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

[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.