Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500
calculatingempires.net
calculatingempires.net
A lot of unavoidable, but still quite subjective compromises had to be made to project the very high-n space addressed by this infographic into 2 representational dimensions. A lot of stuff got mapped to the zero vector here.
On that note, when I drill into the details I see things that are initially puzzling, such as the lineage starting from cartesian geometry seeming to end abruptly at vector calculus, to be resumed (but without guiding connectors) both above as forecasting, and a panel or so rightward as Markov Chains and further on, the somewhat loose cluster of concepts headed by the word "Transformers."
And... what's with all the hunched-over shoegazers? Are they here to pay off a debt? Their multiplicity and contextual disjointedness with respect to their surroundings somehow gives off MidJourney vibes. First time I've ever felt a pang of sympathy for clip-art.
It looks like the authors were inspired by those mind-bendingly complex biological cycle charts published by Roche, but didn't want to attempt the extremely tedious (and necessary, IMO) bird's nest business of cross-linking causally influenced (but rep-space remote) systems with a spaghetti of directed connectors and data detailing that those charts made famous.
Middle school students. It's a nice wall poster. Put it up next to the Periodic Table.
I will say that there's a lot that could be added before and after Frege that would be helpful, for the programming languages bit. Whitehead, Russell, Peirce, and Chomsky would be nice to see, not to mention Aristotle and Hegel
Indeed, there are a great many non-western examples of this as well.
Examples from the 1500s and 1600s are definitely European-centric -- meaning that there are little, if any examples drawn from ideas outside of Europe.
I look at the category for Education, and it has "Saving Souls with School". Where are the non-Christian examples of innovation in Education?
The category for emotions (of which there are rich traditions and thought on this in many cultures). Or "Era of Humors", "Cartesian Dualism", "Embodying Class". Those are all Western-centric ideas.
One curious example -- specifically talking about the import of teas and porcelain from the East. The implicit frame here is that it doesn't matter for this set of comparisons until those items became available in the West. What about the history of when tea (and spices!) were cultivated, and porcelain were made? (The porcelain that were exported out of China were mass produced and considered the bottom grade unsuitable for the domestic martket).
The next century or two may well see us wipe ourselves out as a species, as the great elliptic of this leverage-amplifying 'innovation' arc comes crashing back on itself..
It may well be that not innovating, in this western-dominated sense, was the right strategy for our species survival all along, and thus clamoring to be included in this narrative is to demand that non-western cultures be given a position of honor alongside the west in the story of humanity's self-destruction.
I can't say that non-Western empire cultures were that much better from that lens.
The one I had been studying for the past year or so was the Chinese. During the 1500s and 1600s, technologies for warfare was just as rampant. The Ming and the Jinchurens were fielding firearms as enthusiastically as anywhere else. The 1800s when many places were industrializing, the Qing dynasty was wracked with uprisings, revolts, and a civil war with a scale comparable to WWI in terms of numbers of dead and cities razed. This unrest was the result of centuries of increasing marginalization of young people being shut out from economic opportunities, and widespread access to the ability to inflict violence.
But I can't even say that even if the Qing did not have that internal instability, would they have done better? The telegraph was invented in the mid 1800s, and it started globalizing markets because of information transmission. It is considerably difficult to map Chinese ideographs to the equivalent of Morse code, even if the literati were not using the ability to read and write maintain status.
It’s easier to understand permaculture as a regenerative paradigm in a living systems world view. Only living systems can regenerate. Living systems adapt and grow all on its own. It _evolves_, rather than innovates.
Technology, from the machine world view, is incapable of regenerating, growing or living on its own. It requires an external force to set it in motion, as well as external force to innovate and make changes. The source of innovation comes dominance as long as someone views the world in a way where nothing happens unless you make it happen.
But now we are reaching technologies that are complex enough to start resembling living systems.