1          Soul Bound

1.2        Taking Control

1.2.4      An Artful Carnivale

1.2.4.33   On desperate ground

They made their way back to the ladder and found that a dark hollow, beneath an overhang one third of the way up from the bottom, was actually a hole. The roughly excavated passage led slightly upwards for twenty meters, before connecting to a rickety spiral staircase with many treads wobbly and some missing entirely. They descended carefully.

Tomsk: {I wouldn’t like running up and down this for 48 hours straight, carrying armloads of fragile irreplaceable scrolls.}

Kafana: {It was probably kept in better repair back then. What would you like? Long term, I mean. Wellington wants privacy and is worried about misuse of expert systems. Bulgaria wants tiaras to be used to improve communication and understanding between people, rather than to control them. Bungo is worried about elite dynasties using their wealth to boost their lifespan and effective intelligence faster than the general population can learn to resist being manipulated by them. I don’t know what Alderney’s long term concerns are - I’m going to ask her tomorrow. And I’m still working out what I think myself.}

Tomsk: {Have you ever taken part in massed combat of the old-fashioned sort, with swords, shields and armour? The sort the Romans and Saxons engaged in, with thousands of heavy infantry, backed by spear wielders, archers and cavalry? The common soldier had little view of how the overall battle was progressing, and their emotions would range from overconfidence to terror as the lines surged backwards and forwards. This could go on for hours, with relatively few casualties, until the morale of the losing side plummeted far enough to turn an organised retreat into a rout. At that point the formations broke up, the winner’s cavalry would be unopposed in cutting down fleeing soldiers from behind and the losers would go from having only 10% or 15% casualties to having 90% or more, with the winners losing maybe only 5% of their troops.}

Kafana: {No. When did you get the chance?}

Tomsk: {I’ve not done it for real, but I’ve taken part in large scale re-enactments, in velife simulations and I’ve read accounts of the real battles. The interesting thing is why the victors don’t surround the losers, why they leave a narrow difficult path for them to try fleeing along. It turns out that if you get greedy and try to eliminate 100% of the enemy by entirely surrounding them, the enemy realises that they’ve nothing to lose by fighting as hard as they can. They count themselves as already dead and hurl themselves forwards wanting only to take down some of your forces before they die. You end up with far higher losses than if you’d given them the illusion of possible safety. Sometimes so high that your forces step back, allowing the enemy to escape for real. Only by counting themselves as dead were they able to live.}

Kafana: {"The cornered rat will bite the balls of the cat."}

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Tomsk: {Just so. Sun Tzu described it as being on “desperate ground”. The moral of the story is that people without hope are dangerous. Areas where people don’t see any prospect for life getting better, being worth living, are a breeding ground for extremism. The danger isn’t so much that extremists will win, will get what they want, as whether they’ll smash everything in their attempt to get it. Offensive technologies tend to precede defensive ones, and as the pace of technological change increases, society becomes more fragile - easier for just a few malcontents to smash. It used to take a significant fraction of the resources of a superpower such as America or the USSR to develop the capability to build and deploy sufficient nuclear weapons to send the human race back to the stone age. Nowadays Alderney can casually mention phoning up some pals of hers in orbit, and having them drop a large rock on a city. Wellington could probably send half the nuclear reactors on the planet into meltdown with a single computer virus, and Bungo has access to sufficient automated biology labs to make twenty different bioweapons if he so chose.}

Kafana gulped.

Kafana: {I hadn’t thought about it that way. Why haven’t we exterminated ourselves already?}

Tomsk: {Firstly, people with the skills and contacts of Wellington or Alderney are rare, and they tend not to be desperate, because the same things can earn them lots of money.}

Tomsk: {Secondly, unless you work entirely on your own, being a violent revolutionary is difficult given the amount of surveillance. Travel is restricted, deliveries are monitored, electronic communications are snooped upon. Expert systems look for patterns, and monitor who contacts whom, what they say and what they read. People are so used to this, they no longer notice it, and even reading about how prevalent it is and how to circumvent it can get you put on a watch list. Twenty years ago, Nadezhda would rant about it, and it is so much worse now. But it has probably staved off a repeat of the Bad Years more than once.}

Tomsk: {Lastly, China has been remarkably pragmatic. Outside the ‘Common Heritage Belt’ they’ve followed a live-and-let-live policy, not intervening in the internal affairs of other power blocks over humanitarian or civil liberty issues. “Each to their own culture”. The resulting lack of global cohesion has resulted in most extremist groups having local objectives, rather than trying to break the whole world.}

Kafana: {So carry on as things are?}

They reached the bottom of the stairs, deep in the bedrock, and started along a smooth oval passage that looked like it had been created with magic rather than by being dug out with tools. The only markings were boot scratches on the floor and sooty marks on the ceiling from carelessly held torches. Tomsk passed her the lantern and walked first, sword drawn.

Tomsk: {We can’t. Over the last five years automated laboratories and expert systems have improved to the point where hoards of competent mid-level scientists are being put out of work. Automated mining and manufacturing makes assembling bombs easier, and ubiquitous drone delivery makes dropping them simple. China may not be grinding other countries down, but that isn’t stopping corporate forces putting billions of people on desperate ground. And as unemployment grows, leaving more people on substance charity at the mercy of impersonal bureaucratic or corporate forces, more and more people are losing hope. This isn’t a stable situation. It’s the pause before the rout. The tipping point.}

Kafana: {Do you have a solution?}

Tomsk: {Loads. But what are their costs? And which solutions would enough people buy into for them to succeed?}