Triologues of Interdependent People

“Let me refine it: the classification should help us work with the assumption that boundaries exist in the economy. Suppose rules mostly define which red lines must not be crossed.”

“Classify by degree of freedom relative to behavioural boundaries?” Unkno ventured. “Something like estates?”

“Almost,” said Cernus. “Let me begin—with an extreme. Some economic actors treat all manner of boundaries with utter contempt.”

“Criminals, then?”

“Yes. But if we include those who aid them—willingly, unwittingly, or often without even realizing it—the aggregate represents significant economic flows. Beyond high passionarity, what characterizes such actors? What distinguishes them from ordinary ones?”

Rr. Unkno fell silent for a moment.

“They form strong bonds,” he finally said. “Their connections are often far stronger than any legally binding contract. Certain ‘codes.’ Honour.”

“Exactly!” Dr. Cernus exclaimed. “And note something crucial: these ‘strong interactions’ arise not only among passionaries themselves—whether in pairs or larger clans—but also between a passionate actor and an ordinary accomplice. Such ties are frequently much stronger than typical legal relationships. I needn’t cite prostitution (where illegal) or arms trafficking—though these, plus trade in other prohibited goods and services, constitute a share of any economy too large to ignore. Vast amounts of commerce occur in the ‘grey zone’—ordinary goods sold without proper certification for that territory. Ordinary people buy them in ordinary shops. True, big chains rarely carry such items—but small retailers almost always stock either counterfeit or dubious merchandise.”

“So what?” said Rr. Unkno. “They get caught, they don’t—does anyone feel hot or cold? The state suffers no harm as long as the criminal element remains small.”

“It remains small precisely because apprehending such actors yields little benefit—even for law enforcement. I wish to draw your attention to the fact that this turnover never enters official statistics. Or rather, it’s worse: it *does* enter, but indirectly—distorting the very correlations that would aid factor analysis. For example, bread consumption traditionally correlated with actual residential population density. But migrants bake flatbreads in mini-bakeries and sell them off the books. Electricity use, also tied to population density, suddenly diverges from the bread index. Thus, given how much migrant activity occurs in grey or black markets, this layer of actors is substantial. Moreover, these actors periodically spawn new dangerous hotspots—they’re constantly hunting for novel schemes. And this isn’t just about so-called phone scammers, who are prominent partly due to sponsorship by geopolitical rivals. All other rogues are equally alert. In short—these are plasma people. Charged.”

“Ah,” Rr. Unkno said, comprehension dawning. “I see where you’re headed at last. Then let’s call them *ionized*. ‘Charged’ sounds undeservedly positive for such actors.”

“Excellent,” Dr. Cernus smiled—but Rr. Unkno couldn’t see it. “Next, we consider the following stratum of economic actors, ranked by their reverence for boundaries.”

“I’ve already guessed. Now comes gas.”

“Yep. Or smoke. Broadly, everyone operating ‘through crypto’ and various kinds of remote workers. Also included are those ‘self-employed’ who route only a fraction of their turnover through special accounts or even sole-proprietorship accounts. This varies by country, but such actors abound everywhere. The state finds them extremely hard to track, let alone ‘mobilize’—by which I mean compel to do something the state wants, but which these individuals either dislike, find too tedious, or simply never learn about. They’re ‘cloud’ people. Airy.”

“There you go again, doctor—embellishing. *Gaseous*! It’s unseemly to use such poetic metaphor (equally unearned by these characters).”

“Incidentally,” Dr. Cernus added, “it’s precisely the gaseous who shape news and ideological agendas. Traditional media like TV and newspapers are now irrelevant in this regard; on social media, pro-government influencers compete with individuals who interpret state-imposed boundaries with extreme liberty. Depending on the regime, their informational influence is easily on par with the state’s. True, their narratives are fragmented—but they powerfully divert audiences who simply lack time not only to adopt any ruling clan’s viewpoint, but even to properly hear it.”

“I assume the next stratum is easy to guess. *Liquid*. Characterized by actors being much closer to one another than in the previous two.”

