So many genies are long out of the bottle and just can't go back. Three and a half billion years into an unceasing arms race on this ball of rock, that is just the inescapable nature of things. Authoritarian regimes episodically make a run at controlling these genies but ultimately fail because the controls prove too horrifying, the temptations toward abuse too great, and the complexity ultimately unmanageable. We would do well instead to take a cue from the domains of security engineering and distributed systems, accept an imperfect universe, and strive to have fault-tolerant systems where the design leverages compensating controls and operators regularly perform root cause analysis on failures. There are more choices available to us than authoritarianism and anarchy.

For a full multi-media version of this episode with interesting links and related content: https://blog.awgibbs.com/2025/12/21/guns-germs-and-steel-and-a-few-other-uncomfortable-topics/