@ghost_bird Ehhh you aren't being too negative yet, don't worry xD

@ghost_bird It's sort of a cyberpunk dystopian future with a fantasy twist, really?

Thinking on the specific premise more, you'd likely wind up with the "good" areas which the elites who have the knowledge to maintain the infrastructure approve of or that follow their wishes, which is all clean and smooth and so forth, and then you have the "outside" areas which are lower tech level and considered lesser by the "nice" places but could be societally better to live in.

@InspectorCaracal Very much like where we live now, then?

@ghost_bird We're on the early edge of it, yes, but that level of technology hasn't yet made its way into the core infrastructure of civilization. Traffic lights are run by computers, but they're run by fairly simple computers and people can still navigate an intersection successfully in a car without them.

Imagine, by contrast, an endgame where self-driving cars running on cloud-based traffic data are the norm. The gap between "modern" cars and cars you can actually fix yourself becomes huge.

@ghost_bird I'm kind of jumping between car-related analogies there but I think it still makes the point I'm aiming for decently well. 😅

@InspectorCaracal A working steam railway, electrical power grid, or wooden sailing-ship absolutely do require special knowledge, though. To choose examples from three different revolutions.

@ghost_bird The key differences:

1) Those were important to the progression of the economy and technology, but not part of the basic infrastructure the average citizen relies on.

2) You can reverse-engineer all three of those, given access to the end result technology, and thus can figure out how to build your own train, or ship, or power grid from the things themselves.

@InspectorCaracal Hm. 1) All three of my examples were absolutely critical in their day even if we have alternatives now. And the electrical grid is more critical than ever, of course.

2) You underestimate how easy it would be to reverse-engineer (say) the metallurgy of a steam engine, the precision tools needed to make a dynamo bearing, or the navigation techniques you need to sail a ship.

@ghost_bird Ah! I think you are misinterpreting my differentiation between possible/not possible as easy/not possible.

I think you would need years or decades and a dedicated team of people to reverse engineer any of those things, but I don't think you could do it with a smartphone at all. You could revere engineer a *cellphone* out of a smartphone, probably, but I think that's as close as you could get without literally reinventing the technology yourself.

@ghost_bird If you give someone a smartphone and that person has no computer or software education, they can't really reverse engineer the phone itself and figure out how to build a smartphone, even if they dedicate years to the endeavor.

@InspectorCaracal And the same is true if they do have a software education. You’d need to be a chip designer and a software engineer and an electronic engineer and an inorganic chemist and...

@ghost_bird I'm genuinely not sure how this is supposed to be a case against my point... <.<

@InspectorCaracal You seemed to be granting a unique virtue to “computer education”. My point is that there’s no single specialty that allows complete control of a complex technology.
(Which is why - veering back to politics - power accumulates around the ability to grant or deny access, not the ability to create it.)

@ghost_bird Uhhh, no? I'm not talking about education at all, I'm talking about the possession of knowledge. o.O

@ghost_bird Oh, no, I'm not trying to say that the people who can MAKE the things are the ones who would have power. It's the people who have the knowledge of how the things work. Doesn't have to be education; it can be schematics and reference material and a cabal of specialists or any sort of combination of things that results in the collection and restriction of obscure yet necessary knowledge.

@ghost_bird In the particular scenario, it's not creation that's the key point of leverage, it's maintenance. I imagine the continued development and evolution of technology would stagnate at that point, especially if they have technology which would allow them to eliminate outside groups attempting to develop technology themselves to a competitive level.

@ghost_bird To tie in the "cargo cult" angle, it could even just be a massive bank of computers that only the "mages" have access, the necessary knowledge of how to find the data within the computers, and the knowledge of how to repair errors in the computer.

Ultimately this would collapse, as the mages' knowledge would inevitably either collapse into poorly understood ritual (like that episode of Star Trek with the generation ship) and render them vulnerable to core system failure, or (cont.)

@ghost_bird (cont.) another society would develop sufficiently competitive tech, or an internal power struggle would break apart the core leadership. But that's not really the part I'm interested in, as that's more a study of human nature and less of the societal implications of infrastructurally integral black-box technology.

@ghost_bird I think you overextrapolated my earlier comment about "a person without any computer or software education" to mean that a person WITH it would be able to, when in fact I was attempting to establish a baseline of zero. Rather, it is not to say "the education is key", but to establish that the point is a technology that people without any prior training cannot reverse engineer into a functional version of the same thing.

@ghost_bird Even so, there's already a societal drift towards the possession of information being the possession of power; so far, though, it's been manifesting as people using that to gain massive amounts of economic capital, rather than political - although there's already been moves towards the latter.

@ghost_bird Because, as you pointed out, we are already at that level of technology. The key element that hasn't yet been established - but is getting, imo, dangerously close - is the requirement for those technologies to continue running in order to maintain the basic infrastructure of contemporary civilization.

The recent trend for computerizing everything and putting everything on "the cloud" is basically sending us racing towards that cliff, though.

@InspectorCaracal Ah, OK. Then it sounds like all you’re really saying is that we’re adding another layer of critical infrastructure. Which is certainly true.
As for information as power... I’d say money and political power are inseparable and that what actually happens in a technological revolution is that the tiny minority who are able to get rich from it become part of the existing ruling class.

@ghost_bird Oh I agree completely on that last point.