Comment by Barrera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrera | Hacker News Reader

> If this is correct, then post-industrial society isn’t our name for the next stage of civilizational progress. Instead, the term is true in its most literal and pessimistic interpretation: a society after and without industrial civilization. Such a society doesn’t even have the social infrastructure of agricultural civilizations. This means it cannot even mint the preliminary social capital needed to reindustrialize. Likewise, we have lost the implicit knowledge upon which our industrial systems functioned even as recently as a few decades ago. That knowledge cannot be regained absent the people who actually built and understood those systems.

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.

The cause isn't adequately explained, but it's hard not to see the ramifications of the outcome everywhere you look. We live in a society that couldn't rebuild, if it had to, the New York City subway, or the Interstate Highway System, or the national electric grid, or numerous other features of industrialized 20th century America.

Like feudal post-Roman world couldn't repeat any large Roman infrastructure for a millennium.

>We live in a society that couldn't rebuild, if it had to, the New York City subway, or the Interstate Highway System, or the national electric grid, or numerous other features of industrialized 20th century America.

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.

there are machine tools all over this country that make it possible [...] sitting in basements, garages, barns, forests

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.

I understand that scaling infrastructure back up takes time and effort. I understand the long timescales involved in even the most basic of factory setup. I watched as it took a year to move the gear shop I was working at.

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.

> 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.

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.

>What does "mint preliminary social capital" mean and why is it impossible after industrialization is abandoned?

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

I took "mint preliminary social capital" to mean, fundamentally, trust. The kinds of trust needed for a society to consent en masse to the collective capital project of (re-)industrializing are difficult to attain in the face of decaying material needs of the skilled labor force (if those skills even propagated forward to begin with.)

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