|
|
|
|
Some notes on Empires |
OK, this is Anders' information theory of the rise and fall of empires :-)
[ This mainly deals with governments of some kind, which is by no means the only way an empire might work (the NoCoZo works by contractual obligations, Keter through transrational anarchy). But I'm interested in how the systems maintaining an unified society within an empire work, so let's call them governments. ]
Some thoughts: political control is limited by 1) information processing, 2) communications lags, 3) enforcement efficacy and 4) ethics/culture.
Governments are limited by the amount of information they can handle. Centralised governments are easily blocked by the complexity of reality if they must handle a too large domain (e.g. the Soviet Union and other planned economies). Distributing power helps a bit (the feudal lords do the local coordination, the king coordinates the lords), and by clever arrangements the distribution can manage more information (bureaucracies are a good example of this). Free markets work by putting most information processing outside the government, creating a bottom-up system instead of a top-down system - many, many agents doing the processing for themselves, but little allowance for central control. Information technology helps by raising the amount of information a single individual can manage - without writing civilisations based on laws cannot work, without printing democratic national states cannot exist (people cannot be informed about the issues otherwise), without advanced AI
Note that there is also a complication due to the fact that the government is part of what is being governed - there will be oversight committees, auditors, divisions of power etc. The logistic equation shows that there is an upper limit to the size of this kind of organisation. If N people can do kN units of useful work in a day (k is a constant), then the more people you have the more can be done. But if they need to communicate with each other to coordinate things, then they need to spend cN time on communication rather than work (c is another constant), and the total efficiency is kN(1-cN). This increases for small N, up to a maximum at N=k/2c. Beyond this point each new person will decrease performance simply because of the bureaucratic load. Information technology can increase k and to some extent c (phones instead of mail, email instead of phones, direct neural communication instead of email), organisation helps c to some extent.
Governments also need to be able to respond to what is happening within their domains. On Earth most empires seem to have been the size that a messenger could get from the border to the capital in a few days, at most a few weeks. Larger empires couldn't hold together well, or had to be decentralised (like the provinces of China, which also did splinter several times). As communications get better, the size of empires can grow. Today the Earth is well within the communication limit, and the entire solar system can be handled using radio. Without FTL interstellar governments are unlikely unless they rely heavily on decentralised local powers.
In OA we can make the assumption that some things do change, like the timescales of government. If we accept that AI and subrelativistic transports force a slowing of social change and the emergence of stable societies, then empires could presumably work with at least decades-long delays (First Federation era) or even centuries (Version War). However, this likely requires super-rational AI that can deduce what other equally bright AIs on the same side would do.
Enforcement is another important issue. Unless you can enforce the government's rules, they will not be followed if they limit the desires of citizens. Enforcement is heavily technology dependent, both in means and how quickly it can be sent anywhere. The Roman empire worked because it could send the legions so quickly to trouble-spots. Most likely you need to be able to send enforcement as fast as communications or within an order of magnitude of that speed to keep things together. Otherwise a rebellion can spread faster than the army can reach it.
In general enforcement is just deterrence - the police will take you if you don't pay taxes, the army will come for you if you rebel. Effective deterrence hinges on the appearance of coercive ability - you can and will use force if needed. If the government cannot or is unlikely to want to use coercion it has no real power. Beside the usual form of physical coercion (obey or die/suffer), in OA there also exists possible forms of mental coercion (obedience nanites, memetic therapy) which is a new factor. It doesn't seem to be that different from physical force in this context though, the effect is just a very effective coercion if it is used.
Some governments may have limited coercive power, but instead work by deterring through economic or social sanctions. The NoCoZo works because the price of disobeying the rules is so much higher than what you might benefit from doing it.
In OA the real limit to military force is sending ships relativistically. Most likely this has a range of a few hundred lightyears - not even the hyperturings can handle things beyond this communications distance. So outside the wormhole skeleton of the empires each has a hundred-lightyear zone where it can exert power of different kinds before being too slow and attenuated.
Note that if people can escape from the power, it will be much weakened. Space is so large that self-sufficient habitats can hide with virtually no chance of being detected. Iain M. Banks pointed out in "Some Notes on the Culture" that once self-sufficient habitats become possible and sufficiently movable, coercive central governments will not be possible. Although some assumptions may not hold it suggests that the empires will to a large extent be based on non-coercive influence - trade, culture, memes. Keeping an empire together by force results in the Conver Ambi disaster or the chaos of the Centauri Region.
A ruthless government is still limited by 1-3, and e.g. the current liberal-democratic nations often seem to run into 4 (we *could* wipe out renegade nations and turn our nations into police states, but powerful cultural reasons make this unlikely and it would be strongly opposed internally). Future aiocracies would be very dependent on the values of the AIs.
So, what does all this mean?
The Information Age earth was information-wise and communication-wise able to turn into a single government, but the mixed culture and multitude of interests prevented this from happening - a lot of people were highly independent (largely thanks to the technology and the cultures).
In the interplanetary era enforcement was too weak to create a single empire. It was slowly becoming more powerful, and if the nanodisaster had not happened it would likely have reached the point where a system-wide government would have been possible. Maybe after a final nano-showdown or economic competition the Orbitals or the Gengineer Republic would have been the single victor. However, not event then it could have prevented people from clading off or moving outwards.
The First Federation achieved a systemwide government, largely based on dividing the governing information problem into smaller chunks in the form of all the independent groups. It was able to keep an unified culture within the solar system, but failed over interstellar distances. Also, when it centralised it lost more and more of its efficiency, until it reached a bureaucratic collapse and the top level vanished in the solar civil war. It was replaced simply by the independent polities, which eventually recreated a more stable and less heavy solar organisation.
The megacorps turning empires of the federation era were likely limited by communications. At first enforcement was limited, just economic and contractual ties. Belonging to an empire was largely an economic issue. As communications got better and the AIs could manage longer spans, the size of their domains could increase. However, they still couldn't enforce their will efficiently, so either they had to be highly decentralised (the NoCoZo approach), rely on local governments (Taurus Nexus) or manipulate their culture (the Conver Ambi approach).
With wormholes things got much easier - suddenly governments could send force to trouble spots within a few days, nearly as fast as information could spread. Also, the wormholes made perfect chokepoints and were in themselves a way of controlling systems. The empires went from being based on convincing people to obey to able to force them to it. However, there was also a large frontier that was becoming easier to reach, so either you went for very heavy coercion (nanocracies, cliographic societies, pharmacracies) or still employed economic, cultural or ideological means to keep people in the empire. This could be done in a wide variety of ways, making it possible to set up many very different empires.
The early wormhole empires were solidified by femtotech AI, which made it possible to not just maintain the empires but also influence the surrounding relativistic space a few hundred lightyears away. This created the "modern" empires.
The current era of fragmentation is part due to the spread of powerful technology and high-level AI to new groups - the old empires do not have a monopoly any more, and the power of smaller empires is growing. The old empires have reached their bureaucratic limits and cannot expand, while outside them new ones are developing. Also, the cultural power of the empires is waning, as member cultures have grown so old and diverse that no amount of memetic management can keep them together.
