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Well I agree, but the bros don't see this future. They see "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", or other Heinlein novel of space pioneers, where only luxuries need to be imported, the Moon (Mars, Ganymede) farming pioneers are utterly free, indeed have no government, much less policing. "Harsh Mistress" opens on a Moon with no effective government. But! It is growing, extending tunnels every day, adding crops, having babies, and exporting enough food to Earth to feed 'millions of starving Hindus'.

In short, the book opens with the Libertarian belief that government isn't actually needed, is simply parasitic...that's already proven. Indeed, the book is about them forming a government, which bums out the narrator, he considers leaving for the asteroids to find the Wild West again.

So if the Moon needs no government, it definitely needs no pee-database.

The Wild West (of fictional existence to start with) is what they want. All that fiction presumes that Earth is Old Europe, and Space is America, specifically the West after about 1800 - a place to be free of regulations and bureaucracy.

You couldn't be stabbing them in the very heart more cruelly, to point out it would be a life embedded in a hypersurveilled bureaucracy of a rule for everything. Which is why you must keep it up!

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This articulates the reason I’ve enjoyed The Expanse so much. It’s the first sf universe that made the necessary « servant class » such an integral part of the world building.

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