New Comedy! And a debate about the limits of free knowledge! · 11:49pm May 6th, 2016
Because you can't just get stories from me. You also have to get difficult questions! It turns out GaPJaxie isn't the only author who can write thinly disguised political-philosophical tracts!
But let's talk about the new story first:
Completely Safe in the Reference Section
After a harrowing and dangerous quest, Twilight Sparkle and her friends have recovered Excelsior's Ecstatic Codex from an evil zebra cult intent on ending the world. The Codex, one of the greatest works of dark magic ever forged, carries within its pages a limitless collection of vile, twisted spells, all specially devised for anypony who opens the cover.
What do you do with a book of dark magic? If you're Twilight Sparkle, you put it in your library. Because that's where books go.
After all, books are for everypony.
This was my entry in the most recent Writeoff competition, and I was fortunate enough to take the gold with it! This is the first time I've ever won a competition with a comedy, so I was really excited to do well this time. It's really weird because I'm known as a comedy writer (or, at least, I was back in the early days). So getting back to form like this was fun. Who knows, maybe I'll have to lighten up with my stories in the future?
Anyway, part two! The Debate!
If you haven't read Completely Safe in the Reference Section yet, well, please go do that. Daddy needs those view counts.
Okay, back? For those of you who ignored my wishes, let me summarize for you: although the story is sorta about a cursed book of dark magic, the real conflict is between Rarity and Twilight Sparkle. Twilight Sparkle, being a librarian and believer in the freedom of information, promptly puts the dark magic book in her library for anypony to read. Rarity, who has had some bad experiences with dark magic books, is aghast. The book should be hidden or destroyed.
You probably guessed by now, but the story is a metaphor for a conflict that our modern society is wrestling with every day: how much knowledge should be freely available? Do people deserve to know all about our national security secrets, courtesy of Edward Snowden? Should designs for 3D-printed guns be available on the internet? Should The Anarchist's Cookbook be in libraries?
What about Birth of a Nation, the first movie ever viewed in the White House? If you're not familiar, it's a brutally racist homage to the Old South, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. You can view it on YouTube if you want.
What about 'free speech zones' on universities? What about our comrade and fellow traveler Professor Melissa Click, who famously assaulted and threatened a student reporter who was trying to film the public protests at Mizzou?
What about the recipe for sarin gas? Ricin? It turns out they're surprisingly easy to manufacture, if you know how. Should we be able to know how?
So, that's our new comedy! Enjoy!
Well, I'd say free access to all knowledge isn't the real issue here. Of course knowledge should be available to all. The problem is that some lack the wisdom or morals to make decisions for the betterment of themselves and all mankind. Something like the code of ethics for engineers should be taught to all people first.
"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
-- P.C. Hodgell, Seeker's Mask
lol
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For me (and all of this is purely my opinion, and as we know opinions can, and might often be, wrong) it's not that I want the bad stuff out there for anyone to look at, it's more about the snowball effect of censorship and all that. If you say it's okay to block/erase/deny/censor one thing, it starts making it easier for whatever is next. It's an interesting debate though, because like it or not, there is most certainly a necessary amount of government control needed. The public shouldn't know everything either, not if it means lives are at stake, but it shouldn't be able to hide just anything, history especially. As for 3d printed guns and what not... I'm not exactly sure how I feel about that. So I'll stop there since now I feel even more confused.
At least Twilight didn't cast a spell allowing her to keep track of every book read by every patron of the library.
I've chatted with GaPJaxie on similar matters, and I'm sure you know how that lovable rapscallion's mind operates.
He's gotten me convinced that, whether or not it should be available, it inevitably will be. The anonymity and ubiquity of the Internet, free knowledge fighters, the Streisand Effect, Google's inability to forget, etc. all spell a future where knowledge will just be available, and no matter how noble a cause it might be to censor that data, it simply won't be feasible to. So it makes more sense to plan for how we'll live in that future, than to try to prevent it from occurring.
I'll not speak for Jax here, but my own thinking is that it's the gov't job to protect its citizens. If we or our children live in an age where I press Enter on my keyboard and a semi-automatic pistol pops out, the gov't will need to govern accordingly. And yeah, that's gonna mean more monitoring of Google history, and tighter security at public locations. Sure, we're bemoaning the airport full-body scanners today, but no one really bats an eye anymore if you go to a sports stadium and have to walk through a metal detector. Monitoring and security technology will grow more ubiquitous, more powerful, while also (feeling) less invasive.
So yeah, it won't really be possible to prevent someone from downloading 3d blueprints for a gun, or the instructions for making sarin gas, or doxxing me. But that information can still be used in ways that are illegal as fuck. So yeah, if you download that file, or purchase certain ingredients, or place a pizza order to someone's house in another state... boom, gov't watchlist. Computers will get more powerful and will be able to sift through this data to more accurate degrees over time. Does it suck that the gov't would know tons and tons about me? Sure. But I'm not a fan of choking on chemical agents, so...
