fantasy dystopian society where the magic underpinning society and the infrastructure of civilization is run by a powerful noble class of mages
plot twist: it is not magic at all. it is technology, which got so complex and society became so well-trained to not question how the technology works so people whose job was to maintain and repair and understand the tech wound up gaining power
@InspectorCaracal I kind of have a lot of criticisms of the implicit assumptions here, but I don’t want to spoil anyone’s day by getting all negative,
@ghost_bird If the criticisms are about the plausibility, then sure. I mean, it's not like I think it's ACTUALLY going to happen? It's the whole pointing out an element in society in fiction by exaggeration thing.
@InspectorCaracal More that I think money and ownership are the important things, not technical knowledge.
@ghost_bird Probably! The idea came from a combination of the idea of increasing reliance on technology we don't understand and the concept of cargo cults.
@InspectorCaracal It goes back to at least H G Wells as an idea, but I think it tends to reduce to flattery for nerds (if the nobles are benevolent) or a warning against giving the workers control of the means of production (if they’re not). And - crucially - we’ve been through several tech revolutions without it happening.
@ghost_bird ...well, yes, neither of those are what I was thinking, and none of those technology levels reached require *particularly* special knowledge to understand how they work.
Like, what I'm thinking is once technology is sufficiently complex or specialized that you can't reverse engineer it and build your own, or figure out how to fix it on your own if, say, the computational network for running traffic infrastructure malfunctioned.
@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 I'm kind of jumping between car-related analogies there but I think it still makes the point I'm aiming for decently well. 😅
@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.