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The End of Industrial Society

161 points by CryptoPunk 4y ago

pkdpic 4y ago
No idea what the deal is with this site, it seemed intriguing but found this on their articles index. Probably should read it before making any judgments but... its mothers day, who has the time? > 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.
- haswell 4y ago
  Without reading the articles themselves, we can’t judge those titles. It is sometimes true that truly evil forces are responsible for progress. 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.
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  > its mothers day Not here it isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day
- yorwba 4y ago
  It's a very good article. You should read it. Especially if you disagree with the title.
aww_dang 4y ago
I don't agree with the premises. The arguments are not fleshed out. The conclusions feel absurd and lack supporting logic. 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?
dtagames 4y ago
A fantastic read. Thanks for the post!
woodruffw 4y ago
This is Internet Rationalism, distilled and bottled: masturbatory rediscovery (there's a reason we've been calling it "post-industrial" for the last 40 years) mixed with a healthy dose of neoreactionary handwringing ("civilizational collapse"). 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!). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835570
alexashka 4y ago
The tone of this article does not match its contents. This is some cherry picked data to suit a narrative, presented as a matter of fact. That is a mistake.
sysadm1n 4y ago
> We can imagine a possible scenario of the collapse of our own civilization. Our ability to perceive decline would be compromised early in the process. 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.
civilized 4y ago
> Not only marketers, but scientists, statesmen, industrialists, politicians, philosophers, and writers shaped ersatz social technology to fill the gaps, but completely failed to guarantee knowledge succession of the generative core of knowledge. The strange spiritual practices, scientific exploration of human psychology, and at times outright ideological cults of the founding cohort gave way to a more shallow type of knowledge. This was a knowledge of levers and buttons, rather than the first principles which built those levers and buttons. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- airbreather 4y ago
  Yes, a slightly challenging read, but it's not a dissertation, rather more an opinion piece. 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.
  - civilized 4y ago
    You seem to have missed the point of my brief comment. I didn't fail to understand the passage. I understood it and found it implausible.
    - joshcryer 4y ago
      The lovely thing about this "old knowledge" or "old ways" fetishism is that the knowledge economy is a superset of all previous paradigms. 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.
bsedlm 4y ago
> What, then, is the core engine of our own civilization, and in what way might it decay? While we lack an incontrovertible answer, the Industrial Revolution appears to be a leading candidate. 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.
AlbertCory 4y ago
> These social technology cores decay with time as they obsolete their own foundations, and as errors and parasitism build up 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.
- stickfigure 4y ago
  And also nutty statements like this: > 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.
  - paganel 4y ago
    As an EU citizen I was de facto forbidden to enter other EU countries until relatively recently (because of the pandemic), not sure why do you find that conclusion far-fetched. 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?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - stickfigure 4y ago
      Half of Americans think our visa/visitor/immigration regime is capricious and unfair, and the other half wants it to be worse. As part of the former group, I apologize on behalf of my countrymen. But Americans are not forbidden from visiting Iran and there is nothing the US government will do to me if I take a holiday there (and survive the experience). 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.
kkfx 4y ago
Hum, grumble mumble... We surely are at the end of a cycle in human development terms, witch means the actual society going to change in something new, BUT "Industrial Society" is not actually a society in humans terms. 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.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  So far yours is the only substantive response to the post (edit: although a few others popped up after I wrote this). I agree with most of the broad ideas you bring up which are insightful. However, the tone of your comment does not seem to be quite acknowledging that we are in reality now in a somewhat dire situation. Anyway I have a few questions. 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.
jseban 4y ago
Stream of consciousness with a way too big scope, gives in to the temptation to conclude that everything will just collapse and disappear to get out of trouble in the end.
- xbar 4y ago
  Agreed. The author discounts a great deal of flexibility in the existing systems.
jarsin 4y ago
> With a handshake and a reputation at stake, you could sail to the other end of the world, spending years out of contact with your business partners, yet secure in knowing they would honor their word. 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.
- jseban 4y ago
  More like a handshake, a reputation at stake, and a threat of death penalty, if you want to take a more honest look at what would happen if you committed mutiny.
Barrera 4y ago
> 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.
- nyolfen 4y ago
  >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
- rayiner 4y ago
  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.
  - trhway 4y ago
    Like feudal post-Roman world couldn't repeat any large Roman infrastructure for a millennium.
  - mikewarot 4y ago
    >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.
hammock 4y ago
Industrial society didn’t end, it just moved to Asia, particularly Southeast Asia. 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.
closedloop129 4y ago
>The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life. 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?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > 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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw_C_sbfyx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw_C_sbfyx8
throwmeariver1 4y ago
jackcosgrove 4y ago
The article has a somber tone, lamenting the holes that have opened up in our societies and economies since the heyday of industrial production. 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.
