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I think the chances of a new dark age are locally still non zero but globally very close to zero. The modern age, for lack of a better term, is cross cultural a

I think the chances of a new dark age are locally still non zero but globally very close to zero. The modern age, for lack of a better term, is cross cultural and includes science, engineering, cultural expression, and of course the internet in it's many forms and shapes. So, there are billions of people that are part of it and are sharing knowledge and teaching their offspring to be part of it. That's not going to stop happening even if some people and countries are desperately trying to do stop that from happening. Of course those people might be locally very successful in keeping their people illiterate, poor, miserable, and suppressed for some time. You can find examples of that on most continents. But mostly, that tends to be a highly unstable situation because people don't tolerate being miserable and poor very long and inevitably come into contact with people that can teach them how to fix that. The more miserable they are, the bigger the incentive. That's how revolutions start. That's how the dark ages ended in Europe. There were still people that knew how to read and write. The Roman empire fizzled out and moved east but it continued to exist. Constantinople was a cultured place for many centuries before it became Istanbul. And that eventually spread west again. What is now Austria and Germany actually used to be called the holy roman empire. Which was a thing that emerged out of the ruins of former actual roman empire after a few centuries of various tribes of Europe rebelling, converting to Christianity, and regaining literacy. And that's just Europe. The Chinese, Indians, Persians, Arabs, etc. might have a few things to say about their long and interesting history. Europe was a bit of a back water for most of that.

mathieuh 4y ago
I think it will be interesting to see what happens in Ukraine in the medium to long term. Obviously it’s politically expedient for the US and the countries under its hegemony to provide aid to Ukraine and I don’t imagine that will change, but I wonder whether “bomb them back to the Stone Age” will prove true. The collective trauma and destruction of infrastructure must surely have a devastating effect on the entire population, especially the younger generations who are the ones fighting. I can easily imagine a dark age of sorts in Ukraine.
- somewhereoutth 4y ago
  Much of Europe was laid to absolute waste after the second world war, yet now is arguably the richest 'light age' area on the planet. Ukraine will do just fine, particularly as EU will throw its full economic might into fixing everything (much as the US did with the Marshall Plan).
NovaVeles 4y ago
There is a reasonable argument that with a lot of the newer technology like the internet that while we have made information easier to produce and move about - it is a lot more fragile that it has ever been. Resilience is traded for convenience. If there is a long term decline of material/energy resources for whatever reason, we will be in a world of pain in terms of information preservation. Will we favor food or archiving? Yes, this is an extreme scenareo but one that is fun to think about. SSD's, Hard drives, chemical photographs and high acid paper printing will end up being the Achilles heal of this stuff. It still feels like stories and stone tablets are the best we have for real multi generational - multi millennial information storage.
- TapWaterBandit 4y ago
  This is one of the reasons I buy some physical books even thought I love my kindle. Especially with non-fiction and technical stuff, I see buying textbooks also as disseminating technical literature that in an extremely unlikely scenario could be useful to future generations.
- dependsontheq 4y ago
  It's not a reasonable argument because the total printed volume is still going up. So this is not something easy to prove because the International statistics are very weird, but there are more book readers now than at any time in history, more schools and more libraries, so it's reasonable that there are more new books than at any time in history. We also have the books of the last two centuries very well preserved, so yes some High Tech Processes are very hard to duplicate or even to archive. But these processes are hard to rebuild anyway as soon as organization and key people are lost. Do I have a enough stuff in the local libraries to rebuild the civilization from scratch into the 80s? It's a university town, it shouldn't be a problem... and that's just one town.
  - californiadreem 4y ago
    >Do I have a enough stuff in the local libraries to rebuild the civilization from scratch into the 80s? It's a university town, it shouldn't be a problem... and that's just one town. The issue with this type of thinking is that it assumes some level of material surplus before those books are both physically and intellectually lost to future generations. A societal collapse already implies a critical level of material scarcity that would make information or industrial preservation low on the totem pole. Where are you going to get the raw and human resources to maintain what remains let alone rebuild industrial processes? And what if those "human resources" don't want to rebuild? The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart has a pretty candid take on what would happen if an academic survived a systemic collapse of the United States and tried to rebuild the Old World from what was left of the survivors. I think Stewart's vision is extremely plausible, even with the advent of the Internet and digital storage, possibly more so.
akira2501 4y ago
I would assume that most regimes would produce works about themselves, if nothing else. The lack of literature in the middle ages suggests a social and governmental collapse, not the reign of totalitarian dictators purposefully harming their populations in the name of some strange idealism. A modern nuclear or orbital engagement could very well bring this about, although, I would assume it wouldn't last as long as the middle ages did.
_hypx 4y ago
It can be argued that the Middle East is in a dark age since so little scholarship is being generated from that region.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  It can also be argued that it is ideally positioned to crawl out of that because none of the knowledge was actually lost and is there to be accessed and re-learned. Just look at Iran/Persia lately. So much history, knowledge, culture, etc. The status quo just isn't great and is already creating rebellion. It's pretty grim and hopeful at the same time. People living there definitely seem ready to move on.

