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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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In some ways, but I think in a lot of ways building is way easier now. Anyone who's played around with power tools has to wonder "how the hell did anyone ever get anything built before these?" And I'm not just talking about the difference between a hammer and a nailgun, but literally having ready access to the nails.

Generally nails weren't used, I assume you are familiar with thatch and carving notches in logs.

Part of the good thing about living in Amish country is that they still do post and beam construction, versus the modern balloon frame construction where the shell is the support structure as well.

Having done it the old way in the literal middle of the fucking jungle:

With friends.

You put out the call and everybody comes; the dudes from the harbor bring block and tackle; the dudes down the valley bring some donkeys, and everybody brings their sweat and you put that shit up.

Working without fasteners isn't actually that much harder for simple structures; it's just much more time consuming.

Then again; I can't imagine doing it without the products of industrialization. Even if we didn't have electric drills we did have HSS bits, as it were.

Then again; I can't imagine doing it without the products of industrialization. Even if we didn't have electric drills we did have HSS bits, as it were.

As you say, same thing only slower.

You can bang a spade bit out of iron, or even stone I guess -- you can make a brace out of various things, with a bow drill being probably most primitive.

You can hack boards with an axe -- which is one of the older tools in existence.

The story of technology is that of workers figuring out ways to make their jobs easier, and it is a pretty long story before you get anywhere near the industrial age.

And power drills and nails are designed and fabricated at locations very far from you, and are useful to you or not (supply, packaging, standardization, spare parts, etc) based on the decisions made by far away people, often times leaving you no recompensed if those decisions impact you negatively.

The glib libertarian answer would probably be that the kind of international trade that facilitates the manufacture and supply of technology is also best maximized by getting the government out of the way. But I'll bite the bullet and say that I think modern states also frequently lower transaction costs for trade, and that the kind of institutions that create power tools are likely to be large scale corporations with bureaucratic management structures themselves. I'm a great enjoyer of modernity and I think the vast, impersonal scale of our institutions is part of what drives prosperity. There's a reason why humanity generally trades off independence and self-reliance for the stultifying comforts of advanced society.

I certainly wouldn't undo that trade myself, but I want to highlight that something important was lost through the trade, something that's partially a choice and can be recovered without sacraficing everything else. The Spanish Flu response that Greer highlights was in the early twentieth century, after both industrial capitalism and modern bureaucracy had been built, and yet we still understood how to achieve wide-scale, grassroots activism and institution building. A society that regained those skills would be much stronger, more self-actualized, and more operationally democratic than the one we have now.

A society that regained those skills would be much stronger, more self-actualized, and more operationally democratic than the one we have now.

Agreed. Maybe I was taking issue with the framing, as if these skills were "just lost" like a penny in a gutter, or via some nebulous "force of bureaucracy". They were abandoned for the same reason that you cannot build a power drill yourself (or probably even a hammer).

(Though I also believe we'd be a better society if everyone knew how to make a power drill)