“Correct,” Dr. Cernus confirmed. “They aren’t bound by rigid frameworks, but exhibit a kind of ‘short-range order.’ Ordinary firms, ‘office plankton’—regular ‘free’ people and businesses. They likely form the majority, though not an overwhelming one. Notably, differences among them are small—in habits, income, worldview. They’re not kinetic; their minds slightly softened by calm, monotonous lives. They’re viscous—posing no danger, yet offering the state no reliable support. As a group, they change extremely slowly. They may shift jobs or even sectors, but overall, they constitute a stable volume—a watery constant.”

“Watery—let’s call them that,” said Unkno.

“And the final stratum,” Dr. Cernus declared conclusively, “is civil servants and various security personnel. Bureaucracy.”

“The deep state?” Unkno sought clarification.

“Yes. Including military personnel bound by military mortgages or rigid contracts. For these actors, freedom is a step left, a step right—that’s all. Essentially serfs. True, they could theoretically leave any day—but they remain not by estate, but by circumstance, which continues to hold them in place. These actors resemble atoms arranged in crystals: they form a periodically repeating internal structure. States orient much of their behaviour around them, though individually, these people wield little influence.”

“Corruption here, I presume?”

“Precisely! Thank you for that vital observation. Corruption—despite its overtly criminal nature—belongs squarely to this crystalline stratum. It’s a system-forming factor in any state, and largely *regulated*—not publicly acknowledged, but meticulously codified and documented.”

“Lobbying,” Unkno grunted.

“Thus, we have four strata: bonded, watery, gaseous, and ionized. Allow me now to formally introduce the concept of boundaries—the very ‘rules’ you mentioned in game-theoretic terms.”

“A permissible formal assumption,” Unkno conceded. “Call rules ‘boundaries.’ I even see where you’re going. The first stratum obeys all boundary types. The second (watery) ignores one type. The third (gaseous) ignores two. Ionized actors are constrained only at specific checkpoint boundaries.”

“Checkpoints,” Dr. Cernus emphasized.

“Border crossings? That’s only part of a boundary—a topological error. A thief belongs in prison, not passing customs.”

“When confined to non-standard prison cells, criminals either drop out of active agency or maintain their profile—e.g., as phone scammers. If a criminal holds managerial status, incarceration doesn’t always halt economic activity. Forced labour, meanwhile, is counted as civil-service labour. But the Belomorkanal era is over; few states derive serious economic output from such labour. Look—we’ve already described how actors at different levels differ in core properties. Now note: when identifying structural features, we must attend to process timescales. Within one stratum, durations are roughly of the same order; across countries, they differ by orders of magnitude. Criminal networks decide instantly. ‘Boring’ firms take months. But time and space are linked. Therefore…”

“Each stratum has its own characteristic spatial reference points,” Rr. Unkno interjected. “Actors within a stratum perturb boundaries with disturbances of comparable magnitude. You’re referring not to transaction sums, but to *how* boundaries are crossed—I take it?”

“Not money. More like ‘action’ or ‘mean free path,’ borrowing from statistical physics. Indeed, directly observed reductions in pressure on criminal networks immediately increase their occupied volume. Kinetically, this is simple: the ‘mean free path’ of constituent actors grows. Heating the solid, bonded stratum merely makes embedded actors vibrate more intensely in place, with negligible system-wide expansion—yet it possesses high heat capacity, storing energy usable for good or ill. Heating the liquid stratum, however, might inadvertently cause boiling—triggering mass flight into the gaseous state.”

“I see merit in your constructs, but your illustrations amount to a kind of reductionism.”

“Yet history shows such approaches often yield fruitful results,” Dr. Cernus agreed with the characterization.

“Then you must have the next obvious step ready: moving from your corpuscular model to a continuum one. That is, you must formulate an ‘interaction field’ and reveal its role in economic interaction.”

Without removing his left hand from the handlebars, Dr. Cernus raised his right toward the sky, culminating the gesture with an upward-pointing finger.

“I’m not seeking an analogue of ‘field,’” he said. “I assure you, phase space will suffice. Of the two known approaches to discovering regularities—dynamic and statistical—I need neither. I won’t seek regularities at all.”

“Because no one’s succeeded so far?” Unkno wasn’t surprised by the doctor’s stance.

