The Mardi Bash, 1984, and SAC_2045's Sustainable War: How do we achieve peace if the Mardi bash' is right?
I'm going to put most of this under a spoiler, but this is inspired by a tag I once saw from @isaacsapphire: "the mardi bash was right". It stuck with me because it's an apt condensation of Great Powers diplomacy-via-proxy-war, and because I've seen more fiction recently that deals with the perpetual wars.
Spoilers follow for Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045's second season, and basically the entire Terra Ignota series starting with Too Like The Lightning. Spoilers also for the endgame of Worth The Candle and the early settings of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and The Matrix.
The Mardi bash was a think tank whose working theory of war was that the longer a period of peace there was, the more horrible the next war would be. They spent their lives to answer the question: How do you prevent the next war from being apocalyptic?
I. A list of solutions in Minecraft
SAC_2045's second season reveals that the first season's "sustainable war" — a Great Powers conflict managed by AIs and fought primarily with robots and mercenaries, to relieve international conflict via the minimum of violence and destruction necessary — was created and orchestrated by an American Empire AI called 19A4. 19A4's tasking included the requirement for world peace and a benefit to all humanity, but the American Empire should benefit the most.
Terra Ignota's OS Conspiracy is revealed to be a hereditary band of assassins who relieve inter-Hive (read: international) conflict via deaths chosen by human computers who can find the one person on Earth whose death will resolve the conflict. Their choice of whom to kill is subject to practical and political restrictions: only someone whose death will have a significant impact, only an unpromising person (no members of OS' own Humanist Hive), no one whose death will expose OS, no member of the European or Mitsubishi Hives.
Also in Terra Ignota, the Mardi bash' is a family group like OS, but rather than maintain peace in our time via assassination, they studied war. They concluded that long periods without armed conflict mean that technology advances beyond the knowledge of weaponization, and when a war occurs after a long period of peace, not-yet-weaponized technology is quickly weaponized in unanticipated ways. Too long without war, and we may end up with humanity-extincting weapons being used because no one knew that they would cause extinction. Therefore, says the Mardi bash', let us have a small war. A war which is not too extreme. A minimal number of deaths, to prevent more deaths.
OS says, let us kill this one person, so that interhive conflict does not result in a greater number of deaths.
JEDD MASON says: if we are to have war in the future, let the laws of war be the same as the laws of daily life, which means no killing now that we have nonlethal methods of making war.
19A4 and the sustainable-war AIs say, let us fight over here, because these deaths and destruction will maintain the greater international peace.
Did the wars in 1984 actually happen? Or was the description of the distant wars enough to relieve the population's need for war?
The culmination of these different technologies is the doublethink of The N in SAC_2045: Each person lives in a bubble which makes them content, as they carry on in a shared physical reality with every other person on the planet. This solution was set up by Takashi Shimamura, a high school student and programming prodigy interested in perceived-reality hacks.
Now for three other simulated-reality peaces:
The final Heaven of Worth The Candle, where a benevolent god helps you do whatever makes you happy. The world runs on narrativium now; what the new god says is what happens.
The initial setting of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, where a Three-Laws god helps you do whatever makes you happy. Your reality is implemented through physics hacks and the power of distributed computing.
The Matrix and The Animatrix use that same simulated reality, but put humanity in pods to support it. Their Earth is trashed by apocalyptic wars; the pod people provide the compute while the pods provide them life.
These benevolent gods tend to partition people off in their own realities, physically disjoint from the fantasies of other people. Not so for The N: their benevolent implementor has no godlike abilities. The N's doublethink software can only manipulate the Cartesian theatres of people who use cyberbrains. Their different perceived realities still overlap physically with each other and with the offline, so the doublethink has to make sure that no N actually takes action which destroys the world. Sisyphus' body rolls the rock up the hill each day; we must imagine his cyberbrain is happy.
II. Solutions in Minecraft
If the Mardi' bash is right, if a longer war makes the next war more terrible, how do we prevent that war's terrors? Indeed, how do we prevent the terrors not just of any particular future war, but of all wars?
A summary of answers:
OS puts off the war indefinitely, one murder at a time.
The Mardi' bash plans a small, safe war to interrupt the current happy peace, so that there may still be people left after the war scheduled for 300 years in the future, but they do not prevent the war.
JEDDM allows that there might be war, so let's make illegal for war to be lethal.
19A4 and the American Empire fold the upcoming war into the eternal, forever, small-scale conflicts called "sustainable war", which is more about stroking the AE's military-industrial complex' collective dick than it is about uplifting the rest of the world.
1984 tells people about all the successes they're having in the big war, but doesn't actually make their lives better or pleasant.
The Matrix gives people a happy life, so long as they're in pods hooked on to 1990s Simulator: Beige Edition.
Takashi Shumamura set up the software which links The N together, sharing a physical reality but perceiving whatever makes them happy.
Prime Intellect and the ascended Juniper Smith solve the problem by ending the world, but they're benevolent omnipotent gods, so they can do that.
III. But we're not in Minecraft, are we?
We don't seem to have a benevolent omnipotent god handy, and we don't have cyberbrains. We don't even have reliably-nonlethal weapons. Is the best solution to the problem of war the current status quo (ignoring Ukraine) of small lethal conflicts, or is there a better way to solve the tensions which give rise to war?
1984 proposed state control of the media environment in order to deceive a populace into a state of complacency. Would the information environment of 1984 work if people self-sorted into their desired filter bubbles, not just in the Internet, but in meatspace as well?
IIII. A preview of coming attractions
It looks like speculative fiction has caught up with the war in Afghanistan. But now I'm wondering about filter-bubbles, and the things which pop them. The neo-Victorians' media environment in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age and the social filters in Charles Stross' Accelerando come to mind as examples of the genre, but
What other stories address the effects of living in your own media environment?
How would the third season of SAC_2045 play out? I have my thoughts, but I'd like to know yours.
