The New Emperor's Clothes
In recent news, the Americans have discovered that their government has been looking at ways of effectively ruling the world. (You can even download the PDF of that briefing document, if you want.) Such fools, these mortals be.
The problem with the American (well, Republican American) point of view is that Empire is a silly thing to have. About the only thing that our historical experience of empires (and, yes, our empirical experience) has shown is that they are hard to manage and bring few long-term benefits to the dominant political entity. In fact, history shows us that only when great powers come to dynamic equilibrium do benefits accrue significantly to all.
Why isn't Empire, empirically speaking, a good idea? The obvious thing is that Empire is by nature inefficient. As Empire grows, the only thing that keeps it borderline efficient is the promulgation of universal values (i.e. the values, language(s), culture, religion etc of the Imperial overlord). If the imperial power fails to clone itself into the cultural DNA of every one of its subsidiary centres of authority, the day of imperial overstretch will arrive. Just as a rubber-band comes to grief more violently the greater the degree of overstretch, so too goes an empire.
One simple chain of reasoning will suffice to show why Empire doesn't work (and we won't even have to go to Edward Gibbon or Isaac Asimov for this). Consider a resource that occupies space and must be moved (which is most of them). The more locations that produce it, and to which it must be moved (and its consequent products as well), the more roads you need to build and maintain. This is why sea-lanes and air-routes are strategically vital for an empire; land empires have serious logistic problems. However, eventually even sea and air routes will fail, as the total transactions in physical terms multiply.
The solution is either to find transport with zero logistic cost (or close to it), or resources which require no transport (or close to none). In real terms, this means you develop teleportation or you became an information-driven empire. The former is not within our reach above the scale of the sub-atomic for now. The latter... ah ha, you might say.
No, information empires don't work either. Consider the necessity to store and process data. If you have a single datum, then it has no relationships with anything except the 'identity' relationship. It just is. You store it, and you need at least one more bit to store the information 'identity'. It therefore needs at least two bits to store one piece of information (as opposed to data). Consider two data points. They will have at least one relationship between them, and one 'identity' relationship each. So to store two points as information, you need five bits at least. For three data points, you have three 'identity' bits, three 1-to-1 bits, and perhaps three 1-to-2 bits and maybe a 'this is a chain' bit. It is obvious that for an empire of data, you would quickly bog down in a morass of unprocessed information.
But it is still possible for a pseudo-empire to flourish. If there are wise and intuitive leaders (or powerfully controlled decentralised authorities), they can decide what to throw away by rule of thumb. They might actually be able to cut the information load down to a minimum and wing it. This seems to be the driving force behind any empire that actually succeeds: willful ignorance. Paradoxically, a desire for unknowing may save a glutted empire. It is certainly no long-term solution, existing as it does on a wing and a prayer. But it may last long enough for the imperial power to put an eagle up in every courtyard before the whole shebang collapses.
The problem with the American (well, Republican American) point of view is that Empire is a silly thing to have. About the only thing that our historical experience of empires (and, yes, our empirical experience) has shown is that they are hard to manage and bring few long-term benefits to the dominant political entity. In fact, history shows us that only when great powers come to dynamic equilibrium do benefits accrue significantly to all.
Why isn't Empire, empirically speaking, a good idea? The obvious thing is that Empire is by nature inefficient. As Empire grows, the only thing that keeps it borderline efficient is the promulgation of universal values (i.e. the values, language(s), culture, religion etc of the Imperial overlord). If the imperial power fails to clone itself into the cultural DNA of every one of its subsidiary centres of authority, the day of imperial overstretch will arrive. Just as a rubber-band comes to grief more violently the greater the degree of overstretch, so too goes an empire.
One simple chain of reasoning will suffice to show why Empire doesn't work (and we won't even have to go to Edward Gibbon or Isaac Asimov for this). Consider a resource that occupies space and must be moved (which is most of them). The more locations that produce it, and to which it must be moved (and its consequent products as well), the more roads you need to build and maintain. This is why sea-lanes and air-routes are strategically vital for an empire; land empires have serious logistic problems. However, eventually even sea and air routes will fail, as the total transactions in physical terms multiply.
The solution is either to find transport with zero logistic cost (or close to it), or resources which require no transport (or close to none). In real terms, this means you develop teleportation or you became an information-driven empire. The former is not within our reach above the scale of the sub-atomic for now. The latter... ah ha, you might say.
No, information empires don't work either. Consider the necessity to store and process data. If you have a single datum, then it has no relationships with anything except the 'identity' relationship. It just is. You store it, and you need at least one more bit to store the information 'identity'. It therefore needs at least two bits to store one piece of information (as opposed to data). Consider two data points. They will have at least one relationship between them, and one 'identity' relationship each. So to store two points as information, you need five bits at least. For three data points, you have three 'identity' bits, three 1-to-1 bits, and perhaps three 1-to-2 bits and maybe a 'this is a chain' bit. It is obvious that for an empire of data, you would quickly bog down in a morass of unprocessed information.
But it is still possible for a pseudo-empire to flourish. If there are wise and intuitive leaders (or powerfully controlled decentralised authorities), they can decide what to throw away by rule of thumb. They might actually be able to cut the information load down to a minimum and wing it. This seems to be the driving force behind any empire that actually succeeds: willful ignorance. Paradoxically, a desire for unknowing may save a glutted empire. It is certainly no long-term solution, existing as it does on a wing and a prayer. But it may last long enough for the imperial power to put an eagle up in every courtyard before the whole shebang collapses.
Labels: Empire, Information, Management, Resources
etched with acid at 6:52:00 pm
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