Smashed Social Technologies
How the the void left by social technologies we’ve smashed are at the root of our fraying society
I read an article by Samo Burja, The End of Industrial Society and it’s linked together some thoughts I’ve been having on what are called social technologies.
“Social technologies—intentionally designed ways for the people in a society to operate—form the basis of the varied systems of material production and material technology that we see in every society.”
Samo Burja, The End of Industrial Society
We’re surrounded by social technologies. Democracy, social media, the language of politeness, dating practices, they’re all creations of human beings to operate society. But social technologies change. New ones are created, old ones adapt, and some are smashed altogether. The foundations of industrial society and what expanded the industrial revolution were a set of underlying social technologies.
“Early modern Europe, while sharing many features typical of agricultural civilizations, also developed social technologies that lent themselves to an explosion of material production. One example was an ideological commitment to truth in speech among some aristocratic circles, exemplified by Britain’s Royal Society, whose Latin motto translates roughly to “take nobody’s word for it.” This commitment enabled advances in basic science by assigning high status to verifiable mathematics, empiricism, and experimentation. It further lent itself to honesty about the process of production. Another key social technology was the Protestant conception of friendship as expressed through the community of willing believers. Strangers could be trusted by default within this community, and thereby coordinate closely to form and run companies. Material factors like roads, canal networks, or good climate contribute to industrialization, but they don’t tell us about the social machinery that took advantage of them.
With a handshake and a reputation at stake, you could sail to the other end of the world, spending years out of contact with your business partners, yet secure in knowing they would honor their word. This trust at a distance provided the conditions for ocean-based commodity markets to beat regional commodity markets. After this material transformation, the plantations in the New World and workshops in India became logistically closer to a city than shepherds living in geographically nearby hills. Before this point, city-based labor markets had the highest impact on society, while the role of markets in exchanging the raw resources of the countryside for the finished products of the city was minor and easily replaced by customary trade. With the social technologies of long-distance commerce, the labor market of a city became connected to a commodity market that could match its pace, opening massive potential to make the city a center of material production.”
Samo Burja, The End of Industrial Society
Burja’s argument though is that many of the social technologies that built the industrial society of the late 18th and then through the 19th into the early 20th century are gone, and with them industrial society no longer has the foundational technologies to maintain itself.
Smashed Social Technologies
Burja, in a tweet, seems to be sympathetic to the idea that the root of industrial society’s creeping issues may lie in a strange new phenomenon that probably no other people in history had: we fear our own power, and we have World War 1, when our incredible industrial power unleashed itself and killed millions, to thank as the catalyst for this fear.
“After the Second World War, people basically gave up and resigned themselves to the idea that it's man's nature to destroy himself. The specifics keep changing—overpopulation, nukes, global warming, AI, etc. But psychologically it's mostly still a reaction to the machine gun.”
This seems likely to me as well, though I think there is more that I have not seen Burja mention (though I’ve read very little of his work so far). Nietzsche in the late 19th century is famous for declaring that God is dead. What he meant by that was more than just a belief in the supernatural though. He meant that the basis of morality for thousands of years was dead. Without the ten commandments and a belief that there is a universal consciousness telling us what’s right and wrong then anything goes. Who is to say if murder is wrong if there is no God? Us? What gives us the right to declare that on behalf of the universe?
Many of the social technologies that make up (or did make up) our societies no longer have a basis either without a belief in God. Burja himself even mentioned the Protestant conception of friendship. I think many of us have an understanding of this–even ardent atheists often lament the end of communal well-being that came with everyone attending the local church. We smashed our social technologies, and have struggled to come up with replacements. The Internet was thought to be a possible replacement, but it’s proving to be poor at the task. I think the only evidence required is to look at rising rates of loneliness, falling birth and marriage rates, and rising political extremism and animosity. The fact that we are atomizing socially is in a way all the proof we need that the social technologies we have at our disposal today (new and old) are not up to the task.
We seem to have gone through decades of smashing old social technologies. “Smash the patriarchy” has been the modus operandi of the feminist movement for decades. Artistic movements were deconstructed. Social moors were questioned and obliterated in the 60s, particularly involving the sexual revolution. Much was destroyed, and for good reason much of the time, but nature still abhors a vacuum. Perhaps some of the darkening social issues we face today (particularly involving gender) came from the void left behind when those old social technologies were destroyed. Monsters come from the void, and these monsters seem to be atomizing us.
“As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create.”
Spock
The dangers are larger than just a low trust society of increasing atomization though. Burja gets into a hypothetical future where without the foundational social technologies that enabled the industrial revolution society will fall into a post industrial collapse.
“What then follows is slow decay, first of production and then of advanced technology itself. At a macro scale, this is the deep root of civilizational collapse. Civilizations first lose subtle social technologies and bases of implicit knowledge at crucial junctures; this process ratchets as elites become less adept at institutional management and design; systems downstream of and less complex than the civilizational core then begin to collapse. Eventually, the entire civilization is fatally vulnerable to outside shocks, such as war with more dynamic societies or even mere natural disasters such as pandemics.”
Samo Burja, The End of Industrial Society
I’m not as pessimistic as he is. Society to me is more organic. It adapts itself to changing situations and it can renew itself. The problems of today could be the catalyst for renewed and superior social technologies of tomorrow. But having said that I think it’s important to consider that there is a continuing loss of foundational knowledge. We still haven’t gone back to the moon, the largest and most complex organizational operation in history was Operation Overlord that culminated 80 years ago on D-Day, and post WW2 bureaucratic processes in government and private organizations multiplied at the expense of anyone more focused on just getting anything done (oh, hello there, modern regulatory state).
