Dear David and Francois,
Thanks for your thoughts. I did not post the article to take a position on it, merely to share an interesting viewpoint by an engineer who helped to design one of the tools of the contemporary world.
If you are talking about the ways that technological artefacts change cultures around them, all the examples that David gave make sense. There’s a lot more — chipped stone tools, the atlatl, fire hardened wooden spear points, bronze swords, writing, mathematics, iron swords, steel swords, … lots more. What does differ in Cooper’s argument is that this specific invention leads to modern-day globalization. One can argue that different kinds of long-distance trade existed in the past — we have evidence for trade between India and Rome in antiquity. Indian mathematics and philosophy seem to have influenced Greek mathematics and philosophy. China was a major world power when the west had not yet emerged.
But these weren’t global — for all practical purposes, what happened in Europe, Africa, and Asia were completely remote from what happened in North and South America, and Australia was far from all of them.
Anyhow, the article was interesting, but what we understand about history, macro-history, and world events depends on the questions we ask and the frames set set for inquiry.
Electronic waste is a serious problem. All the things we use affect the environment. Given the world we have built over the past century, technological lock-in makes it very difficult to change our trajectory. This is made worse by the fact that every possible change involves competition between groups who have different philosophical and political positions, and this is made even more complicated by the fact that many of these issues are determined by policies set under different jurisdictions and legal frameworks.
Every time I read yet another article about electric automobiles, I wonder why people do not realise that electric cars solve local air pollution problems and fossil fuel usage at a distinct cost in different kinds of pollution required to generate electricity, make batteries, and so on. And some of the ways that we generate electricity pollute the air just as much as fossil fuel does. It is also the case that electric vehicles do not work for the farm equipment, long-distance trucks, and even long-distance drives required in some nations.
Every solution that we trial brings new problems. In a world with nearly 10,000,000,000 people, I do not have a lot of hope for a solution that will address our major problems before the real disasters toward which we are heading hit us.
The article — "From the ‘Shoe Phone’ to the Smartphone" — was interesting. That’s the only claim I make for it.
Yours,
Ken
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