The flickering candle of democracy finally went out in the early part of the third millennium, plunging humanity into a new dark ages that was to last for the next thousand years.
At the end of the first decade, as society immersed itself in the digital world, the ruthless machinery of logic that it had inadvertently created gathered strength.
The populations of Europa and the States of America realised too late that the machine had already siphoned power from the assemblies and parliaments and into the steel and concrete heart of the cyber-industrial complex.
By the end of 2011, soaring interest rates had bankrupted the Mediterranean states of Italia and Iberia, allowing the machine to put its technocrats in power. Ruthlessly they bent the populations to its will, bringing in a new order which quickly spread northwards.
In a few months, its inevitable logic had swept aside the pillars of democratic representation, the checks and balances that had evolved over a millennia and a half. The anonymous bankers became its unwitting agents, the irrational financial markets were its means of control.
Economic austerity was followed by unemployment and famine, and by the end of 2012 the hungry were rioting across the rich west.
However, the people rose up too late and found the frontages of the European Central Bank, the financial corporations of Wall Street and the City of London already sealed and impervious to their firebombs and their slogans.
As Europa and the States of America burned, the cyber security agencies began their purge, rounding up activists in their thousands. They moved swiftly to crush the Twitter uprisings, intercepting email and telephone traffic, using message boards and social networks to entrap the last remaining believers in freedom.
Their policies were ruthlessly efficient, and by the end of 2013, wearied by fear and hunger, the protests subsided, and the new power structures took shape.