be protected, in order to guarantee the survival of the human race, jeopardised, together with that of the planet, by the deteriorating aspects of the capitalist and neo-liberal system based on growth and competition.

In 2028 the world is shaken by a new global epidemic called Ebatid, and in 2029 the explosion of the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant results in the largest nuclear disaster in history and the radiation contamination of the entire Mississippi River.

The fight against Big Tech, the large digital monopolies that constitute the pervasive infrastructure of global society and are held responsible for the abusive exploitation of data and manipulation of human behaviour on a global scale, begins. Digital extractive (or 'surveillance') capitalism, which leads Big Techs to have more power than nation states, creates a double dynamic: a considerable increase in mental distress and addiction is accompanied by the spread of extremist ideologies, and the substantial disintegration of representative democracies.

In 2029, the inalienability of personal data and the right to data protection is enshrined.

The second half of the 1920s saw the first spontaneous wave of migration from the cities to the countryside or small towns, in response to the ongoing crises that had made the big cities less and less liveable, leading to the increasingly felt need for a less wasteful, less controlled, safer, healthier life in contact with nature.

In 2030, the first Neo-Ruralist Manifesto was published, written by the R2081 Collective, bringing to global attention a new ideology in strong opposition to the logic of urbanisation, held responsible for exploitation, pollution and epidemics, which has contributed to the creation of cities incapable of guaranteeing a sufficient quality of life. Initially born as a spontaneous process of slow abandonment of cities plagued by epidemics, pollution and inflation, Neo-Ruralism became in the 1930s a real ideological and political movement, aiming at a better quality of life based on the environment, harmony with nature and a different use of agriculture and technology.

In 2032, a break in the thermohaline circulation cycle occurs, which leads to a severe acceleration in the global warming process.

In 2034, the 20-year period of the Water Wars begins. With the failure of the movements for water as a common good at the beginning of the century, phenomena such as the increase in the commodification of water in western countries, the progress of desertification in many areas of the planet, and the scarcity of drinking water in countries plagued by groundwater and river pollution, lead to strong tensions around the 'blue gold' all over the planet. In 2036, strong rebellions against China's exploitation of water resources, fuelled by corrupt governments, will be generated in the countries of South-East Asia, causing most countries in the area to slide into civil war. A similar situation arises between the US and South American states, where the 'sedientos' movement sets fire to the headquarters of US water companies, prompting bloody armed repressions in various regions. In Europe, the various states entrench themselves around their water resources, and the war between the water companies raises the price of water beyond measure, while illicit water trafficking by major mafia organisations takes hold, with feuds and armed clashes. The 'water wars', low-intensity micro-conflicts, spread intermittently but widely across the planet.

In 2036, the Adaptive Community Movement (ACM ) translates the new philosophical demands into political action, beginning to lay the foundations of a counter-hegemony of thought, an alternative to neo-liberalism. Revisiting some old theories of Adriano Olivetti's Community Movement in the light of the technological and computer revolution, the ACM Movement proposes a new model of real, neo-rural, fragile and interconnected community that questions the very existence of nation states. To these ends, the movement theorises a new economic model based on a different method of utilising technology, financed through the redistribution of the technological surplus generated by big tech, which would trigger, and accelerate, humanity's progress in order to overcome current emergencies. In continuity' with certain accelerationist ideologies of the first two decades of the century, the Movement calls for a new form of total and adaptive automation that can free man from the slavery of labour, questioning the very ethics of work, created in the service of industrial capitalism and socialist systems in bygone eras, and instead placing study and research at the centre of a new ethics on which to refound society.

In the course of the 1930s, the world's political systems proved increasingly incapable of managing the situation: while in the western countries, which had now entered the terminal post-democratic phase, the crisis of representation became more acute and in most countries government crises alternated with elections without popular support and increasingly frequent demonstrations and revolts, on the other hand authoritarian governments progressively lost the control they had so carefully built up in the first half of the century.

In the same period, the new movements identified the 'transversal' class of cognitive workers, known as the cognitariate, as the subject that could trigger the necessary changes, as the repository of knowledge in the various fields, starting with technology, which is the key point. The Cognitariato progressively acquires strength and class consciousness, while the political research of the Movements thickens around the rejection of individualism in favour of new collective ideals, and a hybrid system begins to be formulated that merges meritocratic criteria with democratic ones, contextualised within a system of government made up of communities that are small enough for each individual to be directly responsible to others, and at the same time to all the other interconnected world communities. The utopia of adaptive communities is thus realised through the creation of strongly identity-based places in which individuals recognise themselves and are at the same time empowered as citizens at all levels.

