The End of Industrial Society
palladiummag.com
palladiummag.com
Samo Burja, the author, is undoubtedly a more serious and educated person. However, he promotes a “Great Founder Theory” which is not so very different from the old “great man theory” of history.
To a large extent, I applaud anyone who can make a good living grifting off of Thiel’s self-regard, but most political economy essays should be read skeptically, and doubly so for anything in Palladium.
Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are.
The stage elaborate public things to legitimize their power.
The Pharaohs themselves lived an entirely 'stage performed' existence to convince the plebes of their ostensible legitimacy.
There are 'other groups' with power, whereupon the public knowledge of their influence would be to their detriment, and they were not 'aristocrats' though they would have probably desperately like to be that.
This is only true in a limited sense. The single most important justification for the King's power has been his divine right: a doctrine of preordained power that no earthly force can usurp. This works pretty well on illiterate peasants who fear divine retribution, but the cat is more or less out of the bag on that front.
And note: that is the justification for power, which defines its perception. A king's true source of power has historically been his wealth (and therefore the size of his army and supporting court), or the support of extremely wealthy parties (churches, merchant classes, etc.). Every regent in history has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the public from realizing that he is just a man, one whose wealth (and therefore power) can be taken.
This is largely why the French Revolution was so vehemently opposed by foreign leaders and why they tried almost everything to get another king on the throne in France or to destroy it trying. It was a living, breathing, functioning and preferable alternative to monarchy. If not clamped down upon it was only a matter of time until it spread.
One of the things the right wing (especially the religious right) in the US does far better than any other groups is to claim lofty egalitarian or noble-minded principals while not applying them to themselves.
But if we throw that out, and want to embrace the cynicism, why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"?
After all, we know disruption and innovation rarely comes from big incumbents. Tax the shit out of them and turn that into funding and options for the rest.
EDIT: there's a good tie-in there, actually - make it legible, that makes it easier to regulate and tax! ... Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power. So that seems like the real motive, here.
> why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"?
The two can easily go hand in hand. In Classical Greece, being publicly acknowledged as "rich" meant that you would be forced to pay for public works. (And the public valuation of your assets was backed by an offer to exchange them for cash! So if you thought that the valuation was too high, you could take the offer and be better off in the end. How much is a Harvard tenured professor position worth, in the modern day and age?)
> Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power.
Because trust is a positive sum game. Lack of transparency is only an advantage to those who plan to take advantage of it. This is how more limited and legible ("formalized") power can translate to enhanced power.
> A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not.
"Whether or not they should be legible or not" is not the only remaining question. Nor, I think, is "legible" the right word for what seems like it's being proposed - a return to "aristocracy" is not about just labeling, it's about formalizing and legitimizing power. Legible is a flashlight, not a scepter.
In recent history it's not even a particularly primary one compared to "how much should we tax, regulate, and break up those elites." In more violent revolutions, it's also been "should they get the guillotine?" You're talking purely legibility and not "accountability" or "what happens next." I think things are legible enough that we could hold the powerful more accountable than we do today if we wanted to. Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help.
And that violent example is a particularly important thing to remember if you're tempted to trust the elites to not hide and obfuscate even while making claims of "just making things legible." I don't think "should it be legible" is a particularly interesting question because I don't trust them to play by the rules anyway. When have they before?
Again, power is a pervasive feature of any complex society. Do you pick formal and legitimized power, or power that's completely illegitimate and shorn of any formality?
> Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help.
If you have some sort of proceedings to make Peter Thiel a Duke, there might also be ways to strip him of his title for cause. Which might actually increase the public's collective power over acknowledged elites, and that without any resort to the more physical means you alluded to in your comment. After all, it would be more of a routine quasi-criminal sanction than a social revolution.
This is specious reasoning. There's a process that turns both of us into mulch (it involves a woodchipper), but you shouldn't attempt that process based on the inference that a reverse process (a mulch-to-human machine?) must therefore exist.
It was not an "acknowledged thing." It was a bloody, brutal affair. Men fighting for titles is probably the one thing that measures up to religion in terms of lives lost.
And all of this before refuting the central point: the duke of some random duchy in 1305 had no "increased social legitimacy" in any way that matters to contemporary humans. He was able to petition whatever king he served, and he could rule over his own land insofar as someone with a bigger army didn't mind. It is, on face value, ridiculous that we're discussing this as a viable state of affairs.
I think you are making the mistake of reading too hard into these writings and somehow managed to invent a meaning in it. The reality is unfortunately as simple as that these people imagine they would get to be kings and rule over everyone. The philosophy dropout verbose word vomit is required to obscure this simple and obviously idiotic point because of course why would anyone pay attention to it otherwise.
Making it less likely that companies become very large, profitable and valuable discourages investment in companies of all sizes, by reducing returns on small cap and venture capital investing.
