[ColFrancis]

He almost got there in the end, but he stopped short. The plough will break. Then what? Do you know how to make charcoal and how to make a forge? What about replace the steel that's rusting around you?

Beyond the technology traps, we're in a "society trap", we need each other and the skills each other has. The trouble for the fictional scenario is not the technology, it's the lack of a community to pool knowledge. The little old lady who loves her garden and knows what plants are what, even some of the exotic ones typically imported, the fitter and turner who might not know how to exactly use a forge but understand metallurgy enough to shape it sensibly, the farmer who knows what the plants and animals need even if they don't have on hand the tools they normally use.

I for one don't want to end up by myself, I quite like all the benefits society and specialisation bring. In no part of history or prehistory I know of (not a lot, granted) has much of society known enough to survive alone without at least some sensible community.

[dredmorbius]

Arguably, that's the rest of the programme.

The next scene opens in Egypt, at the dawn of agriculture, with the invention of the plough itself. See the full episode:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

The scene linked in this post ends at 29:33.

Burke's style isn't to explicitly state all lessons and relationships. The goal of the series after all is in its title: to teach viewers how to make their own connections.

[Dzugaru]

I agree, he lost me in the first few minutes by assuming the moment some problems start the society will turn on each other like in some zombie apocalypse.

Anecdotally, I lived almost totally without power (critical institutions had diesel powered stations I think) for months in a childhood, in a city that was not that small (about 100k citizens) in the 1990s in Russia. Nothing much ever happened, no looting, no arson. Police retaliation would be swift, they don't need no computers to punish offenders.

[addingnumbers]

> he lost me in the first few minutes by assuming the moment some problems start the society will turn on each other like in some zombie apocalypse.

You're not convinced this is a likely outcome while watching footage of it actually happening?

The zombies are set dressing in that sort of fiction, the tension comes from taboos and mores being shed by the survivors adapting to new conditions in ways history has documented a million times

[XorNot]

A simple thought-experiment is: which of your neighbors are you planning to murder when things get rough?