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@epictittus @thefinn @Jewpacabra @wingedhussar @SK1ZM @Escoffier @BowsacNoodle the complicator here is "technological power"

in feudal times, the ability to concentrate force was limited by very insurmountable structural problems; anything requiring "bodies" meant that you were relying on people who had, at the very minimum, the ability to change their minds

and anything you wanted to do required lots of those bodies - building things, fighting wars, searching for fugitives, standing guard

in order to make sure those people were doing what you wanted them to do, you needed more people at levels closer to your own, meaning that you surrendered some part of your power to ensure that you were still able to control your organization effectively, but that left you vulnerable to those managers changing their minds and using their authority over the people they were placed over to usurp yours ("elite circulation")

technology has made it possible to reduce the number of bodies for those tasks, by ensuring that they do not need to be all the places they used to need to be: instead of 1,000 guards patrolling the landscape, you need 20 dudes kitted out to the nines chilling in a barracks until the automated face-scanner plugged into your surveillance Panopticon tells you exactly where your bad-guy is and tracks him, at which point your squad shows up with a helicopter and a Bearcat and either waste him or roll him up, and you will get whichever of those outcomes you choose >99% of the time

more importantly, instead of worrying about what subset of that 1,000 dudes you used to need thinks about you and your policies, now you just need to make sure that those 20 dudes are happy and naturally inclined to participate in your program for reasons of sociopathy or personal gain; more importantly, you can keep tabs on each one of those 20 dudes yourself, or with a very flattened organization, making damn-sure they don't go off the reservation (and getting rid of them quickly if they do)

where things go from here is not clear, because this is not a condition that has existed before in human history (as far as we know); "Dune" represents one such envisioning, but many of the ideas inside it are fantastic (nobody would just give up "thinking machines") and that makes it a bad map

it is very clear, though, that old models and assumptions are not going to be a good guide for where we're headed