another query

[rm]

More shit I'm thinking about:

Do you believe a society that either lacks, or shuns, mass mechanical production can be technologically advanced?

N.B. -- steampunk is not an answer

Comments

[delchi.livejournal.com]

That would depend on if the society had something in the place of mechanical technology, ... say a different type of technology that achieves the same result as mass mechanical would.

I'm thinking along the lines of castaways who land on a tropical island - and end up making treehouses, rope bridges, defense devices ( bow/arrow, spring traps, etc ) , hunting devices, elevators to bring food up to the treehouse, waterways to capture / store water and so on. All this done without mass mechanical production BUT technologically advanced past where they were when they first landed.

In a more realistic example, consider the Amish folks who still blacksmith their own implements for farming and so on. If they need something, they make it from scratch, and don't rely on mass preproduced items. They may hae a centeral person, say a 'village smithy' who makes things for everyone - and that person may have some things they invented to make their job easier... but still not mass mechanical.

From where I'm sitting, it has alot to do with how you define 'advanced' in the term technilogically advanced. Any level of technology is advanced when compared to the previous. The cotton gin was considered high tech in it's day. Likewise compare the waterwheel powered by a nearby stream to hoover dam. Each one is more advanced than what came before it. I think the only way you can observe somethign as technologically advanced is when you are looking at the technology in question, and what technology came before it at the same time.

[briansiano.livejournal.com]

That's tough to answer. I mean, I can _imagine_ a society that, after enjoying the technological advancements that mass production encourages, decides to bag that whole process in favor of singular, artisan creation. Maybe they've perfected nanotechnology and _every_ object is equally easy to manufacture. They would be "technologically advanced," and they'd shun mass production.

But if you're asking whether humankind could have become technologically advanced _without_ mass production, the answer is a simple _no_. Without mass production of some sort-- like the entire application of agriculture, to mass produce food-- large scale human societies could not exist. And you need those societies in order to develop higher technologies-- how much metallurgy could a single guy develop when there aren't miners out there somewherem, bringing him metals to work?

[delchi.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. I didn't think ' large-scale' when I wrote my reply.

[rm.livejournal.com]

That pretty much mirrors my thinking, which leads to the next question -- does human nature require that the advent of mass production means most things for most people (as in our society) becomes mass produced. Or could a society use mass production only as regards large scale things (say food, public transit and mutions) -- or does that not make any sense? I'm trying to figure out if a consumer pop-culture is a necessary outgrowth of mass production.

worldbuilding gives me such a headache.

[briansiano.livejournal.com]

It's not so much "human nature" as it is simple logistics. If you have to make an object, it requires acquiring the materials, forming and using the tools, and the actual work. If you do this only once, it costs X. But, if you do it 10 times, then the cost becomes less than X. You might find it easier to get larger amounts of the materials. You don't have to create a new set of tools each time. And you may find a way to make the work go efficiently after a while. If there's any human nature here, it's our desire and skill to do things efficiently and more easily.

As for consumer culture and mass production, they are intertwined and interrelated. And that's fine because it enables more people to acquire things they need and want. It means that more people can enjoy a great film, or obtain attractive or durable clothing, or enjoy exotic foods, or acquire the means by which they can create their own objects. I mean, I do woodworking, and it certainly helps that I don't have to make my own saws and planes.

It's not something we can "triage," i.e., decide that _these_ things will be mass produced on a large scale, and these _other_ things will be available only as artisan, one-of-a-kind things. What would be the criteria for this decision? Look how many things we can get that were once the province of specialists, hobbyists, and the wealthy: we can own movies, automobiles, dialysis systems, books, designer clothing, etc. Take sex toys: a hundred years ago, you _could_ buy a vibrator if you could find an engineer to make one for you in secrecy away from Anthony Comstock. Nowadays, thanks to mass production, millions of people can buy happy little plastic friends.

Sure, having things made by artisans is really nice. And happily, there will always be artisans whose works we can enjoy. But if we gave up mass production, then we'd be penalizing a LOT of less-than-affluent people, by making a lot of things nearly impossible for them to afford.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Of course, I'm not talking about the economics of our world, which is as it is and your assessment on that front is perfectly right. I'm trying to figure out rules for a world I'm writing and I want to see how other people bang into this topic as I'm sitting here doing so night after night.

[briansiano.livejournal.com]

Hm. Offhand, it seems to me that what I outlined is kind of unavoidable. Economics is a symbolic representation of certain flows in our society, like effort, materials, needs, etc. It'd depend on what you want to do with the story.

