The End Of The Industrial Revolution

In 1769, James Watt unveiled his steam engine, and the revolution began. It did not truly pick up steam until 1801, when Jacquard’s loom, which used punched cards to automate the weaving process, was introduced. What followed was unprecedented in the history of mankind – the next two hundred years saw seemingly unimaginable levels of wealth in industrialized nations. Who could have imagined in 1801 that two hundred years later the chief medical issue in the newly born United states of America would be people who are obese because there’s too much food and it’s too cheap?

There were a number of enormous consequences of the Industrial Revolution:

  • Mass-production allowed products to come off the assembly line quickly and cheaply, giving everyone the same thing, with few variations, very cheaply.
  • Centralized manufacturing and business emerged in order to establish efficient factories at lower cost.
  • Big companies emerged as a natural response to these potential economies of scale.
  • These new, large companies multiplied the distance between decisions and execution and thus required several management levels between executives and workers.
  • Employment and jobs became the predominant way to make a living.
  • Cities (and later suburbs) attracted most of the population, centralizing it within a very small percentage of each country’s landmass, and creating the idea of urban, suburban and rural as distinct economic zones..
  • Work and leisure separated, with each occupying fixed times and places.
  • Mass media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, motion pictures, and so on) emerged and began broadcasting a small set of messages to a large number of people.
  • Mass-marketing produced a consumer environment crowded with similar products, with no real way to differentiate themselves other than “image-building”.

The end result, of course is mass marketing being used by mass media to sell mass-produced products to the working masses. There are other, more subtle consequences however. Chief amongst them is that the increased centralization of work necessary for the Industrial Revolution to succeed caused individual lives to become less centralized, both in sense of self and sense of community.

We began to live and work in ways contrary to our dominant historical experience as a species. No longer did we live in a place where we knew everyone. No longer did we work for either ourselves or directly for the leader of a focused team (i.e. farming, craftsmen’s shops, hunting parties, etc.) No longer were our work and personal lives so tightly integrated that our homes doubled as our workplaces.

Until recently, it was not seen as possible to recapture any of these lost human experiences without abandoning the progress and economic wealth that the Industrial Revolution created. I believe that now, it is possible, and that it is now possible to reestablish a more balanced, decentralized lifestyle. So many things (The Long Tail, The Internet, search marketing, Cheap cellular communication, etc.) are rapidly dissolving the benefits of being big and centralized, and in some cases is making them into disadvantages.

Now, this is not going to happen overnight, of course. It has been slowly coming together in disparate ways for the last decade or so, and I believe that in thirty or forty years, within my lifetime, the big, centralized business that has come to typify the Industrial Revolution will be a thing of the past, and in its place will be small producers, and networks of these producers, that will provide service, selection and pricing that is far better than that of what the Industrial Revolution could offer.

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Published:
6.7.06 / 2pm
Category:
Pondering
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