>The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life. I would like to argue that this is the other

>The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life. I would like to argue that this is the other way round: A corn field is a highly parallelized and automatized food creation machine. Is there a significant difference between operating crops and life stock or an industrial machine? I don't think so. Industrialization means that we have transferred the automation of life onto previously manual processes. The countryside was brought into town. This process is far from finished. Does anybody on HN doubt that the bureaucratic processes will be automated in a not so distant future? The stalling, the increase in bureaucratic processes is good because it makes it even more profitable to invest into process automation. This will overcome the 'post-industiral trap'. That said, the observation at the end of the article is still very interesting: >...will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty. Do social technologies have the potential to create systems with far greater capabilities than the ones we have? Is Facebook the 'Wright Flyer of social networks' or is Facebook already the Saturn rocket?