“Partly that. Dynamic-type laws yield strictly deterministic predictions. Despite widespread use, this approach fails utterly in economics. Let’s drop political correctness: it’s become a common—even mandatory in many academic circles—form of charlatanism. In economics, only methods embracing imprecise, probabilistic outcomes make sense. For example, most images online are lossily compressed—that’s a statistical approach. AI sometimes ‘hallucinates.’”

“Often.”

“Often. Also a result of statistical methods. Again: dynamic regularities are defined by strict, unambiguous relationships in all cases. Negatively stated: where strict unambiguity is absent, no such regularities exist. From unambiguous links follows their equivalence—any considered relationship, regardless of the nature of the properties involved, is deemed equally necessary. This doesn’t work in economics—and cannot.”

“I get it, I get it,” Unkno urged. “You started saying something about phase space.”

“The point is,” Dr. Cernus said, “that unlike economic actors—individuals, firms, or non-profits—a transaction is a relatively simple entity. We can define certain states to describe it. Its active lifetime is secondary and variable. But if we take decision-makers as the unit of analysis—as is customary—we cannot construct a phase-space analogue.”

“One must treat the concept of ‘system state’ with caution,” Rr. Unkno intoned didactically. A faint scent of sweat clung to him. “Typically, it denotes a specific configuration that uniquely determines the system’s future evolution. Defining a state usually requires specifying a set of descriptive parameters, fixing initial conditions at a chosen time, and applying laws of motion. But as we’ve said, we shouldn’t expect to derive such laws. Thus, we must remember: we won’t know system states in the conventional sense. We can only know something akin to temperature.”

Dr. Cernus was slightly irked by Unkno’s patronizing tone—unwarranted by depth—but gave no sign:

“One could smile and recall the old quip about ‘average hospital temperature,’ but temperature truly is a vital system characteristic. For physical bodies, temperature changes can trigger transformations far more profound than mere spatial relocation—gas condensing to liquid, liquid freezing to solid, and so on.”

Unkno nodded silently—and they exchanged not a word until the checkpoint.

<>

3. Structural Crisis and the Laziness of Being

Chapter Three, in which Rr. Unkno and Dr. Cernus, en route to Kowshinovoh, outline the current crisis, its historical roots, and underlying logic.

~

During the intervening time, the doctor had reflected on what in his manner of speech might have provoked—even slightly—that unpleasant prosecutorial note in ritter Unkno’s tone. Dismissing outright the notion that it was mere intolerance of differing worldviews, yet reaching no firm conclusion, Cernus simply resolved to be even more pliable.

“Annoying, but I didn’t find time yesterday to sum up the day’s conversation,” Cernus said. “Now I’m ready.”

“By all means,” Unkno replied.

They were passing a crooked fence that once enclosed a great medieval polis. The doctor summarized:

“Instead of static equilibrium models, the Emperor should consider tracking accelerations—nonlinear shifts in value, saturation, and behavior—within a self-sufficient territory, of course. Textbooks describing ‘rational individuals’ are naive fictions that ignore real-world power, corruption, and systemic irrationality. The economy is structurally fragmented. Human systems obey the principle of ‘laziness,’ not scarcity. Order is defined by boundaries, not rules. Statistical—not deterministic—methods are valid. The proper unit of analysis is transactions, not agents. We can only measure ‘temperature,’ not truth.”

“Doesn’t it trouble you, Cernus,” Rr. Unkno said, offering no comment on the doctor’s compendium, “that our cities still fall short of the cantons of the Land of Mountain Fire?”

“That confederation is the only Western country where cities remain better kept. And for some reason, I can’t shake the feeling that the architects of both world wars live there—and likely those who now crave a third. Their acting Emperor is little more than a clown.”

“The nominal head of the last superpower must ‘be funny for everyone,’” Unkno countered. “Otherwise, no one would have cause to laugh… Do you not see this as cunning, Cernus?”

“That they’re pretending to be weakened? No. I don’t see it that way at all. Such a maneuver would be executed quite differently.”

“How so?”

