Progress Studies
how do we make progress?
sari and
Progress Studies
Consider one more possibility: that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast. Imagine that the evolution of your life or our culture is like a pregnancy: It needs to reach its full term. Just as a child isn’t ready to be born after five months of gestation, the New Earth we’re creat
... See moreRob Brezsny • Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia
Why did agriculture mechanize and not construction?
Construction Physicsconstructionphysics.substack.com
"Almost without exception, everything society has considered a social advance has been prefigured first in some utopian writing." -David L. Cooperrider
Malthus was wrong.
We make MORE food than ever with LESS land than ever. Because we have one inexhaustible resource—
Human ingenuity.
Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs
Slime Mold Time Moldslimemoldtimemold.com
Our metrics of progress have continuously abstracted: from the tangible bushels of wheat in agricultural economies (with natural physical limits), to industrial-era efficiency metrics (units/hour, machine uptime), to the nebulous productivity measures of knowledge work. Each evolution has moved us further from human-scaled, naturally bounded metric... See more