You live in a far distant time and place somewhere in the universe - a desert planet - maybe. The place is lacking in vital substance, namely "water"! You thought that you could do something about this and harbouring all your effort, time and money in the search for it.
At last, you found it. By hook and by crook, you invested all your resources building infrastructure to bring water to your village.
Most of money, both yours and loans, had been spent on building the pipeline for bringing water in. You needed a big workforce for this, so you needed everyone to work for you.
Since your pipeline cuts through a long distance, you needed to own lots of land. Some you'd bought, some you cut deals with land owners. But why pay more when you can have for less. You bought cheap properties and setup a shopping town elsewhere and drove the price of properties up. People love shopping town. Perfect! Now the land you wanted are sold at discounted prices.
There was demand to maintain your healthy workforce, so you might as well invested in medical facilities and doctors and nurses. You ended up investing in these areas. New recruits need training. So you opened workshops, training centres, schools and eventually you invested in education system.
Later you realised people had all sorts of problems. Beside physical issues, they also stopped work when they are unhappy. You set up counselling centres to give people advices. However, you learned that the best way was for them to believe - to have faith. You needed some way to influence this in your favour. More money.
People also complained and fought when not happy. To maintain order of peace, you started training part of your workforce as security services. It was better that they should follow some basic rules, who had better be making these rules if not yourself. Now you'd got the laws under your payroll.
How do you keep all these things running - after all you were not doing this for charity! You started charging for your services. People needed to subscribe to get water into their places. Then there were these people who realised you were making lots of money. So they too started building their own pipelines. You didn't like that at all. You tried to talk them out but eventually you ended up fighting against them. With all the workforce you had, you trained them to fight. You now got an army. You won. However you realised that it was best not to fight them, but rather make them fight among themselves. The best way was to create civil war - to make your competitors have conflicts internally. Of course, you would fund them from both sides.
Now you started to be worried about your own image. People talked. They shouldn't be. In fact, they should not be thinking. So you created some forms of entertainment to keep them occupied when they were not working. Now you'd own the media which was very handy when it came to PR.
At last you seemed to get things under control. Things were just starting to build up on top of each other - network over networks, structure over structures, layer over layers. However, sometimes you thought that people were not working hard enough. Some you even considered lazy. You needed to keep them working - working for you. People don't like to be cheated. So if they felt that they owe you, they would work without complaining. So you set up financial systems that loan money out to people. It worked! People actually work for you and pay you their money!
Ah! You were tired. Tired but happy. These intricate web of control you've created worked magically. Although, it seemed to be fragile but you were confident that you'd got control over it - after all nothing could go wrong.
You turned on the tv, of course you could now relax. There was this news on the tv about this guy, somewhere in the suburb, claiming that he had discovered that there is water everywhere! He proved this with a very simple device, the one that anybody can build. This device can be placed in anybody's backyard and it would dig, it would dig and find water... For free!
What would you do?
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