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.
@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.