As for direct effectd, "taxing the shit out of" the rich, as you suggest, would impact far more than large incumbents. It would reduce the incentive for the rich to invest in general, by reducing the size of the reward for becoming very wealthy, encourage capital flight and expatriation of the highly ambitious and capable, and reduce the after-tax income of the best investors, and with it, the volume of new investment.
There's an opposing side to this dichotomy though: embrace competition. American democracy, with its separation of powers, is an example of this. The founding fathers explicitly set the government at odds with itself, because when "ambition is made to counteract ambition", the ambitious are so busy fighting each other that ordinary businessmen and citizens can go about their business relatively unmolested.
To answer your question: I'd absolutely work for an anarcho-tyrannist firm where I have no idea who the CEO is and managers can fire me on a moments whim, as long as I can walk into another firm tomorrow and get a new job. Job loss is only traumatic if all your eggs are in that one basket; if there's always another job waiting for you, just go get fired and take it.
There's a tension between full capitalism, which often becomes inefficient because entrenched interests prioritize persistence of the institution over fulfillment of the institution's mission, and full competition, which often becomes inefficient because it cannot generate the institutional knowledge needed to run things efficiently. Bureaucracy and mature big companies are on the former side of the scale, bullshit startups and "artisan" (read: overpriced and poor quality) small businesses on the latter.
My ideal social system would make this tension explicit and create automatic mechanisms to break up large institutions and re-form them out of the skilled individual contributors at the bottom. Something like the California labor laws, where you cannot enforce non-compete agreements and it's very difficult to prove that the startup which just spun off stole your trade secrets. Probably even moreso, and applied to the government itself, as CA business climate has recently become relatively hostile to startups as well.
But this is of course palpable nonsense. The entire point of kings and aristocracy was to formalise the notion that the de facto elite was in fact a class of people so superior to everyone else as to render the notion that they should be held accountable for their actions by mere commoners as laughable. The difference between a king and a president isn't that the latter's status as an elite is more ambiguous, but that the president has some semblance of accountability to the public whereas with the king, it's a case of the public being accountable to the king.
A political mechanism defined on paper does not mean anyone will ever invoke it.
The "easier" route is for the legislature to "see" the ruling and pass a law that counter-acts it. The general public can _also_ call their own Constitutional conventions and pass amendments to the Constitution to hold SCotUS responsible.
The real "problem" is all of these solutions, by design, require significant effort. If you want changes, you will need to make them happen.
They certainly would not be more accountable if their appointments were more aristocratic in character (i.e. they inherited them from their ancestors who had been appointed for arbitrary reasons by an unelected monarch) and, like aristocrats, they didn't have to explain how and why they exercised the powers given to them.
Protectionist policies, focus on national identity, celebration of traditional values and gender roles; a “national CEO” whose transformative powers transcend the slow, frustrating democratic machinery. This describes both Putinism and the American right’s goals. It’s not a coincidence that they were increasingly cozy with Russia until Putin rolled into Ukraine.
Putinists love to make the claim that Ukraine isn’t a real nation (and Steve Bannon went on record to agree). It’s worth noting that the same arguments would apply to Canada. If the Thiel-funded right succeeds, they’ll eventually need a war to fuel the nationalist fire. Why not a reunification of the North American colonies? Canada is obviously controlled by decadent forces that need to be purged, just like Ukraine…
Trump wanted to buy Greenland. Good old territorial expansion is part of this value system.
It’s because the advantages are either theoretical and illusionary, or only enjoyable by an extremely narrow oligarchy.
It’s like asking why North Korea seems to have all the disadvantages of Stalinism but none of the advantages.
As an American, that just makes no emotional sense. My lifetime experience is that Americans just plain don't think about Canada much, and it wouldn't make much sense as a target for "a war to fuel the nationalist fire." Mexico makes far more sense in that regard. Canada (or at least parts of it) would probably be most useful as place for political enemies to be forced into exile.
I'm under the vague impression that Ukraine has a much more important place in the Russian psyche than Canada is in the US one. There are always important differences in the details with stuff like this, so it's not very enlightening to do a mad libs style substitution
When a place is a void in the public’s mind, that’s the ideal target to fill it with nationalist fury. The people of Belgrade didn’t think very often about Bosnia in 1980; thirteen years later their leaders were running a genocide to cleanse Bosnia of the elements that supposedly threatened Serbian unity.
Yeah, but that's moving the goalposts. I was only commenting on suitability as a target for "a war to fuel the nationalist fire." There are already hooks for that w.r.t. Mexico, but they'd have to be created out of whole cloth for Canada.
That's silly. Canada is the loyalist colony. They are still part of the Commonwealth. If Theil is a monarchist, then surely Canada is more the good guy to him!
And we should question how "anti-Progressive" monarchism actually is. Given that the American Revolution was driven in large part by a desire to expand beyond the Appalachians (which King George III had banned with the Proclamation of 1763), and that the Empire banned slavery outright in 1833, a full 30 years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, I think we can say that First Nations and enslaved peoples -- focus of core Progressive causes -- would have both been better off as subjects of the Crown, in a Loyalist America.
