It all started when Spencer sent me a comment on my blog, asking me how I had personally answered the question I had mentioned in my review of Freedom: "But in Freedom, it is suddenly a question that you have to answer for yourselves. " (whether the Daemon is evil or good).
My response: WARNING: Below you will find a somewhat rambling, stream of consciousness style answer to your question. :) I am also very curious to hear what your opinion on the matter is, and what you think of my answer to it.
I'm not really sure. At the end of the story, they needed it, because they were no longer able to function without it, but they also would have never gotten into that giant mess in the first place if not for it's presence. I think they were, in many ways, better off because of the Daemon and the Darknet, but the considering the tremendous loss of life that it took to get there, I'm not sure if I would say it was worth it. Really, I think that the Daemon itself can't be good or evil. It's not a sentient being, and can't have good or bad intentions.
What I think really matters is the intentions of it's creator, Matthew Sobol. In the end, he seemed to have good intentions. He created a system that punished wrongdoers, and supported the grassroots community. Maybe what he realized was that the only way to get to that point was to force people to accept that they needed such a drastic change, which the Daemon did force them to do.
But, one major question still remains: was the loss of human life that it took to get to that endpoint worth it? I personally tend to value intention over actions, which forces me towards the conclusion that Sobol's Daemon was in the end a good creation. Of course, Sobol knew when he created the Daemon that he wouldn't ever have to live in a world where it was in control, so why should he care about the process, if the outcome was satisfactory.
So, really, I'm not sure. I would lean towards saying that it was good, but it's hard to say for sure, not knowing what a world without the Daemon would have looked like.
Spencer: WARNING: Here thar be a long, rambling pontification which is worse than unstructured, in that it is structured poorly :)
Hmm. I'm a utilitarian, so the outcome (total outcome: I do factor in the various bad things and loss of life that the Daemon caused in order to establish itself in the "outcome" of the decision to create the Daemon) is my main consideration. Whether Sobol's intentions were good (I agree that they were) and whether the Daemon itself could be said to have intentions (I agree that it cannot) aren't as important to me.
Although I have the same feeling that you do that Sobol's good intentions at least partially justified his decision. If you want to put yourself in a position where you pass the least judgment on others' decisions, you have to approve the decisions that are well-intentioned, since that way you affirm the decision-maker's ability to decide what is good and what will work. Let 'em do whatever they want so long as they're not evil-intentioned. Does that make any sense?
But back to the Daemon. The total outcome is what matters in my opinion. So what do I think of the total outcome?
Assuming that the Daemon's new government is stable enough to last for a long time, the loss of life seems fairly negligible. I mean, compared to either of the world wars I'm guessing the total death toll is relatively small, because the Daemon pitted forces against focused targets rather than pitting entire nations against each other. I could be off on this though, since it's been a long time since I've read Daemon.
So I would argue that if the state of the world is significantly better after the Daemon's takeover, then the Daemon is good. It seems like in the short term this is definitely true, even if you argue that some of the technologies the Daemon instituted would not have been implemented so flawlessly in real life. (Which you have to, because the technologies surely would not have been.) The Daemon improved the state of the world through redistribution of income (and all sorts of stuff like education), fairer and cheating-proof democracy and justice through secure, networked and constant voting, plus a system that gave everyone who wanted one a role in society. These things have little to do with technology and more to do with enforcing fairness.
It also made the world more like a game and in doing so created purpose for people who had lost a sense of purpose in real life.
Suarez also, crucially, built adaptability into the system, so that the Daemon could facilitate all sorts of other beneficial stuff and adapt to change.
However, this ability to change also represents a security risk. You raised an important point: "At the end of the story, they needed it, because they were no longer able to function without it". By removing existing political structure and forcing everyone to rely on the same infrastructure, the Daemon made the world a lot less robust. A single hacker who figured out how to game the system could cause immeasurable damage. I think Suarez would argue that infrastructure defense security people would be able to contain the damage, but if they could not and the Daemon were destroyed, the world would fall into anarchy and chaos. Or if the hacker/hacker's organization managed to turn the Daemon to their own ends fast enough to stymie the infrastructure defense people, they would essentially have unlimited power and the capacity to do all sorts of horrible things.
So in the end my evaluation of the Daemon comes down to how stable and un-game-able it turns out to be. If Suarez's argument that the people who believe in the Daemon will successfully be able to protect, update, and perpetuate it is valid, I'm all for the Daemon. But if it's hacked, the negative consequences would be enormous.
That's my take :) Looking forward to hearing what you think,
Me: I do think that you are right in saying that total outcome is more important in this particular situation. While I do highly value Sobol's good intentions, since he knew he would never actually see the Daemon in action, I don't think it's the most important factor to consider.
I also agree that long term stability (if the Daemon proved able to provide that) would negate the loss of life. I don't know what the death tolls would have been like, but it is probably true that it would have been less than many wars. While there seemed to be significant loss of life in certain area, and in certain groups of people, much of the world didn't fall into any of the target groups, and thus should have been fine.
My main problem with the entire idea is how dependent the entire world is on the Daemon at the end of the book. If they were able to function successfully without it, I think that the danger of it being hacked would be much less, because they could simply shut it down in an emergency, temporary, or, in an extreme case, forever. But because of their dependence on it, if someone did take over the system, they would be stuck in it. They could hope that, as you suggested, members of the community would be able to fix the damage, but in a worst-case scenario, they would have no way to "get away" from the Daemon, without causing mass chaos, which might arguably be worse than whatever damage the hacker caused.
I am leaning toward saying the Daemon is a good thing, though I think in the end, it defies any such simplistic categories. There is so much more information I would want before making a true analysis, but since that information was not available, I think that, considering just the information provided, I will say that the Daemon is good. Granted, it's risky, and there are plenty of possible issues, but I think that given what we have seen the Darknet community achieve in the past, and looking at the the whole matter with a bit of optimism (which admittedly, I'm not known for, but I'm trying. :D), I think my final analysis might have to be that the Daemon is good.
This is the thought process I imagine Sebek going through in the final pages of the book, when he makes the decision to keep the Daemon. He knew that society would devolve into chaos without it, and he knew that it had positive impacts so far, but he also realized that while trusting the Daemon itself was a huge risk, that wasn't actually who he was trusting. The Daemon was simply a facilitator (at least at that point) of an international community. He chose to trust the people, which, when you think about it, is really the only thing you can do in any society. Because, in the end, there are only people.
Spencer: I have to agree with that analysis. I like the idea that the Daemon, by the end of the book, has really become the community that has sprung up around it. If that's true, I'm definitely behind it. The more that the Daemon still has parts of itself hidden from the community, the less I'm inclined to trust its stability.
I wonder, if you were Sobol, what sort of contingency plan you would try to set up. You would probably train members of the community in what to do if large pieces of infrastructure fell apart.
I guess I'd also have to ask how integrated the Daemon is; to what extent it exists in loosely coupled pieces connected by humans versus being a tightly technically interwoven system. I would say that the more loosely coupled the Daemon is, the more robust it is. In the book the Daemon is mostly portrayed as being tightly integrated so that it can maintain its blitzkrieg, but as you were saying, the peacetime Daemon has ceded a lot of power to its human constituents, so I don't really know what the final state of the Daemon looks like.
In the end, I'd guess the Daemon is fairly robust and support it, but you're right: we don't have enough information :)
So there you have it. Our lengthy analysis of Daemon, and our final decision that it is indeed good.
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