On Exploding Pagers, Gun Rights and the One Ring of Power

Lord of the Rings ring of power
A lot of trouble could have been avoided if there had been 430 million rings of power

The same principle [police can have any technology as long as I can too] can apply to larger, more centralized actors than local police. Think large companies and elite intelligence agencies. If the Mossad can pwn a multinational supply chain to secretly make 5000 pagers into remote-controlled bombs, what are the odds that the NSA…Chinese intelligence, MI6, and a half-dozen others can’t backdoor your phone? Not to do anything spectacular, and maybe not to do anything at all. Just to retain the ability to take a little peek if they ever really want to.

Play it out further. Think about remote kill switches in all new cars. Or 24/7 location monitoring, with the ability to dispatch a drone to your location. Or the ability to shut off your banking, or your comms. That’s all already doable today, and the rabbit hole only goes deeper. The incentives are just too strong, and the chokepoints in the hardware, software, and services are just too numerous. If you don’t worry about your government doing it to you, worry about a foreign one doing it. And vice versa.

So there isn’t really any use arguing about throwing the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Any entity who could carry it there will just put it on instead.

Philosophically, gun rights are unusual in that they go the other way. … The question is, what’s the optimal number of rings? Well, zero rings is just not going to happen. One ring is a bad idea, because someone will put it on and go full Gollum. So the optimal number of rings is, oh, 430 million. Anyone gets a ring as long as I get one too.

— Open Source Defense in For Whom the Pager Tolls

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2 thoughts on “On Exploding Pagers, Gun Rights and the One Ring of Power”

  1. Yamamoto may not have actually said something about a rifle behind each blade of grass, but that doesn’t make the underlying idea any less true.

  2. While firearms provide a level of insulation from bad actors, our ever-increasing use of and dependence on technology make us ever more vulnerable in other ways, as this article suggests. So vulnerable, in fact, that a ruthless evil entity could pretty much bring all of us to our knees without ever having to use firearms, ordnance, armored vehicles, artillery, ships, nor aircraft.

    Consider how you might be able to survive for several months without modern technology. That means no electricity, no natural gas nor propane, no municipal water, no sewer, no telephone/cell-phone/Internet, no credit/debit cards, and no access to any money that you think that you have in your bank/retirement accounts. And sooner rather than later, that could even mean no ability to drive a recently manufactured vehicle. Of course if you extend this total technology blackout to several years, it becomes that much harder to survive.

    Pro tip: even if you have the ultimate ability to live completely independent of modern technology, how are you going to pay your property taxes in perpetuity and retain unobstructed access to your property if you have no banking available to you and government finally ends use of cash?

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