So maybe monarchism is good?
A real king would probably slaughter people like Thiel and his hangers on and take whatever money they have.
The schadenfreude from seeing that would be one of the few up-sides of finding myself under a new monarch.
Which he clarified this way after so much outrage.
"It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."
[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
His talk of women being a "problem" in politics is just one example of this broader theme in the article. He talks about establishing a new territory (where /who/ would rule exactly?), he complains about welfare recipients and champions economic depressions without a care for the lives they ruin.
This isn't even taking into account the evidence for what libertarian politics actually create (the Gilded Age is instructive) or the fact that capitalists who get too fed up of either liberal reform or socialist agitation tend to ally themselves with, or outright create, fascists, as Thiel is doing nowadays with Trump, Yarvin and Blake Masters.
It's clear to me that he's moving down the pipeline from libertarian to fascist, as many have done before him.
You can somewhat mitigate that by emphasizing perseverance, grit and commitment character traits, and reward those appropriately at the policy layers. Especially in employer roles, where those traits have been markedly lacking in the modern era. But that only takes you to around 15-20% say. At say 15% that still leaves about 1,185,000,000 people in the world steadily getting left behind in the burgeoning global economy. Even if you take the most aggressive estimates to filter that further, that's still a distributed population of around say 2-500 million. It doesn't make it any better that many of their jobs are prime candidates for replacement by increased automation unless they are in last-bastion niches (some of them quite large still, but with really bad compensation) that will only fall to Moravec-class robots.
There are no easy solutions here, it is a thicket of third rail politics, and incredibly nasty, unpleasant historical echos. But we must walk this difficult and treacherous road ahead of us with eyes open, lest we lose our humanity by trying to sweep this trend under the rug with patches to existing policies like these "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" proposals. We need better patches (IMHO; I'm not a fan of trying out Second System Syndrome with wholesale changes at the societal level, I'm more in favor of trying out incremental patches that are auto-sunset after a pre-determined fixed period unless overridden by a future generation's vote).
Are there many others? FP seems more focused on essays targeted at an audience of one written for ver specific inside baseball reasons. HBR and the likes have become laughable top 10 lists and passing superficial junk.
[1] https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nation...
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
I really wish more people knew that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief at the Atlantic, literally beat political prisoners bloody while he was an IDF prison guard at the world's largest detainment camp.
This is the very definition of ad hominem -- you don't want to confront the messages of the essay, so you try to discredit it by highlighting that one of its authors had opinions you disagree with.
Public intellectuals need to be constantly judged and re-evaluated in the light of their actual predictive capacity. Burja certainly presents as an intelligent person, but since I’ve been paying attention to him the value of his insight has been dubious.
A lot to explain there.
> Yet even in the case of Britain, the key social technologies failed after the Second World War, as the latitude afforded to aristocratic scientists and industrialists was replaced by a system of bureaucratic processes.
And there.
I found this unreadable, sorry. Lots of abstract assertions with no support offered for them.
> Americans and Europeans may at that point be de-facto barred from visiting China by their own governments
...which seems to indicate a lack of familiarity with the relationship between American+European governments and their citizens.
Also, because I may want to actually visit the US sometime in the future I've been making a conscious decision not to visit Iran, for example (even though I find Iran to be a beautiful country, at least from the photos I can find on the web). I know there's no explicit "if you have visited Iran you cannot visit the USA anymore" policy coming from the US visa officials, but I feel like that's the direction things are going right now so why risk it?
Cuba seems a bit more on point, but it's worth mentioning that the point is not to prevent travel there, but to prevent money from flowing there. And even that's incredibly leaky - pretty much everyone I know has been to Cuba at least once. I should have included the full quote:
> Americans and Europeans may at that point be de-facto barred from visiting China by their own governments, so seeing the still-gleaming cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou up close won’t be an option.
It's not like the US State Dept is afraid that Americans are going to realize the socialist paradise of Cuba. The only circumstance you could imagine US travel to China banned would be the kind of sanctions that prevent all economic activity with China first - which haven't even been applied to pariah states like Iran or Russia.
And it's worth pointing out that Europeans freely travel to Cuba.
The idea that the US government would prevent citizens from traveling to China because they're afraid that citizens will see it as some sort of gleaming paradise is nonsense on its face, especially to someone who grew up here.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-...
But then there were no dots to be found, let alone connections.
I am a very literal person, and in my youth I used to think this was a bit of a handicap, as "big thinkers" needed to be able to think of things in more abstract ways. As I've gotten older, though, I think I've become more aware of my blind spots that this literal thinking can cause, but I've also become more confident in that 90% of "big thinking" turns out to be marketing bullshit. Big ideas are one thing, but if you can't give clear, simple-to-understand examples of the point you are trying to make, you're probably full of shit.
