Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material…

Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material basis of our culture, being ignored by our obsessions with the daily team sports of politics. I plug it because it’s a theme I Tweet about a lot. /1 https://t.co/QFtGHEFrLO

For a long time we’ve had this strange binary between social and technical aspects of our society. Reading @EdConwaySky’s book will show you how at every stage of our civilisations, it’s the material bases of that culture that did the deepest weaving of our social bonds. /2

Towards the end of the book Ed unpacks this with some examples, how trying to unravel the social networks underlying some of our key technologies is almost impossible, as the networks of supply and expertise criss-cross the globe. A literal Gordian knot. /3

Gabriel Tarde more than a century go made the same point, repeatedly, and was ignored. He used the example of railways coming to a town. How the exchange and trade they brought to a town socially connected that town to everywhere those exchanges came from. /4 https://t.co/B32UTOzxX3

If you drive through what we dismissively call regional and remote Australia, you’ll see it firsthand. How even the smallest town has silos that took the locally-grown grain to markets elsewhere. That was what connected those communities to the wider community. /5 https://t.co/TAUrWTuAXm

And those communities often disappear, as the silos and other exchange mechanisms cease to operate. This isn’t some economic argument about trade and markets replacing societies. It’s a material argument, that it’s maintaining the material needs of society, that creates them. /6

Again, if you read Ed’s book, you’ll see why he says we need a new Industrial Revolution right now, if we’re to have any hope at all of managing climate change for example. I’ve Tweeted about that before, how we misunderstand the previous Industrial Revolution. /7 https://t.co/M3zWYq9oKj

It was a social revolution, not a technical one. Or rather, those are the same thing, not two things. The enormous social problems we have today are caused by a deficit in *material* development, itself driven by widespread ignorance of the material basis of our culture. /8

The word ‘materialism’ is bandied about by people who like -isms. Like all -isms it’s utter nonsense. To use materials is not only human, it’s the most fundamentally human thing we do. Our societies would cease to exist without material things. /9

Read Ed’s book or any other on the material basis of our cultures, and you’ll feel directly how abstract and hopeless our daily ‘debates’ are in fixing anything. Why I also suggest us ditching any decision-making based on popularity, which is light years away from the…/10

…actual expertise that’s needed to understand and work with our material cultures. All of the fake Left and Right and other binaries we construct in our daily team sports, amplified hugely by social media, miss completely about 99% of what keeps societies running, /11

There is no Left-leaning solar panel or Right-leaning oil refinery. Nearly all of our critical problems can be fixed with no attention to any of that political drivel at all, it’s a useless thin veneer of hot air sitting on top of actual material reality. It’s a roadblock. /end