[hosh]

I can respect that position. When I reflect on permaculture design, or Christopher Alexander's ideas, for example, the Western modernity did not have to turn out the way it did.

I can't say that non-Western empire cultures were that much better from that lens.

The one I had been studying for the past year or so was the Chinese. During the 1500s and 1600s, technologies for warfare was just as rampant. The Ming and the Jinchurens were fielding firearms as enthusiastically as anywhere else. The 1800s when many places were industrializing, the Qing dynasty was wracked with uprisings, revolts, and a civil war with a scale comparable to WWI in terms of numbers of dead and cities razed. This unrest was the result of centuries of increasing marginalization of young people being shut out from economic opportunities, and widespread access to the ability to inflict violence.

But I can't even say that even if the Qing did not have that internal instability, would they have done better? The telegraph was invented in the mid 1800s, and it started globalizing markets because of information transmission. It is considerably difficult to map Chinese ideographs to the equivalent of Morse code, even if the literati were not using the ability to read and write maintain status.

[SI_Rob]

permaculture a good place to investigate a basis of the essential conflict at work here, which is that perma-anything and "innovation" are orthogonal forces over the same domain. Would any culture be capable of improving on the resource rivalry -> technical conflict -> cultural domination/consolidation model?

[hosh]

I have been circling that since I came across permaculture — or more precisely, permatech after deep diving permaculture.

It’s easier to understand permaculture as a regenerative paradigm in a living systems world view. Only living systems can regenerate. Living systems adapt and grow all on its own. It _evolves_, rather than innovates.

Technology, from the machine world view, is incapable of regenerating, growing or living on its own. It requires an external force to set it in motion, as well as external force to innovate and make changes. The source of innovation comes dominance as long as someone views the world in a way where nothing happens unless you make it happen.

But now we are reaching technologies that are complex enough to start resembling living systems.