You expect proof, or a literal pathway of thought and explanation, because it has served you well. This is the guaranteed route to proving an idea, if such a literal route exists. Such ideas are grounded in axioms that exist or can be built on smaller already established truths.
It is far more difficult to explain literally a strong hunch, that an excellent intuitive thinker has but which is lacking the necessary foundation axioms. Maybe this hunch or novel idea cannot be structured upon existing truths, because it looks beyond its current viewpoint. Or maybe the idea is about a situation that is happening outside the established system.
This doesn’t make this idea less valuable to pursue further. It might just be several magnitudes harder to wrap ones head around.
But such ideas often need to be heavily driven by the one with the idea. Even people receptive to the idea often misunderstand such a vision.
So for practical purposes the idea is BS unless the person with the idea is actively working on it. It doesn't need to be proven yet, but if the person with the idea isn't working on it, probably nobody else will.
Sure, sometimes big ideas inspire others, but often the ispiration is more of a winding path rather than a direct "I read this big idea and did it".
You can state a big idea, but then you have to illustrate it. That can be with hard facts, or it can be poetic, but there needs to be something.
They were told to hate him and that if they agreed with his positions they were bad people.
There is an effort to get people to rationalize their hate but when they try to rationalize it they realize it's complete cult ideology not based in reality. Ending up as fans of his.
It happened to me. I was told how bad he was. In fact he is super reasonable to the majority.
To use a specific example, virtually all big, new ideas are some version of the "underpants gnomes" meme: (1) collect underpants, (2) ???, (3) profit. That is, all of these big ideas have a big helping of unknowns that need to be figured out - after all, if things were already all known, it wouldn't be much of a new, big idea.
However, in my experience, big ideas that are likely to come to fruition are ones where proponents are actually able to break down the unknowns in the "2. ???" step into discrete problems that need to be solved or elucidated. This is in direct contrast to "bullshitters" who have a distinct inability to even identify what the critical unknowns are in the first place.
For example, take the crypto space (low hanging fruit I know because there is so much BS and grift in the crypto space). I think there are some areas where crypto ideas will prove useful - I've commented before that finding a replacement for the antiquated backend settlement our financial system uses in the US is a perfect application. But I contrast this with tons of crypto ideas where proponents care barely explain why setting is a benefit over existing solutions, or else they conveniently ignore all the issue the existing system solves that they pretend somehow don't exist with crypto.
Agreed. And it ignores things like the UK airplane industry, which was (post-war) somewhat ahead of the US with planes such as the Comet (eek!) and the Vulcan (yay!). But there are other examples.
Some of the oil states have hit this in a big way. Egypt, for one. Egypt at one time guaranteed employment for all university graduates. That resulted in the government employing a quarter of the workforce. The US is around 14% government, and it's mostly local government - teachers and cops. In the US, this becomes about half the people with college degrees doing jobs that don't need a college degree. A college degree in the US no only no longer guarantees a middle class lifestyle, it may have negative economic value due to debt.
The solution of overproducing white-collar jobs is at first natural and then dysfunctional.
We see this in college administration, where the administrator to professor ratio has doubled in 25 years.[1] If you look at pictures of factories from the early 20th century, there's a common pattern - a small administration building in front of a large factory. We no longer see that.
I'd expected the US to hit "peak office" about two decades ago. We may see that now, but it's because of working from home, not a reduced need for white collar work.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...
Someone is manufacturing all these “post-industrial” radio transceivers, screens and datacenters, after all. Still others are mining and drilling the required natural resources.
Bretton Woods and the Dollar as world reserve currency effected this shift from West to East.
I would like to argue that this is the other way round:
A corn field is a highly parallelized and automatized food creation machine. Is there a significant difference between operating crops and life stock or an industrial machine? I don't think so.
Industrialization means that we have transferred the automation of life onto previously manual processes. The countryside was brought into town.
This process is far from finished. Does anybody on HN doubt that the bureaucratic processes will be automated in a not so distant future? The stalling, the increase in bureaucratic processes is good because it makes it even more profitable to invest into process automation. This will overcome the 'post-industiral trap'.
That said, the observation at the end of the article is still very interesting:
>...will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty.
Do social technologies have the potential to create systems with far greater capabilities than the ones we have? Is Facebook the 'Wright Flyer of social networks' or is Facebook already the Saturn rocket?
No. This is Facebook [1], that flappy steam powered umbrella machine that shakes itself to pieces and kills the pilot.
Honestly, I think if there were any reason to think "Industrial society is eating itself", social media (and tech addiction) would be the number one suspects.
Meanwhile, the 25M people of Shanghai are approaching their third month of complete welded-apartment-door level lockdown.
This is an interesting idea: that the shedding of industry by an industrial society is irreversible. There is no way to go back, no matter how desperately that might be desired.
