by Higgenbotham » Thu Sep 10, 2026 11:28 pm
Higgenbotham wrote: Thu Sep 10, 2026 12:23 pm
What is your view regarding the end of industrial civilization and the fact that an information age has not happened?
I'll speak for myself but I interpret Burja to be saying essentially the same thing - that industrial civilization is reliant on a set of social technologies and, as those technologies degrade, industrial civilization degrades.
I'll use references to previous posts to illustrate this using the example of one social technology that industrial civilization is reliant on - the public education system in the United States. A previous post made reference to the printing press which came on the scene in 1455 before the advent of the industrial revolution. In less than 500 years, the printing press and other things, but the printing press being key, eventually enabled the mass production of school textbooks that were low cost, standardized and uniform. These textbooks appeared in nearly every or essentially every public school classroom in the United States.
A previous post referenced the 66 years from Kitty Hawk to the Boeing 747, the years from 1903 to 1969. What public schools accomplished during those years was a high school graduate was ready to hit the factory floor. Practically any male high school graduate could go to the employment office at the front gates of a factory, be employed that day, and work on that same factory floor until retirement, supporting a wife and children. Some could go onto college and do the same. No BS, no list of job requirements, no online application, no ridiculous multi-week interview process, just a diploma and a willingness to show up and be trained, which was enough to be factory floor ready.
That system (the US public school system as it existed from approximately the years 1900 to 1970) is part of what designed and built the Boeing 747 right here in America without any reliance on any other education system. No H1-Bs needed. It was a social technology tailored specifically to the industrial revolution. It developed over centuries.
As the US public school system degraded little by little starting circa 1971 or so, as the US entered the maintenance phase of a declining civilization, that didn't suddenly mean that the degradation of the public school system automatically began to tailor it for the new incoming information age. What it meant was the degradation of the public school system degraded the functioning of the industrial production system, slowly but surely, and that's it, period. The public school system, after all, wasn't designed over centuries, seamlessly interlocking with other social technologies to produce factory floor human robots willing to work 45 years until retirement only to be presented with a company watch or some such thing, science lesson by science lesson, math lesson by math lesson, reading lesson by reading lesson, ass paddling by ass paddling as needed, to just degrade little by little and therefore be just perfect for the new incoming information age paradigm. That's not how systems work.
As the public school system degrades, the industrial production process will degrade. People will home school. People will send their kids to a variety of private schools that prepare kids for a variety of things. People will pull their kids out of schools and do nothing. Public schools will shut down in some areas. Where public schools shut down in some areas, maybe some of those people will move so they can continue to send their kids to public school and maybe some won't. But none of that is suddenly going to produce information-age-ready 18 year olds. The industrial production system is going to continue to degrade, collapse, hit bottom, not entirely going away, and then something, some spark, some series of sparks over decades and centuries will create a new set of social technologies specifically tailored for the new information age or whatever it is that is going to come.
[quote=Higgenbotham post_id=95388 time=1789057389 user_id=100]
What is your view regarding the end of industrial civilization and the fact that an information age has not happened?[/quote]
I'll speak for myself but I interpret Burja to be saying essentially the same thing - that industrial civilization is reliant on a set of social technologies and, as those technologies degrade, industrial civilization degrades.
I'll use references to previous posts to illustrate this using the example of one social technology that industrial civilization is reliant on - the public education system in the United States. A previous post made reference to the printing press which came on the scene in 1455 before the advent of the industrial revolution. In less than 500 years, the printing press and other things, but the printing press being key, eventually enabled the mass production of school textbooks that were low cost, standardized and uniform. These textbooks appeared in nearly every or essentially every public school classroom in the United States.
A previous post referenced the 66 years from Kitty Hawk to the Boeing 747, the years from 1903 to 1969. What public schools accomplished during those years was a high school graduate was ready to hit the factory floor. Practically any male high school graduate could go to the employment office at the front gates of a factory, be employed that day, and work on that same factory floor until retirement, supporting a wife and children. Some could go onto college and do the same. No BS, no list of job requirements, no online application, no ridiculous multi-week interview process, just a diploma and a willingness to show up and be trained, which was enough to be factory floor ready.
That system (the US public school system as it existed from approximately the years 1900 to 1970) is part of what designed and built the Boeing 747 right here in America without any reliance on any other education system. No H1-Bs needed. It was a social technology tailored specifically to the industrial revolution. It developed over centuries.
As the US public school system degraded little by little starting circa 1971 or so, as the US entered the maintenance phase of a declining civilization, that didn't suddenly mean that the degradation of the public school system automatically began to tailor it for the new incoming information age. What it meant was the degradation of the public school system degraded the functioning of the industrial production system, slowly but surely, and that's it, period. The public school system, after all, wasn't designed over centuries, seamlessly interlocking with other social technologies to produce factory floor human robots willing to work 45 years until retirement only to be presented with a company watch or some such thing, science lesson by science lesson, math lesson by math lesson, reading lesson by reading lesson, ass paddling by ass paddling as needed, to just degrade little by little and therefore be just perfect for the new incoming information age paradigm. That's not how systems work.
As the public school system degrades, the industrial production process will degrade. People will home school. People will send their kids to a variety of private schools that prepare kids for a variety of things. People will pull their kids out of schools and do nothing. Public schools will shut down in some areas. Where public schools shut down in some areas, maybe some of those people will move so they can continue to send their kids to public school and maybe some won't. But none of that is suddenly going to produce information-age-ready 18 year olds. The industrial production system is going to continue to degrade, collapse, hit bottom, not entirely going away, and then something, some spark, some series of sparks over decades and centuries will create a new set of social technologies specifically tailored for the new information age or whatever it is that is going to come.