How to Make a Miniature World

According to Charlie Stross, the science fiction writer, you really can't do it. It is a wild-eyed dream of fanatics who want to crawl back into a "simpler" past, especially one where they would be the overlords. Here's the starting bit of a fascinating post on Charlie Stross's blog Charlie's Diary:

There's a deceptively simple question that's been bugging me this week, and it is this:

What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

There are huge political ramifications hiding behind this question. Let me unpack them for you.

Conservative politicians in the US — and elsewhere — get a lot of mileage from appeals to false nostalgia, to a yearning for a time when things were simpler, everyone was sturdily self-sufficient or knew their place (or both), and government was small (sometimes small enough to drown in a bathtub). Nostalgia trips manifest themselves in all sorts of curious places. In SF (the literary field I know most about) we have the perennial libertarian/space colonization nexus.We have Ayn Rand, and her wish-fulfilment nerd fantasy of a world sustained by a tiny, overworked minority of geniuses who, if only they could demand a level of rewards corresponding to their work, would be rich beyond dreams of avarice (and able to make the trains run on time). Outside it, we have the peculiarly rustic aspirations of the green fringe, who'd like to see a world of five million or so pre-industrial humans living in harmony with nature. In the Republican party of the United States we see rhetoric couched in hatred for "big government", and among the UK's conservatives we see an almost masochistic addiction to cuts in public spending framed with calls for a big society in which many current government services will be delivered by voluntary citizens groups instead.

I think these ideas are mostly delusional because they rely on a fundamental misapprehension about the world around us — namely that we live in a society that can be made simple enough to comprehend.