But the reason presented seems kind of flimsy. What does "mint preliminary social capital" mean and why is it impossible after industrialization is abandoned? The idea isn't explained before or after the statement.
he is referring to what he describes at the beginning of the essay: preindustrial social forms and traits that lend themselves to industrialization, like high social trust between strangers
We live in a society which lacks the collective will to do such things. It's only after the knowledge required to do so is lost that it can't be done again.
Unlike after the fall of Rome, there are machine tools all over this country that make it possible. We don't have to rely on manpower, or beasts to do the work. Sitting in basements, garages, barns, forests. We've got the natural resources. We also have a widely distributed archive of machinists books, literacy, and the hacker ethos on our side.
Mostly it's the financial distortions of the price of money, and tax policy, that have moved our manufacturing offshore, for now.
That may not be as true as you imagine. Entire factories, refineries, chemical plants, etc. were dismantled and shipped to china during the 1990's and 2000's. Once there, they were re-assembled and put back into production. I have met people who were involved in this work. The equipment did not get retired, it got sold.
However, we were discussing not being able to reboot society at all. If you know how modern machining works, and have access to a supply of material and students to teach, it can be booted back up in reasonable timeframes. It wouldn't have to take a few Millenia to be re-invented again.
You can make machine shop level of flat surfaces with the Whitworth method. Steam technology on the small scale is something that can be done in the home shop. Once you don't have to rely on muscle to machine materials, you can scale up quickly.
Eric Flint wrote 1632, a work of alternative fiction which plays out this scenario by catapulting a mining town in West Virginia back to the year 1632. Food was the critical gate to pass through, but they made it.
You’re assuming that the social organization and culture required to do these things can’t be lost just like knowledge. I think that’s incorrect. It’s like how third world countries know what they should do to develop their economies—stop allowing government officials to take bribes, etc. But they can’t.
I find this historically shallow (or short-term). IMO, at the core of civilization is the concept of "domain" (from the old latin meaning, which is like "realm" or possibly "kingdom")
I like to recall that all the "old and obsolete industrial practices" are more fundamental than the novel and up-to-date "computer networking, artificial intelligence, and other “emerging technologies.”"
and when I say more fundamental, I mean that's it's not possible to have the later without the former.
The point about the economy and "revolutions" and other things is that it's an extremely complex chaotic system. Exponentially more complex than anything any computer can model. And details matter. Details matter very very much. A accidental conversation in a hallway or a pebble rolling across a road can lead to world shattering revelations and new technology that will forever after change humanity's trajectory.
This means you cannot predict the future anymore than you can recreate an ice cube from a puddle it makes after it melted.
The required information is simply not available.
However, I was able to get past those things and enjoy the journey as an imaginative flight of fancy. The author might be better suited to fiction?
I’ll boil it down to “new systems generate new social systems, that become imitations of themselves, that then cannibalizes the initial system.”
The insight I see here is we need new social technology.
The “hands on” founder is back with Gen Z, along with verticalized ambitions. There were easy wins building on the institutional tech stack we've inherited, but today you are more likely to conform or fail if you launch a transformational innovation on that stack.
Instead, I see founders going to the source of each institution to create change. Cul de Sac in AZ going after that.
In the same way, we’re designing a vertical reinvention of the org as a guild. There’s institutions we’re build on for sure, but the security comes more from community than the enforcement of agreements by traditional institutions.
You can imagine my shock at discovering that Palladium is funded by Thiel[1] (non-partisan, indeed!), and that one of their founders is now working on Web3 (post-industrial, indeed!).
Quite the Just-So Story. Any evidence that people used to be highly concerned with first principles and this has somehow dropped off? I won't hold my breath.
There are some interesting ideas and constructs, not commonly presented, here.
Maybe rather than criticising it for not spoon feeding you with extracts/soundbites from sources that may appear to be of "academic substance" (but ultimately most likely assumptions themselves), consider it a source of ideas to explore and form your own opinions on.
If you were to ask a blacksmith 400 years ago what he thought about people living in a modern air conditioned house and all the luxuries it affords, with a backyard hobby forge, making steel swords, he would probably be freaking miffed. A hobby?!? Forging stuff for a past time?!? I have to make 20 swords a day or my head gets cut off!
Short of catastrophe, we will not be going back. The future may look different, but the knowledge and technology will continue to improve. If we stop driving cars and stop making cars because we have clean cities with many avenues of public transportation the knowledge of 'how to make a car' still exists.
And there will be some dude in that hypothetical society building a car for a hobby.
He never gets into those reasons because he doesn't seem to understand industrial production, and many get it wrong. The industrial worker is actually not an intrinsically special person. The engineers behind the industrial systems, sure. But those engineers still exist in the knowledge economy, and the barrier to become an engineer in a knowledge economy, I would argue, is far lower. In many ways, the industrial worker can be a liability to the knowledge economy, not an asset, because they need to be trained, systems need to be made to met their capabilities, and they will hold on to those systems for a labor generation, while innovations get tabled.
