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?

[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!

[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.