Most human progress we attribute to democracy is really the work of engineers. It’s engineers who scale…
Most human progress we attribute to democracy is really the work of engineers. It’s engineers who scale knowledge to the material wellbeing of people. That includes pandemics, where engineers have saved more lives than any medical science. And all of our ordinary comforts…/1 https://t.co/jJqawWwdi2
…of life like clean running water, transport, heating and cooling, shelter, travel, energy, telecommunications etc. is…engineers. To put this in perspective, the total weight of built things humans have added to the planet in history is about 1.1 trillion tons. /2 https://t.co/GHqWUKtRQ1
That’s greater than the weight of all living things on the planet. And we’re still adding 30 billion more tons of built things every year. Who’s doing a lot if not most of that adding? Engineers. It’s the defining thing about humanity, which the Romans knew very well. /3 https://t.co/QFB1bffZtm
You could say democracy makes all of this engineering possible, but I think this is a chicken and egg question that has an answer. Human groups never agree on anything for very long. But when you embed agreement in stone and metal and machines, you bind people together. /4
This is what the late and very great Bruno Latour tried to explain for his entire career. Engineering isn’t ‘technical’ or ‘just a tool’. It weaves societies together, building and maintaining something is an intrinsically contractual process. You commit people today…/5 https://t.co/KgdeYzZLq8
…and into the future to the upkeep of the things you build, in a way they wouldn’t commit to any argument or debating point. One way to see that is to watch films and TV from around the world. While the customs and language and culture may vary widely, what rarely does is…/6
…the material built environment you see people living in. The engineering. It all looks very similar. That’s the engineering, the literal bedrock of all civilisation. I’ve Tweeted before that the fastest way to end this pandemic would be to ask engineers to do it. /7
They know how, they’ve stopped pandemics before. Get rid of populist grandstanding politicians and medical professionals curating public identities, and just put the engineers to work. They’ll fix it for you, and fast. /end https://t.co/2aJBdROLUe