I actually agree with a lot of isolated premises in the article, but he arrives at the conclusion in a roundabout way. He says, for instance, factories in a post-industrial society would be local. Yes, I agree. We will only have resource streams and local cities would have factories that make everything. That's the actual realization of a pure knowledge economy, with many millions of decentralized factories making everything, with a few smart engineers running things, and people dropping out of the labor pool. This is all good, and does not lead to technological decline in any way.
While I didn't agree with everything in the article myself, I would say the translation is actually more along the lines of:
"As a civilization becomes more efficient, fewer of the members of the population need to know how to actually do anything. The civilization becomes less robust in the face of new pressures because all everyone knows how to do is sit around in their underwear and play Call of Duty when they aren't LARPing being a knowledge worker."
If you can survive without chopping wood, soon enough you'll forget how to chop wood. If a civilization can survive long enough without anyone knowing how to build/repair the technology that sits a level below the current water mark, it will. See: Cobol codebases.
You have to be able to show how this "knowledge gap" causes a collapse because the "new engineers" fail to understand the building blocks and the systems will erode over time. As long as the standards exist someone can "follow the recipe."
I can totally concede that over long epochs of time of stability there would be a wax and wane of technological prowess and that at some point interest, or active knowledge, would be lost. But as long as the knowledge is still there then it would not take much for this future society to repair and regain its knowledge.
I see absolutely no justification for a collapse scenario. Your CoD LARPers will have to unclog their toilet eventually.
He lost me here. I've (recently, and this is strictly my point of view) become of the opinion that the only true lasting civilizations are the East (mainly China) and the West (The Ruhr area being its center). Civilizations have sprung on the shadow of these two giants but they were mercantile: The Roman Empire, The Islamic Khalifs, Portuguese traders, the USA are all civilizations relying on linking East and West. These two areas of the world had two things in common: 1. Lots of people, and 2. they were industrial.
They produced stuff and they needed to trade. The journey to trading between these two was so profitable that it enabled the financing of whole civilizations which claimed the titles. There are little signs that this order will change. These two areas go through their ups and downs but seems to bounce regularly (World War 2, China civil war, Japan, etc..) to reclaim their status.
Offshoring, so far, has only kicked off an internal market in China. Most countries who are doing offshore industrial jobs still rely on the motherland for technology, organization and development. The US seemed promising on the East coast (the most Western part of the US?) but it didn't last that long.
Of course this doesn't address a post-industrial world: There are no guarantees that these two areas will remain the dominant ones. But my guess is that it'll be the case like it has historically been.
How far we have fallen. We replaced handshakes with contracts that most people followed. Now few even follow contracts and break them willingly all the time.
Every job/business arrangement seems to just bring in more people into your life that you will hate someday.
> The Taliban Were Afghanistan’s Real Modernizers
> Only a powerful modernizing force could overcome the tribal loyalties that divided Afghanistan’s fragile state. That force was the Taliban.
Not here it isn't.
Modernization is not inherently good or bad. That it might be propelled by an organization that itself is evil says nothing about the author or modernization.
Like, you dont have to think that everything about automobiles is great to still need to acknowledge that one super important part of cars being developed is that they were waaaay faster than horses.
Personally, seeing how easy it is to laser cut metal or get a CTO part or a PCB in China makes me jealous. There are similar services in the EU, but not as good, more expensive, and not as widespread (i.e. you can find them in Germany and the UK, but not in many other countries... at least postal services work well, I guess).
This is some cherry picked data to suit a narrative, presented as a matter of fact. That is a mistake.
We have had countless "industrial society" in various different societies, from Japanese steel, China ceramic and shipping (far in the past), metallurgic industry from Celts, Roman industry, cord and weapons industry in more recent times, ... surely "industry" as a concept have changed.
It's still a matter of work in certain location with a certain supply chain to produce a certain (big) amount of goods, in tech terms we have switched various times and now we are about to change from subtractive manufacturing (CNC mills) to additive ones (3D printing) etc such tech change ALSO change more or less the human society but there are still two separate things.
Actual economically-driven, neoliberal society yes completely fails to evolve, because real progress is against certain business, because managerial/profit driven development is incompatible with real innovation, that's an enormous issue of the present time, but again not an "industrial society" issue.
Transportation changes thanks to TLCs and tech evolution, climate change push will probably push us from roads to air/water ways, so a future without major roads and rails infra that demand stability and a certain concentration will probably vanish in a more mixed and flexible ones, the need of big factories will change reducing a bit with tech progress, how we live will change accordingly, but again that's not an industrial society end, nor the actual society end...
It's still probably too early to say when and how such changes happens if they'll happen. There are still too much variables in the game.
I too see many issues with "managerial/profit driven development" and true innovation. However, do you suppose that we should remove the profit motive? What do we replace it with? Because unfortunately people seem to fall back to some sort of centralized system like a scientific committee or centralized AI. The problems with these paradigms are even more severe than with corporations.