It's the price of admission for participating in a society of instant gratification. If I want to see pics of a stegosaurus sandwich right now, nothing can stop me. In exchange, the gov't gets to know how many times I've googled "dirty bomb easy recipe". Seems like a sweet deal to me.
Can't stop the Signal.
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In exchange, everyone gets to know that you searched for pics of a stegosaurus sandwich and at what time, if they want to do so. Whether or not the government will be able to act on, or to even know about, the malicious cases is still unclear. I'm willing to bet that as technology improves, the government will have a more difficult time thwarting illegitimate uses of personal information, or really any information. Meanwhile, it's inevitable that personal information will become more public.
I believe the issue is about the clear and present danger each bit of knowledge poses.
A 3D blueprint for a working handgun should be as regulated as the handgun itself, the same way a construction plan needs validation from an architect or an engineer.
Aside from these extreme cases, though, we head into potential censorship territory; banning "Birth of a Nation" or, let's go all in, "Mein Kampf" does not kill the idea, and banning books is a highly abusable concept.
Speaking of abusable concepts, national security: what a minefield. I suppose on this topic it boils down to how much does one trust his government.
OK, here's a fun one for everyone to think about: a trivial, no-warning method of genetically engineering a future extinction event. Short version: design a tweak to one chromosome that will be passed along to all offspring. If the offspring has one copy, everything is fine. Eventually, when the population has been saturated with that tweak, you start getting offspring with two copies. The catch is simple: if you have two copies, you die.
We already know how to do this. The theory is well-known. The technology to do it exists. Someone could implement this with humans in a few years, using a lab they set up in their basement, and we wouldn't see it coming until it started rendering us infertile several generations from now. Absent more genetic tinkering (or massively invasive genetic screening), we'd lose most of the population. One suggested use is to eliminate any human faction who stands against genetic engineering.
Now, how do you suppress this? We can't ban biology textbooks or shut down all our labs. We can't ban the chemicals or equipment that would be needed. You can outlaw doing it, but that doesn't stop Americans from making moonshine, either. Once the genie is out of the bottle, he ain't going back in.
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That's a very alarmist reading of the article. Yes, the gene drive could be whipped up by two people. But in order to spread the genes they then have to apply it to 50 lbs of mosquitoes and release them into the wild to breed. That would be a couple of thousand mosquitoes. How are your hypothetical gene terrorists are going to infect a couple of thousand humans without anyone noticing what they're up to?
The really chilling part of the article isn't some far-fetched threat of human extinction, its the very real threat that humans will use it to wipe out unwanted species without having any clear understanding of the ecological impact.
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I was using it more as an example than anything. Creating something like that will be simple within a decade or two, unlike building nuclear weapons or something. It's a lot less noticeable than releasing poison gas. That sort of thing.
It reminds me of something else that's seldom addressed in softer science fiction. If you have the magical gravity-manipulating technology just lying around, used in household goods, you've given every man and his dog an instant thermonuclear weapon. Adjust the gravity field to compress a region rapidly, stick a balloon full of hydrogen in there, and boom: instant sunrise.
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By this logic, I should be able to make a hydrogen bomb with an air-compressor. Just because something is capable of compressing a gas does not mean it's capable of doing it hard enough, fast enough, to make a hydrogen fusion reaction.
There's no reason to sell civilians technology capable of this kind of feat and every reason to sell them tech that isn't. It doesn't have to be addressed by the 'softer' science fiction for precisely that reason. Unless you're saying that you can name an example of 'every man and his dog' have access to tech that can produce such incredible and rapid shifts in gravity? And don't say Mass Effect firing bullets with gravity manipulation. If that was all it took, I could make a hydrogen bomb by sticking hydrogen in a gun barrel in front of a bullet, corking the end, and firing. I'm pretty sure that won't work, so 'enough force to throw a bullet in one direction' is clearly insufficient.
In fact, current hydrogen bombs require a normal atomic bomb to go off first to compress they hydrogen. If you're handing out technology that can create compression waves equivalent to an atomic bomb blast, you don't need to worry about people making fusion bombs with it, because you've already given them a city-leveling weapon.
You're using a no-limits fallacy, basically. Just because something 'manipulates gravity' to an extent doesn't mean it can do it to any extent, just like the fact that my car 'runs on explosions' doesn't mean my engine can be used as a bunker-buster.