jotm 4y ago
I like to say "countries that don't produce tangible goods are at the mercy of those who do". Push come to shove, the service economy is worthless. What matters is production of real goods that you can hold in your hand. At least agriculture is still a top priority despite calls from weirdly misled groups to end subsidies. 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).
Animats 4y ago
"Massive white-collar overproduction means the victory of sharp elbows over sharp minds." 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-growth_n_4738584 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...
- mike4ty4 4y ago
  Ultimately what we need is not a "victory" over anyone, but rather something where 100% of everyone's need (food, water, shelter, and medical care) are met barring purely random accidents.
jonstewart 4y ago
Palladium magazine was founded by Wolf Tivy and Jonah Bennett. It is funded by Peter Thiel. Jonah Bennett previously worked at The Daily Caller and he resigned from Palladium when it was discovered he had authored some racist messages and was friends with various white nationalists. 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.
- panosfilianos 4y ago
  Journalism would be so much better with context like this. I wonder if there any initiatives that provide it. Maybe the blockchain would be of help here.
  - CryptoPunk 4y ago
    This context is quite biased by ideological preconceptions.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    I can't tell how many layers of irony this comment contains.
- donkeybeer 4y ago
  You have to remember the basic idea behind a lot of these word salads is that "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" and that "Of course I am a high iq intellectual who will be the nobility and not a feudal worker, why is there any doubt?". Everything starts making sense then.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    The idea of those who favor "kings and aristocracy" is more that we'll always have people around with more power than others (elites), and that formal transparency about who these people are ultimately improves accountability. Would you work for a faux "anarcho-tyrannyist" firm where you have no idea who the CEO is and who the managers are that can fire you or cut your salary?
supersync 4y ago
A semi-interesting read on a topic I often think about. 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.
wardedVibe 4y ago
So... The US and Europe haven't stopped being manufacturing hubs. The kind of manufacturing changed to high end goods, and automation has greatly decreased the amount of labor involved. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_... the thesis is only possible if all you look at are the cheapest consumer goods, where moving to places with the lowest cost labor is a necessity.
- truffdog 4y ago
  A common criticism of that high level view of US manufacturing is that it is a bit of a lie, and a lot of it is about hedonic adjustments for new Intel chips being faster than old ones. Without that, the graph of manufacturing output in dollars looks like a steady downward slope from the year 2000 on.
  - wardedVibe 4y ago
    got a link to someone actually arguing that with data?
planarhobbit 4y ago
Very good article. I disagree with the comments here that it’s too theoretical/high brow. From time to time I discuss these topics in a circle of friends and the language we use isn’t much different from the language of this article. There isn’t much “new” thinking here, but if it’s your first time then you’re exposed to a big question mark. It’s a fairly benign introduction to the genre of post-competent societal literature that has yet to have a name. Knut Hamsun is long gone, so we’ll need a new champion. 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.
lazyier 4y ago
People, like the WEF, who spend a great deal of time trying to anticipate the future "revolutions" and post-"revolutions" are just a bunch of self-important assholes. 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dc-programmer 4y ago
Conservatives need to lay off the Marx and French post-structuralism, and maybe go back to Burke or something. The incongruence between the aesthetics and message of these articles causes confusion to readers because most aren’t familiar with dialectical materialism (and the ones that are see through the poorly executed subversion attempt). You can tell because a lot of the comments on these articles are complaining about the style.
- mike4ty4 4y ago
  Conservatives using Marx! The IRONY!
- beaconstudios 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - ta9251959 4y ago
platz 4y ago
Does he define what a social technology is?
jessriedel 4y ago
The article begins by suggesting that the (“first”) industrial revolution remains much more important and revolutionary than the “later” (2nd, 3rd, 4th) industrial revolutions by appealing to a general sense that the later ones dont feel as impressive, but weirdly he doesn’t seem mention (at least based on my skim) the objective sense in which the original industrial revolution was overwhelmingly more notable: growth rates went from ~0.1%/year to ~4%/year, a speed up of roughly 50 times, which has not happened since. (Growth has now probably slightly slowed.) 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.
spicyusername 4y ago
Samo Burja has been grinding the "were on the brink of collapse" narrative forever.
thematrixturtle 4y ago
> The COVID-19 pandemic showed East Asia to be the best place to put key elements of the supply chain. ... Importantly, authorities see it as vital to enable the gathering of many people together in crowded spaces. ... Because of this, you cannot simply send everyone home forever. Meanwhile, the 25M people of Shanghai are approaching their third month of complete welded-apartment-door level lockdown.
- zivkovicp 4y ago
  I was thinking this very thought when I read that bit. Maybe the point was more about the system of government being one that could force it's citizenry into servitude; either way I'm not so excited about the prospect.
imtringued 4y ago
I don't believe the article but even if it is true all it would take is to stop making it illegal for that decline to be visible. A negative interest rate signals that society wants to preserve excess capital but is failing to do so. The author conveniently dodges the elephant in the room which is the aging population in the west and which will soon manifest itself in China.
csomar 4y ago
> While the great illusion persisted, we’d have more and more trouble maintaining current customary industries housed in client states such as Germany and Japan. 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.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
(2021)

