Dug Campbell

Nineteenth Century Technology

I like this piece of Jamie Bartlett’s book, ‘The People vs Tech: How the Internet is killing democracy (and how we save it)”:

“Sometimes relatively innocuous inventions open up new possibilities for social organisation. In the mid-nineteenth-century America, the settlement of farming communities in the West was impossible because roaming cattle kept destroying the crops. But the invention of ‘barbed wire’ meant that huge swathes of land could be enclosed. Roaming buffalo were doomed, which in turn destroyed the Native American way of life.”

A great of example of technology destroying and creating at the same time.