Can you explain this text? Read it and analyze as you go along.

"The latter months are ending as the sun hangs lazily between the clouds. All about are the sounds of commotion. Trains glide across crystal waters kicking up mist as robots roll between adobe houses and under splaying canopies and a broken sky. Turbine balloons float tethered above village communes as mechanics and whizz kids fiddle with prosthetics, tracing their hands across each mechanism’s flowery reliefs. Refugees are shepherded beyond the great deserts that now swallow up much of the world, and in art nouveau palaces knights and reiters swear fealty to their handlers. Welcome back to the world of tomorrow stranger, though it’s a bit different than how you remember.


The year is 2173 AD. Almost a century and a half has passed since the Collapse Era began, though the exact time when it ended is in dispute, not that there’s any global institution that could decide when that was anymore.  While the “Collapse Era” is a broad term, beginning before the climate collapse itself kicked off in earnest, most historians set its beginning to the onset of the American War, a multi-generational conflict that engulfed the former United States and Canada between a panoply of pretender governments and post-American states of various kinds. The premature death of the world hegemon led to a discordant global period in which the major global institutions attempted to reorient themselves under the UN now based (mainly) out of Vienna. The new order was, in its own words, imperfect and reactive. The need to shore up faith in the global system, to ensure the protection of accounts, states, and economies reeling in the face of America’s fall, and the pressure to balance the now more pronounced regional frameworks in Europe, Africa, and even the Caribbean meant that the post-American world was dominated more by an attempt to loot the great behemoth as it tore itself apart in order to keep itself going for as long as possible as opposed to creating anything enduring. 


In the midst of this other parts of the world began to pull apart at the edges. In the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia the Three Flags Army otherwise known as the Democratic Federation, tore through the region, even taking Mecca for a brief period of time. The outpouring of American refugees (which themselves presaged the larger refugee waves of the era) became a source of conflict as many nations especially in the global south fought over access to a new very skilled and cheap workforce that was up for grabs. China and peripheral nations jumped at the opportunity that had been presented and attempted to kitbash a Fifth Internationale, leading to a breakdown in relations with its former European partners, themselves attempting to recreate the once expansive American intelligence system by importing former members of the US Deep State into their new federal military framework. Meanwhile the war itself quickly broke out of containment, spreading outside the United States and requiring first the largest UN military mission in history, and later on the transformation of what remained of NATO into an occupying organ, seizing control of Canada to maintain stability only to find itself at war with its own people.


Then at last the climate collapse itself hit in earnest. Alongside this, economic pressures from the declining energy returns on fossil fuels compounded the costs states were taking on, and uneven population growth and demographic shifts obliterated long standing institutions in developed nations and undercut nascent regimes across the rest of the globe. World powers became more desperate and reckless, escalating to the point of bringing Kessler Syndrome down upon everyone to deny other nations vital infrastructure and going beyond that to even the use of tactical nuclear weapons on their enemies and rebellious populations. The more humanity held on and the harder its grip became the more the future slipped out of its fingers until it was all gone.


Once again the year is 2173, the world population stands at just under 6.5 billion. 


A century or so is enough time to heal most wounds, provided one actually wants to do the healing. A casual observer or tourist to this world might be struck by how pleasant much of it looks. A view of the late 22nd century evinces a sense of a world painted in watercolor, something ripped out of a solarpunk moodboard or a Chobani commercial. Aesthetically and technologically speaking this is most certainly the case. It is a world of colorful adobe houses and limewashed buildings, of floating turbines, airwells, solar furnaces and pedal powered machines. A time of bionic and folk-craft motifs and stained glass opening up into rooms of optical computers and bio-forges. Of bacteria-phages and gmo molds and mushrooms breaking down the remnants of the old plasticene. Of consciously designed permaculture landscapes around communes on one end and flowing linear arcologies on the other. Socially though? Politically? That’s a different story.


The 22nd century is not a time of hand-holding, of positive psychology, utopian cosmopolitanism or down to earth anarchistic sentimentality. It is in many ways a return to form, a world emerging orthogonal from the past and its expectant future and containing bits of both on its own terms. It is a time of small states yet great empires, conservative communities, knightly orders and guild wars, at once an abandonment and refutation of the liberal and secular notions of the old globalized world in some cases and an attempt to race past them altogether in others. A time of close knit families and communes and bloody conflicts wiping out entire lands. Above all though it is a world that has abandoned the once popular maxim that “men are simply born for no reason”. For in the 22nd century all men have an end that they know, be it prescribed by their state, their community, their liege, their party, or their God. 


When the collapse came it was primarily those great global institutions and the social sentiments that had emerged alongside them which fared the worst. The United Nations, the internet, the global economy and so on, yes even air traffic control, all were dashed against the rocks. While states would return, communities would persist and dig deep roots, the idea of the liberal citizen, of the neutral state, of institutions that exist solely for the purpose of their own survival that would not. Those that survived the collapse and came to seize the 22nd century were those that were able to orient their societies towards specific ends, either that of a destined future or of building a kind of humanity and social order within their borders. The closest equivalent we might have is that of a “theocracy” though this is not entirely accurate. While many 22nd century states are oriented towards a kind of religious end or according to a specific cosmology, just as many are not, and many “secular” orders of the 22nd century (such a term being outmoded) in fact evolved out of the practical administrative structures of 21st century religious movements. Things are never quite so straightforward. 


The 22nd century itself is not even dominated by great powers in the way we would understand the word. For while one might look at a map and see a collection of states which contest land and people, the real powers of the era are different. As stated previously, the major multinational institutions and broader global framework of the 21st century did not survive, but there were some hangers on of the complex globalized society of the past that were able to maintain control and entrench themselves as modern superpowers by the 22nd century. These would turn out to be the descendants of the major charities and development banks, who having their own land, property, and people scattered across the world weathered the collapse and only became more powerful as the new order established itself.

"