Trends: Unabomber World

Saw this in a recent exchange over Cicero's essay "Freedom". After discussing certain elements of the 1918 influenza virus and publication of its genome sequence, Celebrim adds this point. It's a good one, because it defines our future. As you read it, consider its importance to the present global situation, esp. in context of past Winds articles like The S.P.E.C.T.R.E. of Terror, Inc. Fred Ikle on Intelligence, WMDs and the Future, Tim Oren's chilling addendum in 3 Touchstones, 3 Conjectures, Winds of Change.NET's coverage of the bioweapon threat, indeed our entire 4HA: Nukes, Poisons, Germs Topic Archive.

The Mad Scientist Postulate
by 'Celebrim'

All this brings us back around to the real sense in which 'information wants to be free'. Viruses want to be free too, in the sense that it requires more work to contain a virus than it does to spread one. At some point in the 20th century (or possibly earlier) we crossed a threshold in which in the society that we had created information became more expensive to contain than to distribute. This is not necessarily a natural state for society or information. It's entirely possible that absent the cultural and technological infrastructure that we've created, it takes more work to distribute information than it does to contain it, but it is I would argue a necessary precondition for sustaining our culture are we know it.

Hence we are at a point at which, through great effort we've made information easy to distribute to our own immense benefit. This condition will sustain progress up until the point at which this increasing power 'liberates' a subcommunity which is both capable of and willing to destroy the system. As information becomes more readily attainable and technological capacity increases, the minimum size of a subcommunity capable of destroying the rest of the system decreases. At some point, there will be (at best) equilibrium. No further progress will be possible because the n% dissidents in the system will be able to destroy all the economic output of the other 1-n%. With sufficiently advanced technology, the ordinary person can hold the entire rest of humanity hostage just on the simple fact that it will always be easier to destroy things than create them. You could call this the 'mad scientist' postulate.

Some writers have called the point at which humanity escaped from a perpetual cycle of dictatorial military oligarchies with slave economies by creating an alternative system capable of outproducing them as 'The Exit'. I would argue that we are by no means out of the woods yet. I would argue that the next 'exit' will involve finding a means of escaping the 'mad scientist' postulate.