I think whenever you start messing with Special Circumstances, you in for a wild ride and can pretty much count on being played, if not by the drones, then by the Minds running things behind the scenes. That’s kind of a signature aspect of Culture novels in some respects.

A lot of Culture novels contrast aspects of authoritarian societies vs the utopian Culture, and PoG is definitely no exception to that rule because Banks absolutely loathed authoritarianism/fascism and wasn’t very fond of capitalism either, IIRC. But in a lot of ways that is what makes his books so fun (for me). Quite a few very rich or very powerful people who think they can get away with things because The Culture is the good guys and have to play nice are quite surprised by what a benevolent society can get up to when it puts its mind and tech to it in Banks’ Culture novels. Such as finding a guy who just absolutely loves games amongst their zillions of happy citizens and partly manipulating/partly just pointing him in the direction of a game he hasn’t played before and weaponizing his idea of fun into a tool to take down an empire.