Our Disembodied States of the year 2076

(skip to here if impatient)

Air is one of the most powerful sources of social stratification in the U.S. The ability to extract oxygen from seawater is the means by which humans have to a limited extent survived the massive environmental devastation they've brought upon their own planet. Technological and environmental developments have brought about extreme social stratification.
The lack of air creates a societal structure based on this extremely precious resource. The control of this necessary commodity enables an elite few to dominate a vast lower class. Those in control of air (the owners of Stranglehold Inc. ) can deny access to it as they please and thus have control over the life and death of others. The air is derived from ocean water from which oxygen is extracted and then diluted with other gases from other sources. Over pressurization of chambers prevents air contamination from outside. The Upper class enjoy vast material wealth, although even they must bear somewhat limited space. The lower class is subdued and oppressed through the control of this resource.
The possibility of simply recycling air rather than extracting it from sea water never replaced the emergency resort to hydrolysis as air supplies diminished rapidly. It was realized that the recycling of air would be much easier to maintain and require far fewer resources, however the upper class was unwilling to allow such change as it might upset their dominance and so such technologies never came into full effect.
To prevent the uprising of the lower class technological developments such as mass produced inexpensive virtual reality recliners are used to pacify the lower class. These virtual reality recliners interface with the human central nervous system through cheap and efficient nanosurgery in which very small sized machines enter into the human body to form connections with the nervous system. The interface is driven by asynchronous parallel protein processors. These systems keep the minds of the lower class away from their discontentment so as not to challenge the position of the upper class.
The scarcity of nonhuman animal species requires that meat either be synthesized or derived from other humans. The upper class consume exclusively synthetic meat and other non meat products while the lower class are unknowingly sold food derived from fellow underclassmen. The company Daumermeat is the primary distributor of such meat which is derived from the many occurrent deaths.
Technological and environmental developments are at the core of the United States state of extreme social stratification. Anybody hungry?

View the interior of a standard lower class dwelling.

The contents and ideas herein are the exclusive intellectual property of me and a few other people i worked with on a first year seminar project who I may later list with their permission (does anybody really wanna be associated with this?)