The State of the Art
25th March 2020
Severian sounds a warning.
The only differences between caveman days and the Current Year are scale and speed. The NKVD can deprive you of a lot more liberties, a lot more efficiently, than Mighty Pharaoh could. Mighty Pharaoh was a literal god on earth. He didn’t leave the fellaheen alone in their daily lives because he respected their autonomy (the very notion of personal autonomy was a few thousand years in the future when Mighty Pharaoh ruled). He didn’t monitor his subjects’ daily lives because he lacked the technology. That’s it. Put an Alexa in every mud hut along the Nile, and I promise you, Mighty Pharaoh would spend his days fucking with his slaves just on general principles.