161 points by CryptoPunk 4y ago

No idea what the deal is with this site, it seemed intriguing but found this on their articles index. Probably should read it before making any judgments but... its mothers day, who has the time? > 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.

haswell 4y ago
Without reading the articles themselves, we can’t judge those titles. It is sometimes true that truly evil forces are responsible for progress. 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.
Jaruzel 4y ago
> its mothers day Not here it isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day
yorwba 4y ago
It's a very good article. You should read it. Especially if you disagree with the title.

aww_dang 4y ago

I don't agree with the premises. The arguments are not fleshed out. The conclusions feel absurd and lack supporting logic. 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?

dtagames 4y ago

A fantastic read. Thanks for the post!

woodruffw 4y ago

This is Internet Rationalism, distilled and bottled: masturbatory rediscovery (there's a reason we've been calling it "post-industrial" for the last 40 years) mixed with a healthy dose of neoreactionary handwringing ("civilizational collapse"). 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!). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835570

alexashka 4y ago

The tone of this article does not match its contents. This is some cherry picked data to suit a narrative, presented as a matter of fact. That is a mistake.

sysadm1n 4y ago

> We can imagine a possible scenario of the collapse of our own civilization. Our ability to perceive decline would be compromised early in the process. 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.

civilized 4y ago

> Not only marketers, but scientists, statesmen, industrialists, politicians, philosophers, and writers shaped ersatz social technology to fill the gaps, but completely failed to guarantee knowledge succession of the generative core of knowledge. The strange spiritual practices, scientific exploration of human psychology, and at times outright ideological cults of the founding cohort gave way to a more shallow type of knowledge. This was a knowledge of levers and buttons, rather than the first principles which built those levers and buttons. 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.

deleted 4y ago
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airbreather 4y ago
Yes, a slightly challenging read, but it's not a dissertation, rather more an opinion piece. 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.
- civilized 4y ago
  You seem to have missed the point of my brief comment. I didn't fail to understand the passage. I understood it and found it implausible.
  - joshcryer 4y ago
    The lovely thing about this "old knowledge" or "old ways" fetishism is that the knowledge economy is a superset of all previous paradigms. 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.

bsedlm 4y ago

> What, then, is the core engine of our own civilization, and in what way might it decay? While we lack an incontrovertible answer, the Industrial Revolution appears to be a leading candidate. 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.