Automation and economic contraction have made entrepreneurial work increasingly rare, incentivising the autonomous entrepreneurship of the cognitive worker, which initially manifests itself in the development of small-scale industrial economies based on the initiative of individuals and groups of individuals. Innovation in the trembling age thus originated from below and in a fragmented manner because it was managed by small, industrious groups of people, who later organised themselves into cooperative forms of work within the new 'Adaptive Communities'. These neo-ruralist communities, which experiment with new technologies in agriculture and are active in the small-scale hi-tech production of goods, enter into resource-sharing agreements, and manage the intellectual property of data on a strictly local basis. Cultural, natural and digital heritages are protected as tangible and intangible community assets.

In 2037, the Psycho-Pandemic begins. Just as industrial capitalism has exploited the environment to the point of exhaustion to create profit, surveillance capitalism has exploited the most intimate personal data to the point of impoverishing human nature itself, which has begun to suffer emotional, behavioural, etc. damage. The spike in suicides between 2037 and 2042, coupled with the spread of mental illness, prompted investigations into Big Tech in this regard, which were accused in 2043 of "crimes against humanity'".

In 2044, the Accelerated Community Movement succeeded in proving this thesis by means of state-of-the-art analyses of the brains of a sample of 500 million people, and thus dragged big tech into court for what would go down in history as the 'Big Trial'.

In 2046, the World Charter for the Digital Commons was approved, defining new commons of an intangible nature (open source technology and automation) that enable the development of community-based patents (Peer production-based Commons), while the proliferation of commons such as blockchain and data mining makes small-scale innovation easier.

In the second half of the 1940s, the digital commons grew exponentially, and large corporations engaged in major disputes with nation-states and communities, demanding redistribution of their technological surplus, effectively created through the misappropriation of data.

In 2049, Big Tech, after a five-year trial, is convicted of crimes against humanity, and held responsible for 15,000,000 suicides. The condemnation to compensate mankind is sanctioned in the conversion of all Big Techs into non-profit companies: from that moment on, their profits, previously abusively acquired through the exploitation of human data and behaviour, will have to be completely redistributed to finance research and development projects that can enable mankind to overcome current emergencies.

In 2050, the Global Common Fund for Research & Development is established, with the aim of collecting this technological surplus of Big Tech and redistributing it to the public coffers of communities adopting virtuous practices, in order to finance their research projects and cover the necessary basic investments in infrastructure.

After the swarm of destabilising events of the previous thirty years, thanks to the impetus of unprecedented events such as the Big Trial with the creation of the Common Global Fund, and on the basis of the new ideological movements that were progressively asserting themselves, a period of epochal changes, known as "Regeneration", opened up, affecting all sectors and triggering a slow but progressive process of regeneration on a planetary scale.

In 2051, Ruralia was founded, the first Experimental Federation of Neo-Rural Communities, following the union of 7 communities born from the repopulation, during the Trembling Age, of abandoned villages in Tuscany: Castelnuovo Val di Cecina/Larderello, Isola di Pianosa, Buriano, Lucchio, Bacchionero, Lamole, Poggio di Santa Cecilia. The union of these communities, the first neo-rural resurgence project, was born as early as 2041 to facilitate the exchange of goods, data and knowledge, and came to its maturity with the formulation of the "Ruralia Manifesto", signed in Pianosa on 20 February 2051, which sanctioned the principles and mission of the Federation, marking the way for many other communities in the future. The aim of Ruralia is to develop a new model of life on the planet, just and sustainable, centred on Man, Nature and Technology, which is the basis for a new global socio-political organisation, based on the principles of Neo Ruralism and Fragilism. Ruralia is thus configured as the first experimental model of a global federation of "real communities", in line with the ideology of the Adaptive Community Movement, each of which carries out research and development projects of global interest.

In 2052 Ruralia becomes the first organisation to be fully financed by the Common Global Fund.

In 2054, the signing of the international agreement on Water as a Common Good led to a global armistice that put an end to the Water Wars after 20 years.

In the second half of the 1950s, in the wake of the success of the Ruralia Federation, neo-rural communities multiplied on a planetary scale, repopulating small abandoned towns that were no longer isolated thanks to new technologies. This phenomenon has led to a relative decrease in population density in large cities with a consequent increase in quality of life: both traffic and pollution have been drastically reduced, as has the proliferation of viruses. Flats were amalgamated to form larger dwellings, which made it easy to work remotely and to create new meeting spaces.

In 2056, Mori Jiang, a political philosopher and activist and one of the founders of the Adaptive Community Movement, presented his treatise 'The Common Future', which theorised a new global political order, no longer based on nation-states but on connections between 'real communities', united by the same principles and goals. In this scheme, real communities around the world join together in federations no longer on a territorial basis but on the basis of a shared mission and common interests, creating a network of interconnected micro-governments.

