security anarchy

I dreamed SHIELD had reinvented itself and recruited a whole bunch of self guiding agents
like, SHIELD provided labs, armoury, a giant library, meeting rooms, and cubicles to call your desk for the day
but then set SHIELD agents loose in all that and let them figure out what they wanted to chase

which has a few obvious flaws as a way of systematically monitoring global security threats

but makes it a whole lot more like the Avengers.

It's one of the things that bugs me about vigilante heroes in most settings, they pour all their time and resources into their particular Thing, and sometimes they've all got the same Thing and other times they have different spheres, but there's really uneven coverage. And at no point do vigilantes that aren't Batman sit down and study how they can, for instance, reduce crime the most with that money and those hours.

... Batman did the reading, went to college, made crime maps, and used the Wayne Foundation to systematically tackle the conditions and causes, plus paying a lot of attention to what the police commissioner and DA do. Even Green Arrow, attempting to be mayor, is a few layers short of that. And he and his team seem to tackle one case per episode, or possibly per night. Police have a few more things to do than that in Starling.

So setting resources the scale of SHIELD loose to follow their own interests... would have interesting results, but you'd get gigantic gaps in coverage because nobody thought Norfolk was sexy, for instance.

Intelligence work as academia? Although there's grants and funding that shapes where interest goes in academia.

So a dream that was mostly about a SHIELD agent showing Bucky and Steve how they were self guiding now is making me think about systems and how much or little use a hero model would even be.

It's flashy and impressive to be a hero.

But I think a lot of them do more good at their day jobs.