Revolution

Meme

A Revolution is a turning abound or, more recently, a Disruption of the current paradigm into a new one.

Context

This wiki is about Identity and its driver Information and so this will consider prior revolutions only to help understand how the current Information Revolution might progress.

History

What has previously been described as an Industrial Revolution will be consider here as an Energy Revolution. There is a limit to the amount of energy a human can bring to a task. That is not what Evolution has created humans to provide and other living and natural forces can be harnessed to the advance of human civilization. So we can judge the first Industrial Revolution and attempt to move from humans as an energy source to a more productive use of animals and naturally occurring streams of work, like water and wind. (note this reference will be used extensively in what follow without further attribution.)

Many revolutions came to nothing more, especially in civilizations where slavery was a core component of the economic life providing both energy and information service. Both Ptolemaic Alexandria and Rome failed to sustain their hegemony. The first industrial revolution worked to increase the efficient use of available energy in Europe up to the 16th century. Somehow the user of steam, which had been understood in simple toys many centuries earlier, was harnessed by James Watt to produce useful work.

Today's failures are a salutary warning that every industrial revolution is a combination of elements, a 'family complex', a series of different factors. And it is in relation to this multiplicity of factors that the 'pre-revolutions', the movements which preceded the English revolution, are significant. In their case, there is always something missing, so that they add up to a sort of typology of failure or missed opportunity. Sometimes an invention appears in isolation, brilliant but useless, the sterile fruit of some fertile brain; no more is heard of it. Sometimes there is takeoff of a kind, perhaps as the result of a revolution in energy, or some sudden advance in agricultural or craft technology, a breakthrough in marketing or an increase in the population: there is a burst of progress, the motor seems on the point of starting - and then the whole thing comes to a halt. Is it right to Jump together under the same heading this series of abortive revolutions, the reasons for which are never exactly the same? They are at least similar in their rhythm: a burst of progress followed by a collapse. Imperfect repetitions of each other though they may be, they are repetitions all the same and obvious comparisons practically suggest themselves.

My conclusion will surprise no one, certainly not an economist: no industrial