How Power Adapts

The earlier chapters modeled an adversary who attacks the architecture. This chapter models an adversary who studies it.

There is a critique of everything that has preceded this chapter, and it is the most serious critique the architecture faces. The critique is that the entire treatment of capture and resistance has modeled power as static. The anti-capture architecture of Chapter Eleven inventories capture mechanisms and designs responses. The contact problem of Chapter Twenty examines co-optation and scaling pressure. But all of this models power as a force that pushes against the architecture in predictable ways, against which the architecture can be designed in advance. This is not how power actually behaves.

Power is adaptive. Power studies the architecture that resists it, identifies the resistance mechanisms, and evolves past them. An adversary who wants to capture Providence does not attack the anti-capture architecture head-on, because the anti-capture architecture is designed to resist exactly that attack. The adaptive adversary reads Chapter Eleven, understands the mechanisms, and designs an approach that the mechanisms do not anticipate. The most dangerous adversary Providence will face is not the one who has not read the architecture. It is the one who has read it more carefully than its builders, and who is patient enough to evolve past it.

This chapter attempts to model that adversary directly. It is the chapter the earlier parts could not write, because the earlier parts were establishing the architecture, and one cannot model the adaptive defeat of an architecture before the architecture exists. Now that it exists, the question can be asked: how does power adapt to Providence, and how — if at all — does Providence survive an adversary who is studying it in order to evolve?