Neal Stephenson’s second generation cyberpunk masterpiece “↵The Diamond Age“ (1995) is set in a time when the political system of nation states long has collapsed. Tribal organizational forms have taken the latters place. Maybe to clearly distinguish his literary extrapolation from negative, colonial, exoticizing, or romanticizing notions, Stephenson didn’t choose the word “tribe”, but the more highbrow “phylum”, as used in biological taxonomy. The phyla of the diamond age—there are the Neo-Victorians, the Neo-Confucians, the Ashanti, and many more—are in possession of own territorium, but this is dispersed over the globe and mostly embedded into other territorial legislations. In addition all of the phyla act globally in political, economical, and cultural respect. Today ↑The Independent reports: