I'm not a fan of this framing of industrial tech. In this reading, all of our industrial technologies seem to be part of some Grand Narrative of Progress, and t

I'm not a fan of this framing of industrial tech. In this reading, all of our industrial technologies seem to be part of some Grand Narrative of Progress, and these tenets are Holy and cannot be violated. > That those same crops would not be able to feed us if they were not also protected from pests, who will ravage entire fields if given a chance. That whole regions used to see seasons where they would lose large swaths of their produce to swarms of insects, such as boll weevils attacking cotton plants in the American South, or the phylloxera devouring grapes in the vineyards of France. This depends on where and when you're looking at the world. The Indian subcontinent has ancient references using poisonous plants as pesticides. Pesticides are also more necessary in today's large scale industrial farming rather than smaller plots that were more common in the past. > That before we had electricity and clean natural gas, people burned unrefined solid fuels in their homes—wood, coal, even dung (!)—to cook their food and to keep from freezing in winter. Many cultures would use charcoal to light furnaces, which was a lot cleaner than biomass burning (the Kotatsu is a good example in Japan). Other cultures would heat bricks and bring those in to heat their homes. > sewing clothes by hand, since store-bought ones were too expensive for most families What? Specialization and commerce definitely existed before mechanization and industrialization. Indeed, the average person really didn't have access to a variety of clothes and often mended their own clothes, but they didn't hand sew everything. The Indian subcontinent had a long history of textile production. > laundering clothes in a basin, scrubbing laboriously by hand, then hanging them up to dry What? I _still_ often hand wash clothing. It really isn't that difficult. People in many parts of the world hand wash clothing to this day. > That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car People didn't live in remote areas most of the time. I'm fact, many countries still don't dump large amounts of energy laying roads in areas where only a few would live. This is really an American phenomenon that comes from a long dynamic of rural and urban (Senate, three fifths compromise, electoral college) power sharing. Some of these are true. Plastics really have made certain applications, especially those hygeine related, much cleaner and cheaper. Vaccines have absolutely enabled more humans to live with fewer diseases. But this reads like an ode to Western, namely American, development. That everything must be developed this way because there's No Alternative to Western Industrialization or otherwise abject poverty and deep inequality.