In 2057, global mobility reform begins: private car ownership is abolished, and the sale of cars is banned. Transport will be all shared, self-driving, always available within 5 minutes, by reservation, at the cost of use only. The last combustion engine car is scrapped on 7 November.

In the second half of the 1950s, the global average temperature reversed its trend for the first time since 1950, and began to decrease significantly. In 2059, Global Warming is declared defeated.

In 2060, 'Imagine-Nation', a self-sufficient floating artificial island that sails in international waters and gives political asylum to a resident population of 3000 activists, dissidents and researchers from around the world, is launched in Taipei harbour. This community is organised into ministries and research groups and meets in a parliament located in the centre of the island, forming a veritable world shadow government with the mission to elaborate and disseminate new socio-political ideas, free from any form of external constraint or influence, and to do research in various relevant fields, from medicine to economics, from agriculture to energy production. A communication department is in charge of disseminating and promoting the results of Imagine-Nation's research and political activity to all communities on the planet.

In the 1960s, the Ruralia federation found its first twinnings with similar realities on other continents, and the network began to feed not by proximity but by common intentions. In fact, many communities began to aggregate into networks with common identities, interests and missions, on the model of Mori Jiang, and began to carry out specific research in their fields of competence, financed by the Common Global Fund. The result is a twenty-year period of great discoveries in the fields of IT, quantum computing, AI, biology, medicine, new means of transport and communication, and energy production. Automation is spreading, freeing men from heavy and dangerous work, giving everyone the chance to dedicate themselves to study and research, values in which the cognitariat recognises itself: the work ethic, typical of the old industrial capitalism, is progressively being replaced by the ethic of study and research, reported as founding values in the Constitutional Charters of the new communities.

In 2062, after four decades of pandemics that have reduced the global population by 19%, the obsolete vaccine system is replaced by 'Immuni', a new system of continuous natural stimulation of the immune system that can make humans and animals capable of defending themselves against any type of virus.

In 2064, a technology is patented based on a new type of semiconductor thermionic converter, capable of extracting electrical energy directly from thermal energy, without intermediate kinetic steps, with efficiencies never achieved before. The discovery is applied to heat recovery in all industrial and domestic machines and processes, and is combined with photovoltaic cells. But it is the application to geothermal energy, being researched at Larderello, one of the seven founding communities of Ruralia, that will give the most surprising results in terms of yield and sustainability.

In 2066, seven varieties of legumes were selected at the Buriano genomics and bioinformatics research centre to provide noble proteins that can be assimilated with animal proteins, called 'noble legumes'.

The discovery further stimulated the reduction of world meat consumption, which in the same year dropped to an average of 19 kg per capita per year (down from 43 kg in 2020), thanks to the education campaign started in schools in the early 1920s, together with increasingly stringent controls implemented by communities.

In 2067, 'EN Road' was patented, a technology that allows an energy storage system to be integrated into the roadway, thanks to which the road stores both the energy released by the movement of cars and the heat of the sun, and re-transmits it to moving vehicles. This technology was developed in Lucchio, one of the founding communities of Ruralia.

In 2069, after decades plagued by the falsification of any information, an authentication system is developed that allows real-time verification of the authenticity of anything: data, objects, food, news.

In 2071, 'continuing education', the great global reform of the school and education system, is launched. After the decline of the work ethic in favour of the ethic of study and research, a prerequisite for the new merit-democratic structures of communities, learning becomes a continuous practice that accompanies the cognitive citizen throughout his existence, filling the time left free from work thanks to automation. The application of the concept of 'mass research' will have to guarantee the advancement of humanity, while continuous learning will become a guarantee of citizen awareness and responsibility.

In 2073, the 'Union of Federations of Royal Communities' was founded, a worldwide organisation in charge of formulating global policies for communities around the world.

In 2075, the end of world hunger is officially decreed, thanks to the great results achieved through research in the field of robotics applied to agriculture, and research in the field of genetics applied to crops, together with the welfare of water, achieved at the end of the two decades of the Water Wars. The Ruralia Federation is honoured for its great contribution to agricultural research, especially thanks to the research carried out by the Lamole, Buriano and Santa Cecilia communities.

In 2077, Overshoot Day falls on 1 December, bringing the consumption of the planet's resources back to the 1975 level. The world population greets this event with great celebration, while the IPCC officially sanctions the beginning of the planet's regeneration process.

In 2080, the Union of Federations of Royal Communities approves the Global Constitutional Charter, which sanctions the definitive abolition of the governmental functions of nation states, with the exception of those of representation and protection of the specific cultural and natural heritage.

By 2081, all global parameters are back within warning levels, with a trend towards stability or improvement. The World Conservation Union decrees that a new equilibrium has been re-established and planet Earth is officially declared safe on 18 September 2081, a day that will be remembered as 'Regeneration Day'.