Sarin, Ricin, mustard gas, and many other very dangerous compounds are the result of basic chemistry. Nuclear weaponry is the result of physics and having developed the tools and acquired the appropriate raw material to fashion the right parts from them. A 3d-printable gun is an engineering party trick given that the required technology exists. As you've raised as the central element in your story, the question would seem to be less a matter of information, i.e. knowledge—which can be lost and rediscovered given time and curiosity—but of wisdom.
"Purple Smart's" premise of 'there is nothing that evil cannot do that good ponies cannot undo (given time)' by and large stands for Equestria. With the exception of the alternate timelines caused by Starlight Glimmer's meddling, this holds as the course of things. The idealism of her world allows it. (The denouement to the story and all its sub-arcs naturally support her perspective on the matter, I would note.)
Rarity's contention to that premise, that information will be abused, speaks more to our own world, which is certainly the point: "Stories about ponies are stories about people," after all. Earth plays host to domestic violence and mass shootings; genocide; famine; prejudicial intolerance and hate; nationalism turned awry; and so on. The possibility for real, tangible, enduring evil is ever present.
By being ignorant of the means of those who would do harm, one is vulnerable to harm by unknown means—by being aware of the means of those who would do harm, one is able to be forearmed. This is a corollary from the words of Sun Bin, written during the Warring States period over two thousand years ago: "…failing to win in war is how territory is lost and sovereignty threatened. This is why military matters must be examined." Understanding the nature of a nuclear weapon, stratagems can be devised to detect, deter, neutralize, preempt, and defend against their use. Understanding the chemistry of a corrosive gas informs monitoring of its manufacture and treatment against its effects. Therefore, is is obvious and necessary that this knowledge be retained.
Retained, but accessible to whom—is the crux of the matter. Everyone? Everyone but the insane, as stipulated by some metric? Only those whose professions demand their knowledge of it—need-to-know, in effect? Only academics? In an age of democratic dissemination of information, can placing limits on its access even be maintained—how far and wide can a single folder or flash memory drive spread?
What information lacks is wisdom. Pens can be lethal. Ice can be made into melt-away knives. Bows and arrows are lightly regulated and have no licensing akin to those of guns, but a quiver can hold much ammo. Household chemicals can be caustic or explosive. A car is capable of significant destruction. Yet of these things, rarely do they incite terror—instead in the public consciousness are guns, primarily with large clips and punishing rate of fire; instead are pressure-cookers stuffed with explosives and shrapnel. Read a manual, and one can put together a bomb to kill some people one hates… pick up a gun and one can do the same. To develop the skill to deliberately turn a pen or walking stick lethal—to build a gun at all, to engineer an explosive contraption, to use a bow with proficiency—is to understand that knowledge's value, and to find value in oneself. Rare is the individual who both creates destructive knowledge and who uses it.
Knowledge will spread. Limits can be imposed, but to trust it will be contained is foolhardy. Context for that knowledge—by any other name, wisdom—should be spread before and alongside it, wider, louder, and first. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to re-read every book on my shelf about Hiroshima and the gas fogs of the Western Front.
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Perhaps you missed the qualifications "magical" and "softer science fiction". We have universes where houses and vehicles have their own fusion reactors, which run on things like "grav-pinch fusion reactions". In those universes, the tech lying around explicitly does have that capability, and yet there's no special licensing requirements for owning such a thing. Let's not even touch universes like Star Trek where ships are powered by antimatter.
But let's go for a less-controversial soft-scifi example. Reactionless drives.
A reactionless drive doesn't need propellant, just an energy input. As long as it has a functioning reactor, it can continue to accelerate to any arbitrary speed. In some universes, everyone from the military down to tramp freighters and pleasure-craft have reactionless drives.
That means everyone has relativistic planet-killing missiles.
Haul your butt out to the edge of the target system. Set the autopilot on your missile-ship for the target planet (after removing any hypothetical failsafes in the nav software; if you can calculate the orbital mechanics, all your autopilot needs to do is go in a straight line). Engage the engines. Leave on another ship. Since there's no speed-limit in space (except for c), if you're far enough out, your ship can get up to 0.9c eventually, and then the target planet is toast. You can't reliably detect a relativistic weapon in time to stop one, so don't worry about defenses, especially if you can switch the drive off before you enter detection range at all.
For relativistic speeds, kinetic energy is
Ker = ((1/sqrt(1 - (v^2/c^2))) - 1) * m * c^2
which reduces to
Ker = ((1/sqrt(1 - p^2)) - 1) * m * 9e16
where m is the mass of the object in kg and p is the percentage of c
So, let's load up a supertanker-sized freighter and aim it at a planet, going at 0.9c
Ker = ((1/sqrt(1 - 0.9^2)) - 1) * 50,000,000 * 9e16
Ker = 5.8e24 joules, or 1.4e15 tons of TNT, or just over the total solar energy Earth receives in a year.
