Is the Industrial Revolution a Fundamental Driver of Innovation?

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Do you think christianity was a fundamental driver of the industrial revolution, and that's why it occurred in northwestern europe? I guess my answer is sort of cautiously yes, but maybe not in the way you're thinking. Armenians, jews, a pars s, various other minority communities that are precisely because of their outsider minority status were forced to go about things in an unconventional, innovative way. But am, it seems to me sometimes that hobbyists, peep people who do things, who build things, can get a lot done in a hurry. That as soon as a you start to involve a capital and a profit and lost statements and so on, the rate

If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he’s created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-world progress in crypto, social networks, and the creation of the web itself. Though Stephenson insists he’s more often wrong than right, his technical sharpness has even led to a half-joking suggestion that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of bitcoin. His latest novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, involves a more literal sort of brain-picking, exploring what might happen when digitized brains can find a second existence in a virtual afterlife.

So what’s the implicit theology of a simulated world? Might we be living in one, and does it even matter? Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the book and more, including the future of physical surveillance, how clothing will evolve, the kind of freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today’s media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph, whether we’re in a permanent secular innovation starvation, Leibniz as a philosopher, Dickens and Heinlein as writers, and what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions.

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Recorded June 14th, 2019 Other ways to connect

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