Technology Traps (1978) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcZ_5uCldg

by optimalsolver • 5 years ago

47 15 5 years ago

prvc• 5 years ago

That show was so good. Unfortunately, nothing like it could be made today.

Totally curious as to why you think so. I feel so lucky to have grown up watching connections. I even see the decline of this kind of education programming as the seasons progressed.

lelanthran• 5 years ago

This particular episode could not have been made today: 2020 taught us that masses of people setting fire to buildings and/or breaking into them are not "looters" or "rioters" ... they're "peaceful protestors" :-/

This video used the wrong term, and showed the wrong people doing the looting and/or rioting.

amelius• 5 years ago

Today you just pay the ransom and continue with whatever you were doing.

noduerme• 5 years ago

I better quit coding and start ploughing.. get out while the gettin's good.

ntoll• 5 years ago

Perhaps a more humorous illustration of the same principle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU

ColFrancis• 5 years ago

He almost got there in the end, but he stopped short. The plough will break. Then what? Do you know how to make charcoal and how to make a forge? What about replace the steel that's rusting around you?

Beyond the technology traps, we're in a "society trap", we need each other and the skills each other has. The trouble for the fictional scenario is not the technology, it's the lack of a community to pool knowledge. The little old lady who loves her garden and knows what plants are what, even some of the exotic ones typically imported, the fitter and turner who might not know how to exactly use a forge but understand metallurgy enough to shape it sensibly, the farmer who knows what the plants and animals need even if they don't have on hand the tools they normally use.

I for one don't want to end up by myself, I quite like all the benefits society and specialisation bring. In no part of history or prehistory I know of (not a lot, granted) has much of society known enough to survive alone without at least some sensible community.

Dzugaru• 5 years ago

I agree, he lost me in the first few minutes by assuming the moment some problems start the society will turn on each other like in some zombie apocalypse.

Anecdotally, I lived almost totally without power (critical institutions had diesel powered stations I think) for months in a childhood, in a city that was not that small (about 100k citizens) in the 1990s in Russia. Nothing much ever happened, no looting, no arson. Police retaliation would be swift, they don't need no computers to punish offenders.

XorNot• 5 years ago

A simple thought-experiment is: which of your neighbors are you planning to murder when things get rough?

addingnumbers• 5 years ago

he lost me in the first few minutes by assuming the moment some problems start the society will turn on each other like in some zombie apocalypse.

You're not convinced this is a likely outcome while watching footage of it actually happening?

The zombies are set dressing in that sort of fiction, the tension comes from taboos and mores being shed by the survivors adapting to new conditions in ways history has documented a million times

dredmorbius2• 5 years ago

Arguably, that's the rest of the programme.

The next scene opens in Egypt, at the dawn of agriculture, with the invention of the plough itself. See the full episode:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

The scene linked in this post ends at 29:33.

Burke's style isn't to explicitly state all lessons and relationships. The goal of the series after all is in its title: to teach viewers how to make their own connections.

mrtksn• 5 years ago

There was this show called "The Last Man on Earth".

They should have end it much earlier, way before it becomes insufferable and predictable, however the world after the civilisation suddenly ends was quite convincingly depicted.

Did you know that the fossil fuels spoil? Apparently id does, it's organic after all. How do you take care of your sanitary needs when the infrastructure is not running? Maybe simply use everything once and leave it as is. Today we wonder if we are alone but if the technological infrastructure breaks down, at some point people will wonder if they are alone in the world, country or city. Our reach and information completeness is enormous today.

It's is probably an order of magnitude better than even 20 years ago. If we loose GPS and similar, then if we loose the Internet of will instantly feel like it's the stone age again.

dredmorbius2• 5 years ago

If you're a fan of Burke, you'll probably appreciate Ronald Wright's 2004 Massey Lectures on "The History of Progress":

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-2004-cbc-massey-lectures-...

Based on a book of the same title:

https://www.worldcat.org/title/short-history-of-progress/ocl...

gabrielsroka• 5 years ago

This video is from part one of the Connections series. The entire series is available here https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke

Technology Traps (1978) [video]

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