Thread by @SamoBurja

Every civilization is driven by a core stack of social technologies. When this social tech fails, so does the civilization.

The Industrial Revolution is the current core of our society. And it is failing.

My new article in @palladiummag. Read here:
palladiummag.com/2021/03/24/the…

https://twitter.com/benlandautaylor/status/1313949523157409793

Contemporary Western societies are often described as “post-industrial”, as if we have progressed past the need for factories and assembly lines

We liberally borrow the name of the Industrial Revolution & apply it to ourselves in a sort of stolen valor

Factories are obsolete signs of backwardness; yet we lament China’s rise, built upon those same factories.

These contradictory attitudes reveal our idea of “post-industrial” society to be more wish fulfillment than impartial reality.

Rather than advancing into the next stage of human development, the “post-industrial” society is merely one that has exhausted the social and human capital that made the Industrial Revolution possible in the first place.

We are not advancing; we are exhausted.

The social techs that undergirded industrial production and industrial warfare were always very similar, such as mass schooling and strict timekeeping.

A factory is staffed not by an organic community, but by a regimented, uniform army of laborers waging a war of production.

When post-war Europe gave up dreams of empire based on industrial militaries, it also gave up its armies of production.

Social democracy was the name given to the new flash-frozen industrial economy. A customary economy inhabiting the remains of a properly industrial one.

America’s situation today appears not dissimilar. Whatever solution we find to this “post-industrial trap”, it will require social technologies of knowledge and production very different from what we have ever seen before.

The first reindustrialized society is yet to be invented