He also captures something that I don’t hear talked about much, but might feel correct to a lot of people when we think of how much greater figures of earlier eras seem compared to us.
“The marketers were eventually replaced by people who grew up on marketing. Beware, social engineer, of obsoleting your own origins! Yet, they did so in field after field. Not only marketers, but scientists, statesmen, industrialists, politicians, philosophers, and writers shaped ersatz social technology to fill the gaps, but completely failed to guarantee knowledge succession of the generative core of knowledge. The strange spiritual practices, scientific exploration of human psychology, and at times outright ideological cults of the founding cohort gave way to a more shallow type of knowledge. This was a knowledge of levers and buttons, rather than the first principles which built those levers and buttons.”
Samo Burja, The End of Industrial Society
Atomization
Burja ends his article with a note of hope when he indicates that new social technologies can be made to renew and fix society before we fall into a declining post industrial trap.
“These material symptoms are, however, just that—symptoms—and cannot be treated with mere technical innovation, nor minor variants of economic policy. Whatever solution our civilization might find to escape the post-industrial trap, it will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty.”
Samo Burja, The End of Industrial Society
It’s undeniable at this point that the online social technologies we’ve come to rely on in the 21st century atomize us. They are purposely designed to promote low trust between people. Study after study shows that the way these technologies increase engagement and thereby revenues is through anger. We have come to rely on an actively destructive social technology and then we can’t figure out why it seems everything is going wrong.
Our emotional, intellectual, and even physical resources have to be increasingly devoted to dealing with the consequences of social technologies that atomize us and make us trust each other less. It shouldn’t be a wonder we’re all so tired, so hateful, and we have to rely on systems and processes in businesses, government, and legalisms just to operate at a basic level instead of trusting each other and freeing up all those resources for better things. I can’t just shake someone’s hand and trust they’ll complete our business arrangement. I have to pay a lawyer lots of money to create a contract and then the legal system as a whole has to devote resources (however small) to enforcing that contract.
Atomization and low trust is anti-human. Aristotle was correct when he called us a social animal. When we atomize and stop trusting each other we abolish that social element and live increasingly as loners. Men and women aren’t trusting each other and are increasingly seeing the worst in the other, and then this manifests as falling marriage and birth rates. This atomization is literally destroying us as a people. It shouldn’t be a wonder society feels exhausted and filled with hatred when we are increasingly going against our natural tendencies and a major need for socialization–high trust.
Legal Vs. Virtue
Even our inability to build housing, bridges, roads, trains, tunnels, or any infrastructure really has this lack of trust as its basis. The regulatory state and armies of lawyers exist because people and companies and governments don’t trust each other.
I don’t have any clear answers, but I have two arguments to make as a starting point for building new social technologies for creating a high trust society. The first is we should consider this Hemingway line: “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them”
The second is that we need to think more about the difference between a society focused on legalism, and one focused on virtue. You can trust someone who is virtuous. They are constrained from wrong-doing by their own inner moral compass and efforts, and externally by their desire to uphold their reputation (honor) and the possibility of shame. A society of legalism is one that has tried to ignore the need for trust–you don’t need to trust the other person is good and virtuous because the legal system will take care of them if they do something illegal. We live in a highly legalistic society today. Maybe more so today than at any period in history. It’s why every business has teams of extremely well paid lawyers, frivolous lawsuits proliferate, and just building any kind of infrastructure requires years of people experienced in law and policy to generate thousands of pages of reports and paperwork. I don’t think ignoring the need for trust is working well for us anymore. We’re devoting vast sums of our time and money to maintaining a legalistic society that can’t build houses or basic infrastructure anymore.
Working Together
This was the point about the protestant conception of friendship in the 19th century: one protestant could trust that another protestant was virtuous. That high trust relationship frees up all kinds of resources from time getting to know someone, money that might have gone to lawyers, and emotional resources that are drained by higher stress and anxiety levels that come with having to rely on someone you don’t trust.
This limits us from committing to big, national projects too. If trust in government and elites is low (and in turn their own trust in everyone else is low) then there will be no agreement on what direction the nation should take, what projects we should work on, and even if there was agreement no one would trust the government to get it right anyway. Foreign policy? No one can agree on what that should look like and no one believes whatever government and elites say we should do anyway. I think the lies of the Iraq war and earlier failures in Vietnam bear a lot of the blame for this. Without trust there is a polarizing stagnation as no one has the power to overcome the distrust and unite people for a common cause. Where there is no virtue, there is no trust.
Truth is hurt here too. Without trust you can’t tell if someone is being truthful or not. So people tend to believe whatever information is given to them by the few they do trust–partisans aligned with their own viewpoints. To believe an uncomfortable truth requires you trust the person telling it to you.
A good friend is someone you can trust even when they tell you uncomfortable truths. Here again we see the dangers of atomization. As people are increasingly online and 3rd spaces are in decline there are simply fewer opportunities to make friends and practice the social skills required to become friends. To trust someone, to open yourself up to them so you can become friends, requires you be vulnerable, and that takes practice and courage. We need more opportunities to practice real life social skills, and we need people to understand the need for some small amount of courage in this.
Trust technologies, friendship technologies, and truth technologies–this is what we need to think about. Does that mean we need to come up with some new kind of social institution that being a member of acts as a signal of virtuous behavior and trustability? I don’t know, but it is something to consider. There are dangers with taking this too far though. China’s Social Credit System would be taking this to an extreme. But even there I think it’s important to remember that only a society where the government has a profound distrust of its own citizens could come up with a system like that.
discrediting conspiracy theories might be a good place to start - though how, of course. When confronted with one, I just comment that conspiracy requires too much cooperation. It usually generates a pause.