To put it simply, technology is practice. It does not emerge or exist outside of its practical application within a society, economy, or culture. It is not pursued or preserved for its own sake. It has no intrinsic value. A given technology either has a use (in which case it may be developed and passed on) or it doesn't.
Also from Iphikrates, this comment from six months ago explains it in more detail:
...technology is only one element of industrialisation, and arguably not even a causal one. The process doesn't happen because of new tech; new tech is invented to facilitate the process. The actual causes have more to do with the availability of certain resources (capital, labour, ingenuity) to meet certain economic and political challenges within a global network of trade and colonialism. Without this complex system of factors in place, industrialisation could never have happened anywhere. Plunk a fully functioning steam engine down in Bronze Age Mesopotamia and I guarantee you that absolutely nothing will happen.
There are several directions I can go with this. One is to notice that the same thing can happen with cultural technologies: ways of thinking and perceiving, ways of being human, that only develop in certain conditions.
But today I'm thinking about the fate of mechanical technologies in a general collapse. With the infrastructure decaying, it's easy to extrapolate to a world where all bridges have fallen. Really, the skillsets for building and repairing bridges will be in high demand everywhere. So those skills will not die out -- but places that can't compete for bridge-builders will lose their bridges.
Historically, complex technologies start in places with dense populations, and work their way out to the sticks. So the present collapse -- with some exceptions -- will go the other way. Rural areas will become postapocalyptic, and well-managed cities will muddle through.
So what counts as a "city"? John Mellencamp's song "Small Town", which romanticizes a lot of terrible hellholes, was actually written about Bloomington Indiana, a city of 80,000 people, the same as ancient Thebes at its peak.
My point is, in the coming decades, there will be huge local variation in quality of life, and some of the best places will be smaller cities with a high proportion of educated people.
]]>In reality, if there are dead trees, there will be grubs and insects eating the wood, and if there are dead humans, or living humans leaving shit, there will be flies, and if there are insects, there will be birds eating them, and feral cats eating the birds, and coyotes eating the cats. If there is enough sunlight to scan distant cities with binoculars, there will be enough for plants adapted to living in dense forests. There will be mosses, lichens, beetles, earthworms, and crows. McCarthy has excluded all these creatures for purely literary reasons.