Imagine a parallel universe, where people prioritize building robust, resilient, fail-safe systems that reduce complexity, unlike our reality where we're stuck in a precarious tower of brittle, accelerating complexity, which we fetishize while it's imploding.
An anecdote from communist Poland 1980’s — my colleague worked at R&D institute and they were blessed by receiving one of earliest IBM PC clones (which were sanctioned due to potential military use, so they were acquired by Polish intelligence). The researchers were very exciting and started playing with it, learned assembly and over months wrote a classic PC demo showing some 3D objects rotating, changing shapes etc. They expected this will have huge potential for future 3D design and wanted to impress the upcoming communist party nomenclature visiting. So the party leadership came, all of them guys in their 60-70’s, and when show the PC demo they were not only unimpressed but quite angry. They said the team should have invested their time in some „tried and reliable” field, such as using the PC to manage some metal processing machines and all this „3D design” is just bullshit and waste of time that is never going to be used practically. Of course, they were all wrong but the R&D team wasted years trying to deliver the 70-years old grandpas’ ideas of retrofitting modern computers into old school metal processing. The West of course developed 3D design for a few years now, which was plagued by may false starts, dead ends and failures, but ultimately delivered a sector that is now worth billions an used everywhere.
I will play devil’s advocate here and argue that there does exist a social model that does „robust, resilient, fail-safe” — it’s called conservatism. The European Middle Ages feudalism was very stable — it survived unchanged for hundreds of years (the earlier Egyptian one survived thousands). But any change, either social or technological requires frequent failures until it converges to some new homeostasis (and sometimes it won’t).
Add comment