The Revolution Will Be Open-Carry
L. Neil Smith wrote *The Probability Broach* in 1977, published it in 1980, and set its dystopian "our world" chapters in 1987 — a future so close he could almost touch it, and so grim he clearly relished the contrast with his anarcho-capitalist utopia on the other side of the dimensional rift. The setup is familiar enough: a weary cop in a decaying America stumbles through a portal into a parallel world where the Whiskey Rebellion succeeded, Albert Gallatin replaced the Constitution with something closer to a libertarian fever dream, and everyone carries guns, pays no taxes, and lives to be two hundred. What's striking in 2026 is not the fantasy itself but the specific anxieties that generated it. Smith was writing in the aftermath of Watergate, stagflation, and the Church Committee revelations. His dystopian Denver — surveillance-saturated, economically hollowed, its public institutions crumbling under authoritarian austerity — reads less like 1987 and more like a composite sketch of grievances that have only intensified. Government seizure of corporations for retroactive tax violations? That sounded paranoid in 1980. It sounds like a Tuesday headline now, depending on which administration is in power and which tech company has fallen out of favor. The bugged offices, the hit-and-run assassinations of inconvenient officials, the casual lethality of state actors — Smith was extrapolating from COINTELPRO. He landed somewhere uncomfortably close to the documented playbook of several governments currently operating in the open.
Where Smith genuinely saw around corners was in technology and its relationship to power. His alternate world features something very like the internet — a ubiquitous "Telecom" network used for commerce, communication, forensic analysis, and what amounts to remote work. He imagined a society where most people work from home and value personal territory, connected by screens rather than commutes. He described DRM-free digital publishing in his own e-book preface with the zeal of a man who understood, decades early, that the container matters as much as the content. He even gestured toward the idea that accessible literature during economic hardship constitutes a political act. The Probability Broach itself — a device that opens a window between parallel realities — is less interesting as science fiction than as metaphor: Smith was arguing that the ability to *see* an alternative is itself revolutionary, that the most dangerous technology is the one that makes people realize their present is not inevitable. This is, functionally, the argument for the open internet, made before the internet existed.
But the blind spots are enormous, and they are the blind spots of the libertarian movement circa 1978, preserved in amber. Smith's utopia has solved racism by simply not mentioning it much — the Civil War never happened because slavery was abolished early through market mechanisms and moral suasion, a resolution so frictionless it borders on offensive. There are intelligent apes and dolphins granted personhood, which is charming, but the book has almost nothing to say about the structural inequalities that persist even in the absence of a state. Women appear primarily as love interests or healers. The economy runs on competing private currencies and voluntary exchange, with no apparent mechanism for addressing collective action problems, environmental degradation, or the tendency of unregulated markets to produce their own coercive monopolies — a tendency that 2026 has demonstrated with brutal clarity in the form of platform capitalism. Smith assumed that removing the state would remove the boot from the neck. He could not imagine, or chose not to imagine, that the boot might simply be rebranded. The book's villains are all Hamiltonians — statists, centralizers, authoritarians. There is no villain who is a private actor wielding market power as a weapon. In 2026, that absence is deafening.
*The Probability Broach* sits in an odd position in the corpus. It descends from Heinlein's libertarian streak — *The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress* is the obvious ancestor — and from the anarchist tradition of Kropotkin (name-checked directly via the character Lucy Kropotkin, a wink so broad it qualifies as a nudge). It anticipates the techno-libertarianism of the 1990s cypherpunks and the seasteading fantasists of the 2010s. It gave the Prometheus Award its template: the novel as political argument dressed in plot. What it gave its successors, for better and worse, was permission to treat worldbuilding as policy paper — to construct a society so thoroughly along ideological lines that the characters become tour guides rather than people. Win Bear is less a protagonist than a pair of eyes attached to a holster. The book's real energy is in its footnotes, its alternate timeline appendix, its arguments about currency and jurisprudence. Smith was not writing a novel so much as drafting a constitution and wrapping it in a chase scene.
Forty-six years later, the chase scene is dated. The constitution is still being debated, though not in the terms Smith would have preferred. The libertarian movement he championed has fractured into factions he might not recognize — some of them considerably less interested in individual rights than in dismantling the state so that other forms of power can operate without interference. His utopia assumed that armed, rational individuals would naturally converge on peaceful cooperation. The world has run that experiment in several directions simultaneously, and the results are mixed at best. So the question the book raises now, which it did not raise in 1980: If the state is abolished and every citizen is armed and networked and free, what exactly prevents the first person with enough capital and enough charisma from building a new state and calling it something else?