the difference between the Vesta situation and a Corpartion owned world ?
Motive? Specifically, the profit motive?
I am particularly interested in this development, as in just the past two days I've been thinking: what do you get when you start with genuine anarchy (meaning plain ruler-lessness, not spring-break chaos) and let it run for millennia? Just look around.
Someone gets hurt and scared. He wants to control things so that doesn't happen again. If he is no orator, has no persuasive skills, he's sunk; but if he's eloquent, he can persuade his leaderless group to accept some tiny, oh-so-reasonable restriction. . . .
No community goes from a state of adult-grade freedom to jackboots-on-the-face tyranny in one move. It's gradual, and it always starts with a scare.
The land of the free MUST be the land of the brave, because only the brave can face the fact that there is no security, not anywhere, ever.
You who want government fear your neighbor (with good reason, too -- as you know intimately well). So you deal with that fear by . . . electing or appointing him to office and giving him authority over you. Wow.
As a method of protection, creating government is on a par with tossing a fluffy blanket over your head and singing the Smurf song as loudly as you can. You still get mugged but you can neither see nor hear your mugger. Since you believe the blanket does protect you, you can only think, Cheez! If it's this bad
with the blanket, it must be ever so much worse without it! So, too, government: when your elected/appointed/anointed neighbors rob you, cheat you, renege on their promises to you, send you off to commit crimes you would never have committed otherwise, you can neither see nor hear this as being crimes against you.
You are not in fact any safer. John Smith is just as likely to be a liar/cheater/thief/killer as "Senator" Smith or "Officer" Smith as he is as just plain "Citizen" Smith -- but you hallucinate that his having a title
makes you safer, as if being in office magically changes his nature from "normal cussed human goat" to "semidivine border collie".
Pointing out the arbitrary ruthlessness of the whims of warlords in, say, Somalia only means you don't see the arbitrary ruthlessness of your government agents acting on
their whims in defiance of all the laws they've passed. You're getting mugged just the same but it doesn't "count" 'cos it's being done by The Elect(ed).
I'm very much looking forward to how Ceres deals with
this threat. They need to remain "the brave". When they start to fear, they will follow Vesta.
Maybe that's why frontier cultures tend to be anarchical -- the brave go to the frontier, the fearful stay home.