“Solid materials can become brittle under deformation and fragile at low temperatures—that is, under energy deficit. We usually assume that initial defects in, say, multi-metal alloys only hasten their failure: microcracks grow into macrocracks, impurities cloud crystals, and so on. Yet if you deliberately engineer ‘twist defects’ into an alloy of niobium, tantalum, titanium, and hafnium from the outset, it becomes more resilient. If you embed extended regions within the crystal lattice where atoms sit ‘out of place,’ you’ve actually created a reserve of strength. Under stress, atoms have somewhere to ‘move’—the crystal already contains the necessary vacancies. And it’s precisely this property that allows wires made from such alloys to survive at liquid-helium temperatures.”

“Fascinating,” Rr. Unkno conceded. “What about their media policy? Could the absurdity built into it serve as just such a reserve of strength?”

“That, too, ought to have been done differently. Though I couldn’t say how, exactly. What’s happening now resembles more the Letters of Obscure Men of 1515.”

“And what was in them, besides the most venomous satire imaginable?”

“It was a clever blow by humanists against their chief enemies—the obscurantists of scholastic universities. Rather than argue directly, the humanists let their opponents ‘expose themselves’ in their own words. The book became a sensation, read like a gripping pamphlet, and dealt scholasticism a devastating blow in public opinion. The Letters didn’t merely defend Reuchlin—they became a manifesto of a new mindset, where mockery of ignorance proved mightier than any theological verdict.”

“And who’s being entertained now? Residents of the Land of Mountain Fire?”

“Possibly,” Cernus said. “We were, by the way, already discussing last night how… the West is on its last legs… No, I believe, we mentioned that the Western social contract had already become a ghost of its former self. The unspoken pact guaranteeing the fundamental attainability of the ‘Western dream’ through hard work has been forgotten. Their economy is on its last breath—still twitching, but the population has sunk deep and hopelessly into disillusionment about the future. Therefore, while dissecting this corpse, I believe it’s appropriate to sketch the defining features of past eras.”

“By all means, Doctor,” Unkno replied. “I hope you won’t rehash that tired vector of ‘-isms’: feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to socialism, and so on?”

“No,” Cernus admitted frankly. “I want to ‘sell’ you my metaphor of laziness. For millennia, what mattered most was capturing, holding, and defending. ‘Having,’ in modern terms—though they likely didn’t grasp the word then in its current legal sense. Arable land, hunting grounds, and more broadly, colonies. The scarcity of convenient harbors, straits, or silver mines defined rivalry. Thus, societies were dominated by the lower tiers of the well-known ‘hierarchy of needs,’ applied collectively. And failure then stemmed from the laziness of not securing safety.”

“How grim and brutal…” the ritter mouthed silently—then nodded firmly in agreement.

Dr. Cernus continued:

“Later, after the world transformed over just three or four generations, the crucial skill for centuries became organizing manufactories and establishing trade routes. The shortage of people willing to engage in disciplined labor defined the nature of competition. And failure now arose from a more natural kind of laziness—the laziness of not working.”

Unkno nodded again in approval.

“The next leap,” the doctor went on, “took less than a generation. Control shifted to connections—networks, software, derivatives, arbitrage, scaling. In the battle for attention, material downfall stemmed from a sorrowfully deceptive laziness—the laziness of not thinking. This era lasted only a few decades, once again compressing time by an order of magnitude.”

“And now,” the ritter interjected, “with the tectonic shift occurring in no more than five years, the world will be ruled by an utterly absurd laziness—the laziness of not wanting. The frog has been boiled slowly toward communism. And so we’re speaking of a new, fourth era—one that may last only a few years.”

“Or worse yet,” Dr. Cernus completed the thought, “not the laziness of wanting—but the laziness of being. It felt awkward when history was explained solely through external circumstances: from wars over land, to struggles over capital, to network battles. It’s clearer to center the human and his laziness as the fundamental property. Then we may consider that humanity doesn’t always change solely under ‘external’ pressure. In truth, person and environment are intertwined like young snakes in a knot. What matters to us? That this perspective lets us contemplate the human of an era where the primary control point will be (let us accept this as fact for now) artificial intelligence resources—even without those resources actually generating the economy.”

“Enough—I understand you,” Unkno said. “And since the foundation of everything is the commoner’s illusions, then political economy must be addressed to him. Agreed. The framework is workable. Will you also propose narratives for propaganda?”