My take is that involving profits is a way to introduce rules and score keeping to the game. And again, although there are quite a few cheaters, and least there is a game you can play. If you take away the rules and points, you are left with just politics. Or, in the case of a centralized AI, highly concentrated politics related to who controls the AI. And the rest organizing themselves how? Because another part of this equation is that humans are animals and will inevitably construct hierarchies related to mating and resource distribution (just like other animals).
Large scale ultra-local production empowered by things like 3d printing seems to be on its way. But its very far from taking over. And right now, for example, we have a crisis in food production. And the few community gardens we have are negligible in terms of total calories. Also, almost all items, from construction materials to household goods, require oil to produce. Its nice to fantasize about algal oil or something, but large scale deployment is nowhere near here.
To me what could possibly work or at least be a step in the right direction is to use something like advanced cryptocurrency and smart contract technology to reimplement things like money and government in ways that are more fair, cohesive and sane. Combine or even integrate that with truly distributed real time and redundant information systems for large scale data aggregation, visualization and query. My idea is kind of going along the lines of the centralized 1950s style AI, at least as far as being able to get holistic views. But it incorporates modern ideas about the robustness of distributed networks. So we can effectively and transparently share and aggregate global information using peer-to-peer protocols, but not be restricted to a single authoritarian interpretation.
But I am very curious to hear, did you have specific ideas about moving beyond the "managerial/profit driven development"? It just feels like people who want to completely drop money or profit from this usually don't have a great plan. I think most are envisioning a vast network of "intentional communities" where everyone just shares. Again, the reality of that is not going to be as great as you think. Because it means replacing the "game" of profit with just pure politics. Most of the intentional communities become kind of like little cults. Organization will happen one way or another. If there isn't some points accumulation or other structure then you default to manipulation, stabbings, etc.
Not remove, layer it. In the past we have had public universities and big "free" "innovation labs" from private those NOT managerial driven but just "we have big money, we fund some very skilled technicians who innovate on their own and see the outcome, something very nice for our business will appear". Such model have produced the most quick and revolutionary innovation we have seen in last century et least.
My view is: States funds public universities whose target is pure research, innovation for humankind. They do not produce goods, just ideas and initial implementations. Companies for their profits, States for Citizens needs pick those ideas choosing what to implement, sell etc. Private research can't really compete so there will be a bit but not too much to steer society in dangerous evolution, States having the biggest concentration of talents and research can surveil and make Citizens informed enough to decide if something is good or not.
> My take is that involving profits is a way to introduce rules and score keeping to the game.
Although in practice we have seen the contrary: some innovate better than other conquering certain positions, than they start killing potential competitors thanks to money they have amassed... IMVHO innovation can only be stimulate by intellectual means, push needs and rewards means pushing dangerous innovations,, something good can arrive, but also much bad things.
> right now, for example, we have a crisis in food production
And it's cause is only partially the climate change, much is due by for-profit market moves, where it's more profitable having big food players instead of countless small ones. That's why IMVHO profit must be contained, it's not self-contained because the ideal free market can exists, only if kept free by force, by nature it derive quickly toward hierarchy against humans needs... The main point here is that States as Democracies represent the sole real free market: the people, all together unable to really form a monopoly or oligopoly.
> It just feels like people who want to completely drop money or profit from this usually don't have a great plan.
IMVHO money is a very misunderstood topic: so far money are a kind of substrate of anything lent to states in the form of public debt; that's not "money" that's a very old scam, dating back from the '300 or even certain Greeks polis. Money must be a unit of measure of a substrate, determined, not owned, by the public, no private parties involved. A symbol we use to weight nearly anything.
If we made money like that, than profit change aspect: we do not have financialization much more than a thin layer because having no value as a substrate have no value, so no option for profit, at all. In that case a company can have benefits from good ads, but can't live only on ads, it need something valuable underneath etc.
That's the real key all actual élites do not want because actual money is the best way to keep people in line with soft tie almost no one really see and revolt.
Maybe you can give me an example or reference? I don't understand what you mean.
So we invented a symbol, money, we all agree to accept and start saying "hey, for my chicken I want 10 coins, for my shoes 30, ... we can all exchange coins for anything else and the volume of exchanges makes "the right price" of anything, more or less, depending on various factors, like scarcity vs abundance.
Such simple system work well enough, have issues like how to choose a symbol no one can temper easily because if I can produce coins in my backyard I destroy the system for instance etc. Such issues can be solved by a public authority who decide an initial quantity of money, distribute it with commonly agreed criteria, check it's authenticity etc. Such authority MUST be public because MUST been unable to make profit from that money making/handling. Being public have no profit to make, those who work for such institution can't do that in disguise, their money is public, they can't have personal interests involved etc. They must be civil servant like in the ancient Athens where the police was made by slaves, they know if they act well they can live a good life, if not they are dead. Similar things happen in various European cities where the elected government must be formed of strangers checked for any absence of conflicting interests but rewarded enough for their role if they openly perform well.
