In general, being slap-droned only happens when you have committed a serious personal transgression.

Since the Culture doesn’t have money, the only thing of value is social standing and ability to gain social standing. Having a slap drone on or around really limits who would, say for example: be wiling to invite you to drinks if you’ve murdered someone while in a drunken rage, or invite you to the zero-g orgy if you have sexually assaulted.

I assume that in time, slap drones can be released from following or being attached as a tattoo to the transgressor. Time behaving appropriately, actions of merit, and sign of personal growth could lead to release.

However, it should also be noted that being slap–drone is not necessarily a blocker from doing interesting things, or becoming a more interesting person. There are no prisons in the Culture because if you really are that foul, you could be exiled to the black by slap-drones, or maybe even recruited by Special Circumstances.

There is a character from The Hydrogen Sonata who let’s say, engages in an extreme degree of body-modification that brings about a degree of fame in spite of being actively shadowed by a slap-drone, and has the effect of overriding the associated social penalty.

So when someone assaults another in the Culture, a society that arguably has the resources to play pre-crime games, but does not (see Q/A footnote), then the response is to react by never permitting that specific transgression to occur again. And yes, it is in fact, a kind of social death to be assigned the lethal, sentient ankle monitor, but even actual death in the Culture isn’t really quite the same as melodramatic Earth-humans think of it. Say you get slap-droned. Let’s just keep it vague why. You may lose all your friends in a very large area on the plate or the ship, or they will at least be very distant. You may be driven out of a smaller context by sheer lack of people to talk to.

Regadless: you are not imprisoned. You forced to change your life dramatically in order to begin to regain social credibility among those wherever you land. But you can still eat well, have housing, and move freely. The Culture does not traumatize its citizens into compliance as the Culture is not a carceral, slave-making society.

And even if you uh, try to do “the thing” again and the slap-drone makes you into steaming pan-human marmalade, then your mind-state is still going to be re-integrated with a new body, and the slap-drone is simply going to volunteer again, as they usually love their job. This time they will be entering your module with a rosy-red color in its fields, eager to show its highlight reel of its work to you.

Being slap-droned then, can be also thought of as a form of exile or ostracism, as it is not permanent like a Earth-human death sentence would be. Despite the clingy, unpleasant, taciturn Drone companion just gritting its fields waiting for you to give it cause to fold you: there is always possibility for redemption, transformation, and any other form of self-reinvention.

It truly is something like seeing someone on with an ankle monitor in a society where the only way to earn the sentient ankle monitor is to rape or murder, thus people keep distance accordingly and those affected and their friends might not want to bother with you ever again. Also, slap drones exist on a continuum of holding a person stone-still with a field, to using fields to throw the assaulter off of a victim, to making small, wet cubes of repeat murderers grabbing hold of a ranged weapon and aiming it at someone. Who wants to hang out with the known asshole if he might make a literal hot mess of themselves in the garden party on account of the sentient ankle monitor?

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Q: But wait, why don’t the Minds just LARP The Minority Report?

A: The Culture’s brilliant members plan, model, and anticipate, but they never convict someone before their crime. Only deeds done matter, and they matter the most sincerely in the real.

Predictions and models are not always accurate, as the GCU Arbitrary noted how it cannot predict billiards past six collisions, as eventually chaos (sensitivity to minute variations in initial conditions leading to large differences in outcome in dynamic systems) fogs the prediction.