“The ability and means to satisfy basic needs without diminishing the significance of one’s own ‘self’—through guaranteed access to the super-power of artificial intelligence. The end of the eon of laziness. For AI, by its nature, never grows lazy.”

“But what of the enormous energy requirements?”

“Merely halve the cost per kilogram to orbit, and durable data centers will begin filling space. Once that threshold is crossed, the cost of energy will match Earth’s cheapest sources. And savings from orbital centers will compound autonomously—because in high orbit, nothing threatens generation: the Sun’s light is infinite, and battery degradation is slow (no wind or dust).”

“The narrative is clear. What’s the practical program’s essence?”

⁂

“In updating the transaction—the atom of communication, including business exchange. The ancient transaction of the first era was divine in nature. People exchanged coins of metal only a god could ‘create.’ Emperors who debased coinage prudently declared themselves gods too, knowing otherwise their faces on money would lack legitimacy.”

“I might add,” ritter Unkno smiled, “that both the transaction process and wealth storage relied mostly on that same divine providence. Robbery was rampant.”

“Precisely. Millennia passed. The second era dawned. Transactions became matters of honor. God had vanished from them. For what is a banknote or a check, in essence? An invitation for your supplier to inspect your vault of valuables. A banknote rests on the honor of the issuing government. People speak of ‘public trust,’ but historically, it was honor. Checks depend on honor even more. When you pay for goods or services, you sign your bank’s form—this isn’t about shifting responsibility to a third party, as in our modern world, where you force the recipient to accept a third party’s rules. These days, you claim you’ll send funds to a certain account. What does that mean practically? That someone who, in your transaction, should care only about you, now faces a choice: receive no payment or sign a contract with someone else (a payment system). In those old transactions, the honor component partially blurred the material-monetary one.”

“Well observed,” Rr. Unkno said. “With a check, you received reputation as an inseparable bundle. The risk of robbery dropped by an order of magnitude, but now payment represented a probability—not certainty—of receiving funds, tied to another dimension of value space.”

“Exactly,” Cernus continued. “You’ve touched on risk. In essence, every transaction now carried three things: material value, reputation, and a measurable systemic risk. A third party entered. The transaction evolved from a simple vector ‘A to B’ into a graph, mathematically speaking. Still rudimentary: if you received a check, the bank (third party) would say, ‘The money is yours, regardless of your reputation or beliefs.’” Cernus paused to catch his breath. “But in the third era, the transaction graph grew increasingly dependent on the recipient. Fail to ‘show your face’—and money already sent might never arrive! Supposedly, you hold the ‘wrong’ view on some topic. Moreover, price could shift mid-transaction based on who you are or your circumstances. Frequent buyer? Automatic discount. And with varying tariffs across regions, price always depends on traits unrelated to the specific deal. Born in the Southern Marches? Pay more than other continents’ residents. The difference is small—but in systemic mathematics, the principle matters.”

Ritter Unkno shifted impatiently in his saddle. Cernus pressed on:

“The third era developed the full toolkit for transactions of any complexity. Smart contracts emerged—making the deal itself a temporary custodian of value to fulfill complex conditions (e.g., waiting for a full moon at each settlement). Processing speed hit practical limits—faster is unnecessary. Divisibility increased, enabling micropayments. Most importantly, one could now choose the third party’s involvement: exclude it entirely via decentralized platforms, or voluntarily engage it as escrow or arbitrator. Laws compel much we dislike, but we speak of principle. The transaction became a hypergraph. Now, in the fourth era, we must make it flexible.”

“And why?” Unkno asked.

“To justify the inevitable descent into poverty: less monetary component, but also less risk—and higher reputation. And to make risk and reputation visible in every deal, purchase, and social interaction.”

“How will you reduce risk? Reputation can be mutually assigned, but risk is objective. Each purchase reduces your assets—so subsequent transaction risk rises. Risk can’t be faked.”

“That’s precisely why I sought your counsel,” Dr. Cernus admitted.

“Risk can be dampened by reducing the division of labor,” Unkno declared. “It’s what drove the historical tectonics you described. Humans want to live better…”

“Not always,” Cernus interrupted. “Only when society permits it. In many eras and places, wanting a better life was forbidden—which is why few undertook anything.”