mathieuh 4y ago

I think it will be interesting to see what happens in Ukraine in the medium to long term. Obviously it’s politically expedient for the US and the countries under its hegemony to provide aid to Ukraine and I don’t imagine that will change, but I wonder whether “bomb them back to the Stone Age” will prove true. The collective trauma and destruction of infrastructure must surely have a devastating effect on the entire population, especially the younger generations who are the ones fighting. I can easily imagine a dark age of sorts in Ukraine.

somewhereoutth 4y ago
Much of Europe was laid to absolute waste after the second world war, yet now is arguably the richest 'light age' area on the planet. Ukraine will do just fine, particularly as EU will throw its full economic might into fixing everything (much as the US did with the Marshall Plan).

NovaVeles 4y ago

There is a reasonable argument that with a lot of the newer technology like the internet that while we have made information easier to produce and move about - it is a lot more fragile that it has ever been. Resilience is traded for convenience. If there is a long term decline of material/energy resources for whatever reason, we will be in a world of pain in terms of information preservation. Will we favor food or archiving? Yes, this is an extreme scenareo but one that is fun to think about. SSD's, Hard drives, chemical photographs and high acid paper printing will end up being the Achilles heal of this stuff. It still feels like stories and stone tablets are the best we have for real multi generational - multi millennial information storage.

TapWaterBandit 4y ago
This is one of the reasons I buy some physical books even thought I love my kindle. Especially with non-fiction and technical stuff, I see buying textbooks also as disseminating technical literature that in an extremely unlikely scenario could be useful to future generations.
dependsontheq 4y ago
It's not a reasonable argument because the total printed volume is still going up. So this is not something easy to prove because the International statistics are very weird, but there are more book readers now than at any time in history, more schools and more libraries, so it's reasonable that there are more new books than at any time in history. We also have the books of the last two centuries very well preserved, so yes some High Tech Processes are very hard to duplicate or even to archive. But these processes are hard to rebuild anyway as soon as organization and key people are lost. Do I have a enough stuff in the local libraries to rebuild the civilization from scratch into the 80s? It's a university town, it shouldn't be a problem... and that's just one town.
- californiadreem 4y ago
  >Do I have a enough stuff in the local libraries to rebuild the civilization from scratch into the 80s? It's a university town, it shouldn't be a problem... and that's just one town. The issue with this type of thinking is that it assumes some level of material surplus before those books are both physically and intellectually lost to future generations. A societal collapse already implies a critical level of material scarcity that would make information or industrial preservation low on the totem pole. Where are you going to get the raw and human resources to maintain what remains let alone rebuild industrial processes? And what if those "human resources" don't want to rebuild? The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart has a pretty candid take on what would happen if an academic survived a systemic collapse of the United States and tried to rebuild the Old World from what was left of the survivors. I think Stewart's vision is extremely plausible, even with the advent of the Internet and digital storage, possibly more so.

akira2501 4y ago

I would assume that most regimes would produce works about themselves, if nothing else. The lack of literature in the middle ages suggests a social and governmental collapse, not the reign of totalitarian dictators purposefully harming their populations in the name of some strange idealism. A modern nuclear or orbital engagement could very well bring this about, although, I would assume it wouldn't last as long as the middle ages did.

_hypx 4y ago

It can be argued that the Middle East is in a dark age since so little scholarship is being generated from that region.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
It can also be argued that it is ideally positioned to crawl out of that because none of the knowledge was actually lost and is there to be accessed and re-learned. Just look at Iran/Persia lately. So much history, knowledge, culture, etc. The status quo just isn't great and is already creating rebellion. It's pretty grim and hopeful at the same time. People living there definitely seem ready to move on.