And I think that that came again after the mechanization of print. Before that mechanization phase, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the US was 4,000. It was a good substack newsletter.
It was a good substack newsletter. But come the mechanization and mass media, we all get grouped in together. I think what the internet does is kill the mass media business model, and with it the idea of the mass.
of Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, whites coming off the Dust Bowl, blacks recovering from the slow mechanization of cotton-- everybody bouncing from the Great Depression of the '30s. Possible for a black man to be standing on the sidewalk in Jackson, Mississippi, where Southern tradition would demand that he step off
And within transport, what you would really hope that your post-apocalyptic society, that you could stop the regression before you reach a state like this where you can no longer run mechanization . You've lost engines and machinery.
helping farmers to grow nutritious crops from the start. Jahiu, one of my board members, based in Kenya. His company Hello Tractor is connecting farmers with mechanization and digital platforms, increasing yields and livelihoods. It's like the Uber for tractor. Super cool.
Yeah, I mean I was talking to some friends about like, you know, during the 20th century in the in in US there was also a wave of factory mechanization and automation, but unions were really strong during the 20th century. Often times when it was like, "Okay, we're going to bring in these machines." But they would sit down with like the factory union leader and they would say like, "Okay, you can bring in the
who are interested could order the first part and if they liked it they could order the other they could pre-order the very much like uh the mechanization of the biome if you
So there's no need for aeration. So there's no need for high mechanization . There's no downtime required.
What's lost is the fact that that matters at a foundational level. There's a way in which this optimization approach is a mechanization approach. And what people who come from a rational point of view, they want to be dismissive and say, "No, I don't need to feel the strangeness or weirdness.
And so I hear everything you're saying, but that could have been said at the beginning of the digital revolution. It could have been said at the beginning of the mechanization revolution of the 1800s. So in a way, from my view, I think you're both right, or all three of you are right.
What you're failing to understand is that attacking the Soviet Union is over a geographical landmass ten times the size of France, just on the frontage. And you haven't really got much more mechanization than you had in May 1940 when they attacked the Low Countries and France. You've actually got less Luftwaffe aircraft to support you.
To think of people as a mass is to forget them, is to not listen to them, is to group them as an anonymous bunch. And I think that that came again after the mechanization of print. Before that mechanization phase, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the US was 4,000.
You then said-- you kind of answered, so. He didn't think that wages would rise as mechanization progressed.
It's a seaborne empire. The idea is that you use technology, mechanization , modernity, global reach to do a lot of your hard yards.
was a very, very key element in our entire mix. Now, in an era of mechanization , of artificial intelligence, why would you go back to pickaxe and shovel? Because pickaxe and shovel forces you to sweat together.
And the future that we all face now, with jobs becoming more remote, or becoming-- not being there anymore because of robotization, or mechanization , you just reach for culture. It'll save you in the end.
I remember reading in Steinbeck. His references in Grapes of Wrath, his references to the mechanization of agriculture and those passages where he describes the machine as tearing people from the land and separating them from the land.
Because we've been through periods of technological change before. And what I would like to do today is to take you through some of the history about mechanization and jobs. And because one thing that I found quite extraordinary when researching this book is that, technology has progressed enormously over the past 200 years,
So it seems that this had also an impact on peoples and incomes, their nutrition, and life expectancy, more broadly. And the reason for this was in large part the mechanization of industry. The fact that machines replaced middle income artisan jobs with low paid jobs, often performed by children in factories.
And so as a result of that, the threat from the below was essentially reduced and because governments increasingly realized that their military muscle depended on their economic strength, they also invested more in mechanization and allowed it to thrive. And I think that essentially goes to your question, in the sense that we are concerned about an outside threat, a competitor,
is like a huge growth area. You look an Ebay there's all these things that are worth hundreds of pounds is I sought this item here which looks like a hand grenade or a pepper grinder. is quite nice it's sort like of a historical relic and fossil almost of the dreams for hundreds of years of the mechanization of calculation.
they've been. So we can go to electricity, or the labor mechanization of the industrial revolution, or we can go back to the first agricultural revolution
to do together, and are trying to create a society around that. is that in this highly conversational society, I think it started getting locked down absolutely in mass media and mechanization .
He argued that machinery only served to downgrade people, to deprive them of their jobs and incomes. And as a result of that, he argued that it was not in the interest of the working classes for mechanization to progress. Now, Friedrich Engels was clearly wrong about the future.