Again, not perfect but work. Profit, A BIT of, is now a weapon to push people to act a bit avoiding the classic "if you get paid for doing nothing you'll do nothing" and similarly avoid those who decide to live with a purpose because we have various cohort of "people" in the sense that there are the very active who work "too much" ruining lives around them, disturbing a calm evolution of the society etc and we have people who do not want to do anything at all, various others in between etc. Being as society we need to find a best possible place for anyone because that's why we make a society in the first place, and we can bend attitudes a bit, but not more than a bit. In such democratic fictional society we need to pursue the common good without being against personal interests nor individual attitudes. The Roman's said "In medio stat virtus" (in the mean lie the virtue), the Swedes have invented the Lagom concept witch happen to be essentially the same etc. We need a bit of push to profit to avoid stagnation and dispersion but we need to limit it to avoid derailments where people start to live to work instead of the contrary.
Actually money are not like that: EU central bank is formed by EU States central banks witch in turn are formed by the biggest private banks and insurances of their relevant countries, the USA FED is equally a private institution bolted to the public government in an old scam. Only few States have public central banks but such states tend to be dictatorships not Democracies so again the public is the private game of the ruler... Money actually are lent to the public for an interest rate that can't mathematically be paid except if you borrow foreign money so money now is debt. Being the thing anyone want money is not The Value, the substrate of anything.
States need taxes NOT to redistribute richness ensuring a narrow enough fork between richest and poorest for the common welfare but to finance their operations etc. The entire economy is a classic scam due to this absurd distortion at the economy atom. Profit is not anymore producing something good and so get rewarded, being able to buy more, but harvesting money from others etc such system can only end if we agree that a society much be ruled by the people, a Democracy, not a classic Aristocracy, nor a modern Corporato-Timocracy nor something lead "by leaders inn disguise who direct the flock of people" (cfr. Gustave le Bon, Eduard Bernays, ...) like the neoliberal society of today.
I do not know how to make that happen, I do not know how it happen in the past, all I know is how to maintain it witch is the "in medio stat virtus" at any level, richness, welfare, culture etc...
Maybe we should try to figure out how to create an AI "idea generator" that can probe idea space more freely and see if it can break us out of our thinking rut. IOW use the AI not to govern or control or have power over anything, but use it to inspire us and break us out of our boxes.
Manhattan Project, Apollo, ARPAnet, how many public sector monumental counterexamples do you need
An argument can be made that the pessimism exhibited in this article is pointing its finger at the HN comments that are saying it’s too difficult to follow. Yes, the article is right on the money.
To paraphrase: due to social forces we have an inkling of capability left to actually do the things that our ancestors have done that brought us here. Yes, we have technology, but without the means to rebuild it, we are fucked. There is no next step because we haven’t completed this one yet, and already we’ve lost competency. This isn’t a new concept, plenty of books games etc discuss it - Fallout, Warhammer 40k both deal directly with tech that is no longer understood.
I would say we need more over-all rounded people. Your job where you sit in front of a computer writing code is great, but you should really know a variety of things and be able to piece together the gaps. Another good article earlier had an HN comment about how an “unqualified” customer analyzed damaged o-rings by the vibration of a motor. At the very least, learn how to grow some vegetables. Forget automated hydroponic irrigation systems. Just don’t be a complete idiot and this article will make complete sense to you.
Oh, and ignore people saying this is some right-wing dog whistle sponsored by Peter Thiel. These people live in a hell of their own making.
Social media and the Internet is the new opium of the masses. We view the world through this crappy lens and it never matches what's really going on. We think we have a clear picture, but everywhere there is chaos and decline. Klaus Schwab's 'Great Reset' proposal won't cut it. We need mobilized mass revolution and political will to get out of the various messes we are in.
It mentions but does not expand on the central social problem with industrial production: a small group of people can produce enough product for the whole world. And this problem becomes more acute, the more advanced industry becomes.
(There are other problems with industrial production such as environmental destruction and resource depletion, but these problems seem to be more widely diagnosed and understood.)
We have not yet solved the problem that industrial production is too efficient. I use the word "solved" as I consider the economic system from a humanistic perspective. Much like wealth concentration can reduce the flow of money and disincentivize commerce, the concentration of production can do the same.
I think it's an error that efficiency is the only outcome that needs to be optimized, an error often accompanied by facile arguments about comparative advantage, freeing people to do more productive work, and infinite demand. Post-industrial society is, in my opinion, the result of these arguments failing in the real world.
I think the next stage of economic development is a recognition that efficiency must be weighed against redundancy. (As well as conservation, but again this is more widely recognized.) This wouldn't be a return to pre-industrial society, where redundancy was a necessary background given the limits of transportation and communication. Rather it would require a new mindset that sacrifices efficiency for redundancy in a deliberate tradeoff.