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 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 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.