AlbertCory 4y ago

> These social technology cores decay with time as they obsolete their own foundations, and as errors and parasitism build up 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.

stickfigure 4y ago
And also nutty statements like this: > 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.
- paganel 4y ago
  As an EU citizen I was de facto forbidden to enter other EU countries until relatively recently (because of the pandemic), not sure why do you find that conclusion far-fetched. 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?
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - stickfigure 4y ago
    Half of Americans think our visa/visitor/immigration regime is capricious and unfair, and the other half wants it to be worse. As part of the former group, I apologize on behalf of my countrymen. But Americans are not forbidden from visiting Iran and there is nothing the US government will do to me if I take a holiday there (and survive the experience). 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.

kkfx 4y ago

Hum, grumble mumble... We surely are at the end of a cycle in human development terms, witch means the actual society going to change in something new, BUT "Industrial Society" is not actually a society in humans terms. 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.

ilaksh 4y ago
So far yours is the only substantive response to the post (edit: although a few others popped up after I wrote this). I agree with most of the broad ideas you bring up which are insightful. However, the tone of your comment does not seem to be quite acknowledging that we are in reality now in a somewhat dire situation. Anyway I have a few questions. 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.

jseban 4y ago

Stream of consciousness with a way too big scope, gives in to the temptation to conclude that everything will just collapse and disappear to get out of trouble in the end.

xbar 4y ago
Agreed. The author discounts a great deal of flexibility in the existing systems.

jarsin 4y ago

> With a handshake and a reputation at stake, you could sail to the other end of the world, spending years out of contact with your business partners, yet secure in knowing they would honor their word. 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.

jseban 4y ago
More like a handshake, a reputation at stake, and a threat of death penalty, if you want to take a more honest look at what would happen if you committed mutiny.

Barrera 4y ago

> 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.

nyolfen 4y ago
>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
rayiner 4y ago
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.
- trhway 4y ago
  Like feudal post-Roman world couldn't repeat any large Roman infrastructure for a millennium.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  >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.

hammock 4y ago

Industrial society didn’t end, it just moved to Asia, particularly Southeast Asia. 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.

closedloop129 4y ago

>The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life. 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?

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> 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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw_C_sbfyx8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw_C_sbfyx8

throwmeariver1 4y ago

jackcosgrove 4y ago

The article has a somber tone, lamenting the holes that have opened up in our societies and economies since the heyday of industrial production. 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.

jotm 4y ago

I like to say "countries that don't produce tangible goods are at the mercy of those who do". Push come to shove, the service economy is worthless. What matters is production of real goods that you can hold in your hand. At least agriculture is still a top priority despite calls from weirdly misled groups to end subsidies. 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).

Animats 4y ago

"Massive white-collar overproduction means the victory of sharp elbows over sharp minds." 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-growth_n_4738584 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...

mike4ty4 4y ago
Ultimately what we need is not a "victory" over anyone, but rather something where 100% of everyone's need (food, water, shelter, and medical care) are met barring purely random accidents.

jonstewart 4y ago

Palladium magazine was founded by Wolf Tivy and Jonah Bennett. It is funded by Peter Thiel. Jonah Bennett previously worked at The Daily Caller and he resigned from Palladium when it was discovered he had authored some racist messages and was friends with various white nationalists. 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.

