That's a scenario worth considering, but I still lean more toward it being control. There are degrees of control, and what you get from being able to starve a person by disabling their universal vaccine card, or by poisoning a troublemaker on his next injection to keep his card current, dwarfs what you get by employing propaganda cheats against an increasingly skeptical population.
Fossil fuels are basic to how we do things now, but I'm not sure they are absolutely needed to keep the current population alive. The key is how much food can be grown. Mechanization lets single farmers plant, weed, and harvest huge areas, while most of the population works at jobs that either keep the machinery running, or just make clerical work for other clerks.
If the tractors run out of gas, then it's back to hoes and handknives, and most people are employed as farmers on small plots. Given more tender, loving care to the crops, we might actually be able to produce more food than we do under the current system.
Seen from the top, though, solving peak oil by reducing the population might be appealing, because it allows the people on top to keep their fortunes and expand them as small owners die off and their property becomes available for a song. It would also allow them to prolong their own industrial privilege by reducing the base that uses fossil fuel, thus throttling its exhaustion.
That's a scenario worth considering, but I still lean more toward it being control. There are degrees of control, and what you get from being able to starve a person by disabling their universal vaccine card, or by poisoning a troublemaker on his next injection to keep his card current, dwarfs what you get by employing propaganda cheats against an increasingly skeptical population.
Fossil fuels are basic to how we do things now, but I'm not sure they are absolutely needed to keep the current population alive. The key is how much food can be grown. Mechanization lets single farmers plant, weed, and harvest huge areas, while most of the population works at jobs that either keep the machinery running, or just make clerical work for other clerks.
If the tractors run out of gas, then it's back to hoes and handknives, and most people are employed as farmers on small plots. Given more tender, loving care to the crops, we might actually be able to produce more food than we do under the current system.
Seen from the top, though, solving peak oil by reducing the population might be appealing, because it allows the people on top to keep their fortunes and expand them as small owners die off and their property becomes available for a song. It would also allow them to prolong their own industrial privilege by reducing the base that uses fossil fuel, thus throttling its exhaustion.
Interesting line of thought.