Technology and the naming of names

[gfish]

Several years ago, as I was starting to learn machining, I was captivated by the recursive nature of the equipment. A lathe can make all kinds of things, but it can also make another lathe. It's a von Neumann machine waiting for an operator. Powerful stuff. Except, of course, it immediately raises the same question that biological life does: where did the first one come from? As far as I'm concerned, the genesis of something, the bootstrapping process, is always more interesting than the thing itself.

On the bus ride home from the student shop, I started thinking about the bootstrapping of our civilization. There is, demonstrably, a way to start with twigs and rocks and end up with a laser. What are the steps? What are the exact dependencies in the tech tree? How many different ways are there to get from A to B? And, most intriguingly, how much could a single person do in a lifetime?

I started to develop the concept as background for a cyberpunk novel. I imagined a well-known, if rather geeky and obsessive, hobby of people tracing and recreating the tech tree of civilization. It would serve as a framework for the novel itself, with excerpts from discussion fora and reference books providing the header for each chapter. There would be a standard hierarchical ranking of technologies, with endless arguments about the exact categorization of the use of "native" meteoric iron, or copper ores naturally high in tin content but without any actual intent to alloy. There would flurries of excitement whenever someone proved that a certain level of technology was theoretically redundant and could be skipped. There would be specialty stores, selling ores of various grades and exotic woods, hides and dung. Tourism packages where you could go mine your own raw materials. Most people would be content to prove mastery of a technology once, and then buy the resulting product in bulk for future steps, but there would be a small-but-loud group of purists who would smelt every gram of copper used in the entire process. There would be a common end goal that most people would be trying to achieve, like a radio or a laser, but there would be all kinds of people with their own personal goal. Some would specialize in a specific age and be recognized experts for specific technologies. Some would faithfully follow the development history of a specific culture, while others would try to minimize the steps in the process. It would be a glorious mess of creativity and bonding to our technological roots.

The funny thing is, I liked the idea so much that instead of writing it, I've spent the last few years moving closer and closer to implementing it in real life. A lot of the philosophical arguments I had imagined ended up framing the recent copper smelting for me. Does it count if you buy the ore from ebay and use an electric blower? I'm finding that, while doing so is a perfectly good way to learn the basic techniques, it just doesn't feel complete to me. Someday I'm going to have to do a run with ore I dug out of the ground (once I find some!), using human-powered bellows.

This hobby needs a name, though. I'm trying to document things on the web, because thanks to the power of the internet I know similar minded freaks will eventually find it. (Sooner rather than later, in my experience.) But without a name to tie it all together it's just a random collection of amateur experimental archeology. The full name needs to be a unique term, but preferably it would have a catchy shortform that made a good verb. Something that catches the awe of stepping your way through the results of millions of people-years of struggle and toil. Civilization bootstrapping? Technology spelunking? Resurrecting? My word-powers are failing me here.

Comments

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

I've given some thought to this in a loosely survivalist way, but not with such advanced technology. For example, I can start a fire with a magnifying glass, a lighter, or matches, but if the world goes to shit and I run out of lighter fluid and matches and someone steals or breaks my magnifying glass I want to know how to use a bow drill, too, because heat for cooking and keeping warm is one of those Really Important Things. But to use a bow drill I have to know how to make, at least, a crude knife (stone? waste glass/metal?), and have some sort of string or twine (also something that could conceivably be scavenged from waste matter). To this end I've learned to spin and will experiment soon with making thread out of nettles.

My perspective on this is always fairly post-world-falling-apart so there is garbage that can be scavenged and cobbled together, although it's hard to say what the availability will be.

I think the biggest obstacle to getting very far with technology-from-scratch, even with good garbage scavenging, is that just staying alive takes really rather a lot of effort. Of course if you're alive now and you have advanced technology to make the just staying alive bit easier, you could get really quite a lot done in terms of technology from scratch.

Techstrapping

[fildrigar.livejournal.com]

I think the biggest obstacle to getting very far with technology-from-scratch, even with good garbage scavenging, is that just staying alive takes really rather a lot of effort. Of course if you're alive now and you have advanced technology to make the just staying alive bit easier, you could get really quite a lot done in terms of technology from scratch.

Exactly right. Civilisation wasn't able to really advance until we had food surplus and ways to store food. I've often thought that 'social society' for want of a better term would be very necessesary, post collapse. That is to say a way to divide labour duties; "George, you are good with finding food, you go with Edna and bring some back. Edith and I will stay here and build fire, and work on making knives."

I would be very interested to see a 'tech tree' going from Stone age to Laser.