Rinstinkt’s Reviews > The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age > Status Update

Arnold Toynbee noted in his massive A Study of History that the downslope of civilizations forms the great incubator of religious movements.11 Rarely does this happen so dramatically as in times when the most basic assumptions of a civilization are visibly disproving themselves. This is such a time, in case you haven’t noticed.

The claim that “technology is value-free” is fatuous nonsense... individual technologies embody the values and goals of their designers... Look at the suite of technologies used by a person or a culture, and it’s an easy matter to divine the values that person or that culture holds... the values and goals our technologies reveal to the world are a very long distance indeed from the ones we claim to embrace.

Tools for the transition