Thread by @wolftivy

Our recent article from @SamoBurja proposed that the industrial revolution was socially incomplete, but destroyed it's pre-industrial foundations, so post-industrial society isn't going to be able to just go back automatically. This poses a big problem of development strategy.

The obvious implication is that we have to complete the industrial revolution by extending or supplementing the industrial logic to a full stack of social technologies, especially in the currently failing family life patterns and human capital creation areas.

What does that completion actually look like? What if it does look a bit like going back? Deliberately rebuild the pre-industrial foundations alongside industry. Not something wholly new, but a novel stabilization of industrial alongside pre-industrial social tech.

Undertaken as a seriously organized social project, it is more possible to succeed than by accident. And it's possibly the most likely to succeed given that much of the target is known and known to mostly work. This is what we might call the neo-traditionalist approach.

When doing something hard and new, stay in a reversible regime, where you can stop or go back as needed. Imagine rock climbing. When not skilled, you want to avoid dynamic moves and leaps of faith.

Industry was a leap of faith. We have to land and get back to reversibility.

Full reversibility is impossible in complex living systems like industrial society, but maybe we can stabilize a viable superposition of new and neo-old more than we have. We need a force driving back to controllability, not just acceleration.

Concretely: going back to subsistence agriculture, local manufacture and construction, lower technology, thick community etc if industry fails is not currently possible, but might be necessary. We should perhaps take that as a high priority of real industrial progress.

Sustainability-focused de-industrialization in key areas may be key to stabilizing and accelerating industrial progress where it matters.

Is this a paradox?

My full opinion is much closer to "accelerate the industrial logic into managing the foundations too", but maybe deliberately reverse-engineering the known solution to stabilize our social stack is the first step of that.