As I was traveling through the George Bush International Airport at Houston (which George is not always clear) last week, I had the occasion to stand in the security line and take off my shoes. There was one of those canned recordings playing that usually reminds you not to leave your luggage unattended or take materials from anybody with an Al Qaeda T-shirt. In this case, however, it advised me that "inappropriate jokes or language" during the screening process would render me subject to arrest. Being too damn curious for my own good, I ventured a conversation with the bored TSA agent who had just used his decoder ring to discern that my driver's license carried the Ovaltine seal of approval, asking him what exactly constituted "inappropriate language." (I knew that "inappropriate jokes" would revolve around box cutters and bombs in my luggage--I'm not a complete freaking idiot.) He looked at me, apparently examining my chin for moron drool, and...

Two of my favorite SF authors--for completely different reasons--are the later A E Van Vogt and Larry Niven. Niven is the acknowledged dean of hard SF, while van Vogt was famous for the often dream-like quality of his stories. Both writers have dealt with the interesting question of whether society could survive in a state of anarchy: Van Vogt with his 1977 novel The Anachronistic Colossus and Niven with the short story "Cloak of Anarchy" (which you can read in its entirety here ). Curiously, both arrived at the same conclusion: for anarchy to work, there has to exist an impartial authority with the power to prevent or punish transgressions. Both use ubiquitous monitoring systems that are in virtually every public space, with the power to zap the perpetrators of force or fraud before--or immediately after--they commit an act of aggression. Both systems are designed to run normally without human intervention. Both systems are designed to allow you to do pretty much what...