Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt

@60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net

Say what you will about anarchic space cossacks, but it's really hard to screw up the air terminally in a space city with three to five commercial life support companies and dozens if not hundreds of belter rednecks with their own algae banks gurgling away.

@60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net

Once in a much earlier iteration of this topic, I opined that the problem was the assumption of single-provider life support such that any violation of strict discipline could theoretically take it out - which is not only bad social design, but really terrible *engineering* design.

@isaackuo @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net

Well, then, just to grind my axe in a less expected direction, let me take a moment to point out that we can see exactly the same failure modes in corporations with the equivalent strict "social" control, too.

(In this particular area my politics is that "any system isomorphic to sticking your hands over your eyes and fingers in your ears when confronted with feedback is a very bad system indeed" 😊.)

@nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net

Apart from the, ah, joyful societies authoritarian leaders usually create, of course, the *real* social failure mode is when the guy in charge of the strict social control comes up with the space version of the Four Pests Campaign or making steel in backyard furnaces and the population are unable to tell him he's full of crap before everyone's dead.

("Complaining about the smell of the air is unmutual, citizen!")

@nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net

Being who I am, I’m increasingly inclined to write the IES article on social failure modes of space habitats: to wit, that the meme which states they require tight social control to function basically makes them catnip for all the authoritarian personality types in the area.

trolling people by referring to roughly 2/3 of the globe as "unceded English land"

Everyone wants to dismantle capitalism, but no-one wants to mantle capitalism.

In, I hasten to add, a purely Elder-Scrolls-metaphysics sense.

I SHALL BECOME IT IN EVERY ASPECT.

AND IT, NECESSARILY, SHALL BECOME ME.

Among the many things I have learned in life is the vital importance of not confusing a tsunami with a tsundere.

Or vice versa.

@AstroHawk

Once we put a thousand-mile radius moon in a below-1,200 mile-altitude orbit? We're gonna have tsunamis in the _rock_.

@AstroHawk

When the Moon hits your eye /
'Cause it covers the sky /
That's Armageddon.

@foone

Hell. Yes.

@nyrath @Hcobb @isaackuo @MeiLin

(You can patch this with some notions like "every colony sends out n expeditions of its own then suddenly gets permabored with the whole idea of expansion", but like you say, it only takes one defector to blow up the whole thing.)

@nyrath @Hcobb @isaackuo @MeiLin

Applying the same principles to growth-obsessed societies/peoples suggest to me that GFGS civs are acutely vulnerable to breaking down into civil resource wars - and, if you're using relativistic transports, probably the kind of civil resource wars that leave nothing behind except the Cancer Emulation Is Not A Viable Strategy Memorial Stellar Graveyard of 3162.

@nyrath @Hcobb @isaackuo @MeiLin Actually, while I contemplate cancer analogies for growth-for-growth's sake, it occurs to me that there are obvious modes of failure that apply to tumors which also apply to GFGS civilizations.

Necrosis, in which logistic problems starve the center; and cancer-gets-cancer, in which attacking your neighbors to expand into their territory provides better returns than trying to expand into the now-distant margin of the tumor/sphere.

@zarpaulus

Kinda my point.

Well, one of them.

@MeiLin @isaackuo @Hcobb @cstross

But without the internet, how would they be able to tell people they were wrong on the internet?

(Ha ha only serious: I have observed that one of the apparently exquisite pleasures available to the minority doing it right is the joy of arguing with the majority doing it wrong, and that it's really, really hard to give that addiction up.)

@MeiLin @isaackuo @Hcobb @cstross

On the other hand, back then the information/communications density people were used to at home was orders of magnitude less than it is today. The information density gap is much bigger than it used to be.

(Step two, for those not paying attention, is the part where you conclude consciously or subconsciously that your immense caring grants you an exemption to all the ethical rules standing between you and the full fascist fucknuggetry you just thought of.)