Yeah, but parent is saying if you zoom out. We don't know what will come next; it could be dramatically different. Nobody saw industrialization and its attendant social order coming.
regardless, I don't think it's optimism because I don't think I will leave long enough to see such a world, at best we will leave through the roughest part of the shift. this level of cultural transformation takes more tha a few of generations.
in any case, I see something else regarding the way in which individual humans are aware of the relationship to their supporting society which translates up to the way in which a distinct society sees itself as a component of a larger system.
> 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.
Well if we all go around promoting the destruction of the middle class im confident will be able to create that future that you are unoptimistic about ;)
How it will turn out is kinda unknown. 100 years ago many people couldnt read and worked on farms. We past the first transition quite well, how will we fair in the next transition is indeterminate. I do know that this is the one area where what people THINK actually could have an effect on the outcome. (unlike most science)
It shouldn't have taken those graphs to point it out to you. All indicators seem to point to a forced 'adjustment' of the current social landscape within the next (couple) decades.
Inequality (of the social, political, wealth, access types in particular) can only get so widespread before someone gets the idea that they could do better for themselves leading a bunch of angry people with (metaphorical) pitchforks.
Perhaps (hopefully) the change wont be a violent upheaval though. There is the possibility that we've progressed enough to avoid that sort of thing.
The entirety of human history until the late medieval/early medieval period, all those hundreds of thousands of years existed without capitalism despite resource inequality. It can be hard to see beyond the dominant social structures we see around us every day, but don't confuse them for inevitabilities. Things will eventually change and whatever replaces the current structures will seem just as obviously inevitable to our descendents.
The world changed in a very significant way over the last 70 years. Even more so over the last 20 years. It may very well end up that the Information Age has tipped the scales and our large meandering decentralized democracies are no longer the superior model they were back when it took 4 weeks to get a letter from New York City to Washington DC. Now it’s a synchronous call with satellite footage of every inch of the earth. It may very be that centralized planned economies are now the superior model and only the test of time will unveil which is true.
I’ve lost a bit of sleep wondering about this over the years.
You can accuse people of daydreaming of Utopia, and you might be right. But honestly? The future you are painting? That's doom dreaming. With the exception of global warming, whose effects can be so big we cannot really predict, 100 years from now, worst case scenario, western countries look more like Brazil. Big wealth inequality, walls and eletric fences around condos, but no sniper towers.
And if automation improves enough that there is no more labor market? I don't think anybody has a good idea what society would come after that. If you asked someone in medieval Europe what they would think would happen with the introduction of guns, they would probably say that the noble class (which was the martial class, that trained for war) would just use it to oppress the peasantry more. Nobody would guess that their introduction would lead to the complete end of the idea of a noble class.
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.
In addition, there is no positive vision of the future for society as a whole. What does the US look like in 2075 or 2100? All we get are dystopias.
I get that the World, and Europe in particular, got badly burnt by Utopias in the 20th century. But still seems like something is needed - especially given the looming geopolitical changes.
History tells us that societies evolve very differently and it’s a bit of a good intellectual exercise to think that maybe what you want now is not what people will want in the future.
That said, assuming human nature remains the same, I logically assume places with a larger degree of freedom will always thrive in comparison to places where there isn’t as much freedom (at least in the long run) simply because we know one central place dictating rules can’t account for all the trade offs and sooner or later will make a terrible decision no one can escape from, many times motivated by the flaws of the few people making those decisions. Meanwhile a larger degree of freedom allows people to choose what’s best for them at scale and trends happen more organically. This seems to be the idea defended in the book “Why Nations Fail” in general terms.
Also it seems to me that the governments don’t and can’t really control their populations as much as we fear it. To do that, it needs too much information, and even though we can process more and more information much cheaper today, I don’t think it makes the big picture any easier to understand. Any visualization of data is doomed to be reduced to simplifications that only tell a very narrow story of what is really happening, or gets locked in a machine learning black box that isn’t interested in helping you particularly. The more complex something is, the less likely it is for us to make sense of it, and I think all the subdivisions of human fields (politics, history, economics etc.) actually do more harm than good because when you isolate those things you lose perspective of how they’re interacting and a whole model of how something works can fall flat (see economists not being able to predict anything in practice).
The world or human behavior remains and I believe will remain unpredictable with all sorts of emergent behaviors in different scales, if that makes sense. Some even predict nation states are declining and will be replaced by smaller city-state governments that are closer to people’s needs or that different forms of organizations will be created to deal with different issues now that companies aren’t subject to one country in particular etc.
Large societal changes are fairly rare events. Personally I think the next stage is a new form of worker revolt, some new spin on Unions or Communism, the next Marx has yet to write his magnum opus yet though. Those words are still viewed as bad in the West, so it will need new terminology too.
And to be clear, I don't ascribe to communism or anything, I'm simply speculating that some sort of new ideology, with a focus on the common person, will arise in the next 50 years to direct and fuel the next revolt. You'll know it when you see it.
Yeah, I guess I'm thinking: although we have the internet (neat!), most of western society is still organized around getting educated, getting a job and working for a living. It was not always this way, and if the OP was correct, we might expect that 100 years of explosive growth would have dramatically reshaped the structure of society. Basically, it hasn't. In 1923, you might have supported your family by working in a factory putting buttons on coats. Today, you might work in an office putting buttons on webpages.
We have not descended back into feudalism; technology hasn't eliminated the need to work; socialism never took off. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
"All this changed dramatically over the last two centuries. The Industrial Revolution gave the market immense new powers, provided the state with new means of communication and transportation, and placed at the government’s disposal an army of clerks, teachers, policemen and social workers. At first the market and the state discovered their path blocked by traditional families and communities who had little love for outside intervention. Parents and community elders were reluctant to let the younger generation be indoctrinated by nationalist education systems, conscripted into armies or turned into a rootless urban proletariat.
"The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.’"
If nothing else, two centuries is an awfully short time to allow you to conclude that 100,000 years of the past are no longer especially relevant.
The exact opposite of this is true. Great leaps forward in Civilization have come from things like Empire, explicitly run by hereditary ruling classes, and technological advances. In today’s world the latter now eclipses the former. There’s no reason, in my mind, to think that that ratio will (or should) remain.
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