panosfilianos 4y ago
Journalism would be so much better with context like this. I wonder if there any initiatives that provide it. Maybe the blockchain would be of help here.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
  This context is quite biased by ideological preconceptions.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  I can't tell how many layers of irony this comment contains.
donkeybeer 4y ago
You have to remember the basic idea behind a lot of these word salads is that "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" and that "Of course I am a high iq intellectual who will be the nobility and not a feudal worker, why is there any doubt?". Everything starts making sense then.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  The idea of those who favor "kings and aristocracy" is more that we'll always have people around with more power than others (elites), and that formal transparency about who these people are ultimately improves accountability. Would you work for a faux "anarcho-tyrannyist" firm where you have no idea who the CEO is and who the managers are that can fire you or cut your salary?

supersync 4y ago

A semi-interesting read on a topic I often think about. 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.

wardedVibe 4y ago

So... The US and Europe haven't stopped being manufacturing hubs. The kind of manufacturing changed to high end goods, and automation has greatly decreased the amount of labor involved. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_... the thesis is only possible if all you look at are the cheapest consumer goods, where moving to places with the lowest cost labor is a necessity.

truffdog 4y ago
A common criticism of that high level view of US manufacturing is that it is a bit of a lie, and a lot of it is about hedonic adjustments for new Intel chips being faster than old ones. Without that, the graph of manufacturing output in dollars looks like a steady downward slope from the year 2000 on.
- wardedVibe 4y ago
  got a link to someone actually arguing that with data?

planarhobbit 4y ago

Very good article. I disagree with the comments here that it’s too theoretical/high brow. From time to time I discuss these topics in a circle of friends and the language we use isn’t much different from the language of this article. There isn’t much “new” thinking here, but if it’s your first time then you’re exposed to a big question mark. It’s a fairly benign introduction to the genre of post-competent societal literature that has yet to have a name. Knut Hamsun is long gone, so we’ll need a new champion. 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.

lazyier 4y ago

People, like the WEF, who spend a great deal of time trying to anticipate the future "revolutions" and post-"revolutions" are just a bunch of self-important assholes. 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.

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dc-programmer 4y ago

Conservatives need to lay off the Marx and French post-structuralism, and maybe go back to Burke or something. The incongruence between the aesthetics and message of these articles causes confusion to readers because most aren’t familiar with dialectical materialism (and the ones that are see through the poorly executed subversion attempt). You can tell because a lot of the comments on these articles are complaining about the style.

mike4ty4 4y ago
Conservatives using Marx! The IRONY!
beaconstudios 4y ago
[flagged]
- ta9251959 4y ago

platz 4y ago

Does he define what a social technology is?

jessriedel 4y ago

The article begins by suggesting that the (“first”) industrial revolution remains much more important and revolutionary than the “later” (2nd, 3rd, 4th) industrial revolutions by appealing to a general sense that the later ones dont feel as impressive, but weirdly he doesn’t seem mention (at least based on my skim) the objective sense in which the original industrial revolution was overwhelmingly more notable: growth rates went from ~0.1%/year to ~4%/year, a speed up of roughly 50 times, which has not happened since. (Growth has now probably slightly slowed.) 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.

spicyusername 4y ago

Samo Burja has been grinding the "were on the brink of collapse" narrative forever.

thematrixturtle 4y ago

> The COVID-19 pandemic showed East Asia to be the best place to put key elements of the supply chain. ... Importantly, authorities see it as vital to enable the gathering of many people together in crowded spaces. ... Because of this, you cannot simply send everyone home forever. Meanwhile, the 25M people of Shanghai are approaching their third month of complete welded-apartment-door level lockdown.

zivkovicp 4y ago
I was thinking this very thought when I read that bit. Maybe the point was more about the system of government being one that could force it's citizenry into servitude; either way I'm not so excited about the prospect.

imtringued 4y ago

I don't believe the article but even if it is true all it would take is to stop making it illegal for that decline to be visible. A negative interest rate signals that society wants to preserve excess capital but is failing to do so. The author conveniently dodges the elephant in the room which is the aging population in the west and which will soon manifest itself in China.

csomar 4y ago

> While the great illusion persisted, we’d have more and more trouble maintaining current customary industries housed in client states such as Germany and Japan. 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.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

(2021)