The Knowledge - Lewis Dartnell
My next review for #bookstr is a good short book which provides a guide for how to restart civilisation in the event of a major collapse. The book specifically uses a pandemic scenario from which very few survivors remain but essentially the rest of the world remains as it is, just without people.
This will be the only content in the “prepper” category I’ll be consuming for 2025. Once you’ve assessed and weighted the risks of major catastrophes which would lead to such a scenario, and then factored in your chances of being a survivor, you realise how little of your attention this subject actually deserves as interesting as it might be.
However I did enjoy this book, it tickled my autistic mind in a similar way to Exactly by Simon Winchester. But where Winchester is passionately describing history and how technologies evolved, The Knowledge is briefly outlining critical technologies and how to re-discover them and get humanity back to a cyberpunk technology level without spending centuries going through trial and error.
This is the kind of book you’d want in your pocket if you could time travel back to the 1200s and wanted to blow people’s minds.
There is much focus on chemistry and engineering processes to get to higher levels of chemistry which I did find interesting. Some of it you will likely know, and there are no doubt better books specific for that domain, but tying those advances together with what other tech unlocks it gives you is cool. It’s like a more detailed tech tree from the video game Civilisation.
The aspect for which I give the author great credit is his acknowledgement of socioeconomic factors and the impact they have on society’s adoptions of technologies. He doesn’t dwell much on the point, but he does note that China for example had a lot of tech discoveries well ahead of Europe but they didn’t progress because they didn’t have the right incentives simply by how they had their society structured, whereas Europe innovated on that institutional front and then went on to technologically leapfrog and then colonise the world because of better alignment.
This today, is the main thing holding humanity back - the Managerial State. It’s why we don’t have abundant, unmetered nuclear energy. It’s why our food is poison. It’s why they import millions of immigrants to prop up their fake economies. Yes it’s all run on and enabled by fiat, but you cannot have fiat without this Managerial State and Bitcoiners must realise, we cannot replace fiat with Bitcoin and keep the same Institutional Structures in place - it’s all gotta go.