Reposted from Zhihu; does not represent personal views.
Summary translation:
Modern slavery would end under atomized rebellion. Atomized rebellion means no program, no organization, no demands — just individuals taking random retaliatory action against society, attacking anyone they deem an “enemy”, even themselves. Each person becomes a one‑person insurgency, unconcerned with outcomes, focused on maximizing disruption.
Firepower is designed to suppress organized uprisings, not scattered individuals. Atomized rebellion is far costlier to contain than a collective one of the same scale. Ten thousand people as one army can be crushed by a modern military; ten thousand individuals acting at random in ten thousand places at random times against random targets overwhelm policing capacity. This is why modern rulers fear security wars more than frontal wars.
Information control (mass surveillance) preempts organized plots, but it struggles to predict spontaneous lone‑actor violence. Cameras can’t read intentions. Ban guns and they use knives; ban knives and they use cars; remove stones and they use bare hands. The insurgent is always on offense; the ruler is always reactive.
Moral condemnation also fails: atomized rebels may lack ideology and ethics, harming innocents without seeking to help or liberate anyone. There’s no faction to divide or negotiate with. You look around — everyone seems ordinary; you hold the sword but don’t know whom to punish or protect.
The principle stands: as rulers centralize slaves for exploitation, they fall to collective revolt; as they atomize slaves, they fall to atomized revolt. Like microbes that thrive as society grows pathological, such rebels spread with entropy that artillery can’t kill.
In the new era, “rebellion” is about disorder, not ideological opposition. Rebels need not target rulers; targeting reachable bystanders already undermines the system’s foundation because both slavery and contract societies rest on shared belief. Each “social‑revenge” incident increases disorder, pushing society toward the law of the jungle. As random aggression grows and individuals move like Brownian motion, the rules can no longer govern an ever‑entropic world — marking the end of slavery.