But as I said in another post, one could _imagine_ a society that has consciously decided to _not_ follow certain dictates. For example, one may have a religion, or culture, that demands that things be made by an artisan; "One must not repeat a task unless it has been completed," or something like that. So, the principle of mass production would be prohibited. So, if a shoemaker had to make thirty shoes, he couldn't just cut thirty soles, thirty side parts, and thirty sets of laces; he'd have to make each one individually. (Okay, so Henry Ford'd be a religious heretic...)

Or, one could imagine a society where making artisan stuff and mass-producing things costs about the same-- it's just as easy to make one as it is to make a thousand. Which means that people might _want_ to make their own stuff on an individual, one-of-a-kind basis.

[00goddess.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do, but I think it takes the work of societies that embrace mass mechanical production to get them there. I.e. some society has to do the grunt work, have an industrial revolution, etc, and then when they reach a sufficient level of technological advancement, their technology can be shared with societies that shun mass mechanical production.

This is so sci-fi!

[rm.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm thinking about it for the thing I'm trying to turn into origfic, and I have a long list of questions I know need to be answered to have a framework for a world that makes sense in order to set the story somwhere concrete. This is the one that's driving me the most crazy, mainly because of my own predilictions and issapointments with the world we all actually live in.

[00goddess.livejournal.com]

I have read sci-fi stories about technologically advanced societies that chose to shun mechanical mass production, but they were all highly futuristic- i.e. those people were far in our future, and had perhaps come out the other side of mass production.

These are societies that valued the handmade, the artisanal, and also felt it important that people have valuable work to do. I honestly think it's the kind of place I would like to live.

The thing is, they would never have gotten there were it not for the past behind them, one of great mass-production, which basically gave them the luxury to choose the way their society would run.

Some years ago I read (non-fiction, in NG or SciAm or some such) about an African tribe that made a huge amount of money off of oil rights or some such. The tribe became quite wealthy, and they actually had people helping them and wise leaders, so they didn't squander it all on hookers and blow. The chief really wanted to make things better for the tribe, so one of the first things he did was spend money building permanent buildings for them, buildings with concrete floors and metal walls/roofs, replacing the leaf-thatch buildings they had had before, which always needed to be replaced/repaired.

The new buildings were a disaster. They were not as well-ventilated as the thatch buildings were, so the people got hot and sick. When it rained they were horribly noisy. And all the women in the tribe got vaginal infections and UTIs from sitting on the concrete floors. There were other problems too, which led the chief to decide to scrap the new buildings and go back to thatch.

I thought it was a fascinating story, one that stuck with me, and your question made it leap to mind.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Many variables, of course. I've got an SF world in which the technology is all biological, and mass production is more like farming as a result. Looks pretty pastoral to human eyes, but engineered plants and critters produce everything that humans would tend to produce mechanically.

I'm not quite sure where community cooperation ends and mass production begins; I suppose when somebody starts to make more than their community needs of a thing to trade it to other communities for things they don't have locally. Hmm. And then there's that whole question of things you need vs. things you just want, and ... I don't think humans are really wired to be non-matrialistic; we're wired to hoard enough to get through the next winter.

[sethg]

Some disorganized thoughts (because if I try to organize them, I'll be spending the next six hours writing this...)

* Industrial technology and modern capitalism have taken over pretty much every territory they encounter, like the Borg. Mass-produced goods are so much cheaper than traditionally-produced ones that it's hard for a society to resist. IIRC, Gandhi tried to encourage Indians to weave their own clothes instead of relying on imported British textiles, with no success.

* One way to look at mass vs. artisanal production is as a trade-off between capital and labor. In mass production, you build a factory, fill it with equipment that unskilled or semi-skilled workers can operate, and then hire those workers. In artisanal production, you hire a highly skilled worker, who usually owns his or her own tools, to make something. From the capitalist's point of view, the advantage of mass production is that the unskilled workers are easy to fire and replace, and the equipment itself don't go on strike--but the disadvantage is that you have to buy all this equipment before you can start making anything, which means you have to borrow money, float shares, or dip into whatever your current stream of profits is. So in a situation where those sources of income were harder to tap (e.g., a collapse in the worldwide banking system), artisanal production would look more attractive even to the capitalists. If you want your culture to only permit mass production of certain items, then the obvious lever to control that would be through the financial system: you can borrow money to build a sardine-tinning plant, but if inspectors from the Department of Appropriate Technology discover that the factory is actually being used to build vibrators, then you are automatically in default.

* Moving into more SFish territory: you could have a spell or drug or exoskeleton that effectively turned an unskilled worker into an artisan, so that twenty people could use this thing to build separate cars and be just as efficent as twenty ordinary workers on an auto assembly line.

* In the late Octavia Butler's Dawn/Adulthood Rites/Imago trilogy, the aliens used living creatures (whose genes they had, of course, manipulated) for all the things that we use mass-produced technology for, including spaceships.