What ifs are particularly tricky. The world is so intensely complicated, and each moment built on the one before so emphatically, that even tiny changes have huge impacts. So to ask what life would be now without possibly the biggest thing to have happened in the last few hundred/thousand years is kind of troublesome.
But it is pretty intriguing.
It’s hard to imagine a world that hadn’t urbanised and industrialised. As city dwellers, our lives are utterly shaped by the assumptions of industrialisation. If you are not a city-dweller, on the broadest metaphorical level, please tell me what it’s like.
Without the industrial revolution, without the spread of mechanisation across the world, we would probably have less people, more natural resources (though many of the more important ones would be unusable) and have created much less environmental havoc. We would probably be less likely to feel like we were staring down the barrel of a gun, from a planetary perspective.
But then, we would also be in a world that wasn’t aware of each other. Life and communication would be slowed down to a point where if we were dumped there now, we probably wouldn’t recognise it.
Things would be simpler, but we wouldn’t be able to reach out to as many people. Each individual world would be smaller. Power structures would be utterly different. Our lives would be much shorter, and much slower, and much less full of other people and ridiculous things. This computer wouldn’t be here. If I look around my room, pretty much everything I see would be fairly impossible. Some things could have been made differently, but none of it would look like this. Even the walls would be different. The room probably wouldn’t be here. This city wouldn’t be here (it only became big enough by dint of rail expansion).
I have a propensity toward primitivism. I am convinced that the destruction of the environment is an immense crime for which society cannot atone for. Simultaneously, I have a techno-utopian outlook, I see the only solutions to our problems being ones of creative technology. We need to learn from what we have, and work out how to use it differently. It would be no use turning everything back, but we have to reinvent the forward. Create technology that runs as sustainably as pre-industrial technology.
It’s wishful thinking, but honestly, that’s all I have to hold on to. That’s my idealism, right there. We’ve fucked everything up, but we have to use our present moment to build forward. That’s all we have you. You build a pile of shit, you’d better use that shit to sort it all out, and stop making more shit, as quickly as possible.
That is not my dainiest metaphor.
The industrial revolution has destroyed huge swathes of the world, but it has also, finally, got us to a position where we can all recognise that we are the same. We are connected.
And we have a future to build.
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Illustration by Victoria
Unstruck 
thanks for the thing im gonna have some soup now
yeah it helped me tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Reblogged this on The Claire Violet Thorpe Express and commented:
Thank you for writing this post. I am currently researching what life would be like if the Industrial Revolution had never happened, and this article was just what I needed. Well done.
It’s of my standard ‘research absent’ quality, so not sure how helpful it will really be apart from to get the gears chugging (or perhaps just the watermill flowing). But thanks, nice of you to say.
Stopped by your blog and good luck with the Camp Nanowrimo thing. I generally do the November show, but you may be nudging me into the idea of doing an extra one now, just because I have a trashy enough idea that I could run with. Don’t have long to decide though!
Good luck with yours though. I’ll be intrigued to see what you make of a non-industrial worldscape.
I’m interpreting your article as more of a urge to be mindful of our environment than a preponderance of a world with no “Industrial Revolution.” Fascinating to think about but I feel most conclusion would rest at the “Industrial Revolution” being a good thing. Competition along with conscious consumers breed innovation and I believe the problem with sustainability will self correct in due time.
“The industrial revolution has destroyed huge swathes of the world, but it has also, finally, got us to a position where we can all recognise that we are the same. We are connected”
Except the 215 Republican party doesn’t believe we need to change anything and any restrictions on the rights of people and Corporations to continue polluting is evil..
Living a vegan lifestyle (or, at least eating plant-based) is probably one of the most effective things a single person can do to reduce their negative impact on the planet (animal ag creates tons of pollution and uses tons of resources, not to mention the horror the animals face and the damage done to human health and the economy). Not having kids, not driving, and not buying unnessecary junk is also helpful.
I love this article. However, I think the techno-utopian outlook is really one born out of the fear of knowing that we do need to go back to a pre-industrial society, not knowing how to get there, but also knowing that we need to atone for our sins to get there. Technology won’t save us – we need to do the hard, human work of detangling this mess ourselves.
And if I’m being honest, I don’t know that we can.