Something to Think About

Andrew Sullivan has a different quote up from a funny and on-point essay by Clay Shirky, someone I've never heard of before. But that's the beauty of the internet, it's full of people with something to say that I've never thought about before. File this under "what it all means."

I'm choosing a different quote, the lead-in, because you rarely see something this good at the beginning of an even better essay about the social transformation we're immersed in because of technology.

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today.