Logically, in a reactionless drive universe, nobody but the government should be allowed to own ships, and they'd all have crews with the same screening and multi-man rules that the modern nuclear weapons services have now. But that'd ruin all the fun, so authors just plain ignore the issue.
The American people are currently debating whether Trump or Hillary should have the bomb. Israel has an arsenal so that they can carve the name of a dead god across the desert should anyone actually impede their genocidal ambitions. England, the inventor of the concentration camp, has a fleet of nuclear subs ready in case they decide to go to war over another pissant island again. Putin has his own stockpile, in case a particularly large gathering of reporters he dislikes happens to assemble.
All information should be free because the people who might be "safeguarding" this information are the people that, from any objective standpoint, should not have it.
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These chromosomes already exist, tho. It wipes out populations of mice from time to time.
I can personally assure you that mice are prolific throughout the world despite this "killer" gene running loose.
The reality is that there is stuff which you're wise to keep under wraps, but if it is exposed, there's little point to trying to put it back in the bottle - the damage done by censorship to society is pretty severe, and moreover, a lot of information which is censored or classified is done for reasons other than public safety. Heck, the original lawsuit about classification - where the government refused to divulge information about a plane crash for "reasons of national security" - actually turned out to be "for reasons of not getting sued."
Moreover, a lot of information simply isn't all that harmful to make public. How to build an atomic bomb is public knowledge. Is there any point to censoring it? Not really. It is pretty obvious once you understand the principles behind nuclear fission (which cannot be kept secret for practical reasons - it is basic reality). Is it a big deal? Not really.
Same goes for any number of other things.
The reality is that, in the end, you can't really trust censors, and knowledge, while potentially dangerous in the wrong hands, is mostly potentially rather than actually dangerous. More people are killed every year by people building homemade bombs than atomic ones. Which knowledge is actually more dangerous?
Really, our general history of being poor at predicting what knowledge is, in fact, "dangerous" really just suggests that trying to keep knowledge secret is a fool's errand in the first place, as most "dangerous" knowledge isn't. Knowing how to make an atomic bomb is probably, in a very real practical sense, much less dangerous to the public than me knowing, say, martial arts, how to shoot a gun, or the fact that you can pretty much walk up to anyone on the street and shank them in the ribs at any time.
People mostly don't do this.
And really, the ones who do, the particular knowledge isn't the problem - the problem is the person. The correct solution is not to excise the knowledge, in that case, but to excise the people. After all, there are an enormous number of ways to hurt people, and you simply cannot control most of the knowledge in any meaningful way - heck, knives are readily available and pretty necessary tools. If they're dangerous with knowledge of how to make a gun, they're probably dangerous with kitchen knives, too.
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Why is it embarrassing to be naked?
Social norms. It isn't intrinsic to human nature.
Most personal information falls into this category. The reason why people are embarrassed if other people learn about their private hobbies is that it is seen as private, personal information.
In the future, as people's personal information becomes less private, these things matter less. I know enough people's fetishes now that knowing people's fetishes is no longer really a big deal to me.
Unless they actually fuck their dog. Then I'm going to be squicked.
But that's sort of the thing - most personal information really isn't a big deal. Does it matter that I went to Vanderbilt University? Does it matter that I a brony? A furry? Does it matter that I think RariJack is great? That I showed up at a protest once in 2004 with a sign that said "Welcome to the murderer of X many Americans," where X was the number of American soldiers who died in the Iraq war, because Bush was coming to town?
No. It doesn't matter. Because I don't care if people know.
When people no longer expect a piece of information to be private or hidden - if people find it strange that people even bother to hide it - then it stops mattering when it is public.
That's sort of the thing - people don't understand that when personal information ceases to be private, cultural norms about that information being publicly available will change. People simply will stop caring, because it is ordinarily available for everyone.
The main thing people will find upsetting is personal information which actually reflects poorly on them - a criminal record (which is already public), or, say, them cheating on their ex-wife. But is society really better off for people being able to conceal information like that? Even right now, anyone can speak up about a cheating ex, and there's nothing you can do about it if what they're saying is true or an opinion.
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We already have mutations like this in our genome. They're known as lethal alleles. They're present in all sorts of animals, from humans to Manx cats to any number of other things. One of the most obvious examples of this is cystic fibrosis.
The people who made this suggestion lack even a basic understanding of genetics, given double-lethal alleles are a common example in biology textbooks.
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Or, you know, because they're useful for everyone to have, they're not controlled at all. We have all sorts of dangerous stuff that isn't controlled at all because it doesn't particularly matter.
Really, though, any universe with such ships would likely not have anyone who would be willing to do it, as otherwise, it would happen on a regular basis.