now, we all know about the problems with anything adjacent to time travel. if they were stealing the outcome of a investigation from the future, and then using that information to immediately enforcing the outcome, won't that mean the investigation never ends up happening? indeed

but, luckily, television license enforcement happens to be a simple enough problem that it works out neatly here.

the timeline forks at the point they ask the future about the investigation outcome. the first time around, there is no answer, and they investigate.

the second time around, they get the answer and immediately enforce the result. in the process of enforcement, they find out that, indeed, the person has a television, so there is no painful penalty for a false positive. weeks later, they send back the same answer. a neat loop.

it's so neat. well, it's too neat. it is not something you should be able to do. they were probably able to get away with it because television licensing is so inconsequential, and they managed to obfuscate the process so that licensing staff wouldn't know the power they had.

so, right, the lost media problem. you might see where this is going.

in 2006, some of those dead british men i spoke of earlier were still alive. they had spent more than half a century living with the knowledge of what they had done, resisting the temptation to use it again.

well, actually, we don't know if they resisted the temptation. i only know about two timelines: the one i'm writing this in, and the one i talk about in this story. it is possible that there are many timelines where they did succumb to temptation, and had to undo it.

so far i described these people as resisting temptation. but, like anyone else who discovers a way to leak future information into the present, they of course immediately devised and implemented a scheme that would give them the option of doing insider trading, if they wanted.

i said that they could leak one bit of data backwards in time, over a timespan of a few weeks. that sounds quite limited, but that's if you only pay the time, space and people cost once. with several people you have several bits. pay it repeatedly and the timespans can be chained

that makes it start to sound practical. but consider: this scheme is designed for insider trading. it is a conspiracy! the number of participants must be kept small to avoid detection, and for trading on information from the far future, they need to be committed for a long time.

the television licensing enforcers have it easy: they want very little information (yes or no), on a very short timespan (weeks), and since they have have had the actual meaning of their actions concealed from them, they can be employed in large numbers without problems.

suppose you want to convey a large message, with enough information needed to, say, save old doctor who episodes from being destroyed, so they can be found in the future. a message needs hundreds of bits, coveyed over many decades. you need a huge and long-lasting conspiracy.

well, the original insider trading conspiracy of old british men who worked in r&d was not large enough for this. it was a handful of people, in it for life for the fun of it. with regular meetings over a few decades, they could convey only a few bits of information back in time.

but, they had just enough bits that they could retroactively bootstrap a larger conspiracy if necessary. you don't need a lot of bits to do insider trades. if you can make a successful trade, you can hire more people for your conspiracy, and now you have more bits. virtuous cycle

the only problem with this scheme is now you have to maintain a multi-decade insider trading conspiracy with exponential growth in membership over time.

so, finally, what happened in 2006? well, you can probably guess at this point what occurred in many essentially identical 2006es: the tiny conspiracy of old men tried to use their half-century-long chain of side-channels to reach back a few decades and prevent media being lost.

but we don't live in a timeline where they succeeded, because… well, co-ordination problems are hard?

there could be a timeline where they do succeed, but i think a conspiracy of (at least) hundreds maintaining a causality loop of decades is just too big.

ok i'm done