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>>18514783

>>18514783
luddites got it right

>>18515293
Luddites say technological progress is bad, they don't say technological progress inevitably leads to concentration of power.

>>18515319
Luddites hate technological society because its an unsustainable maximum entropy engine, yes.

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Not necessarily. The 19th century centralized power in the hands of a few industrialized nations, but new technology in the 20th century allowed undeveloped countries to break free. All of a sudden you didn't need tons of expensive mining equipment and railroads just a toyota and a bunch of handheld equipment. Guerrillas had access to powerful weapons like the ak47 while the cold war nuclear stand off meant proxy wars opened up across the globe.

>>18515331
some technologies are freeing, some aren't, just depends on the capital you need to have it. But it seems that only ever more capital heavy things are invented and forever out of reach of the little guy.

communications are also centralising in general. any big system can also use the low-capital equipment, so even if all high-capital stuff vanished, could still organise massive armies of footsoldiers.

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>>18516286
An average person doesn't own a factory, but you only need a handful of meme chinese factories to mass produce smartphones for billions of people. It doesn't even need to be owned by a single fat cat either, it could be owned by middle class shareholders and pension funds, it is usually better run when it is as well. About the only way to become a billionaire is to develop some new technology that revolutionizes things, not, as communists imagine, some natural process where capital is ever centralized in the hands of a tiny monopolistic elite.

The increasing complexity of the economy means it is no longer possible for a monarch and a handful of high aristocracy to effectively control it, that world fell apart in the first world war. One might imagine AI will enable a tiny elite to control everything, but even here AI has its flaws, the AI will learn to manipulate whoever is trying to control it. It only takes one puff of cocaine to compromise a member of the elite and render them irrational and easily manipulated. You need an upper-middle class to monitor everything and make sure everything is running smoothly and we don't deviate too much from a sane and stable human existence.

The rest of the population are fucked though, but then if you're white (and maybe east asian), IQ 120+ and not a degenerate they are not a concern. When you look at the typical Indian, Muslim, Hispanic or African it is difficult to have much hope for them.

>>18516298
by "capital", I mean things that are inextricably expensive. A phone is cheap, the factory that builds the phones is riotously expensive. A government can't prevent dissidents from having phones, but to some degree it can cut them off from the supply. (or completely, by nuking Taiwan)

Particularly, any large asset. e.g. a battleship. The only way a small nation or rebel group gets one, is by stealing her from a bigger nation. Fighter jets, aircraft carriers, nuclear reactors, satellite arrays, etc, many things are increasingly essential and completely impractical unless your bank account has more digits than you have fingers.

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>Muh great equalizer. Muh slayer of knighs
>Literally led to Royal governments easily monopolizing overwhelming military power as they can afford to have more guns & ammo than militias or feudal lords.
>Set the foundations of the Military Industrial Complex that led to non-state forces becoming irrelevant on the battlefield.

The common people unironically had more chance against their governments back in the swords & spears days.

>>18516431
Asymmetric warfare proves that an armed populace has a fairly significant chance against their government as well though

>>18516442
Asymmetric warfare regularly got destroyed in previous centuries and is often practiced by the losing side. Asymmetric forces only started winning during the Cold War era because- surprise surprise- states with giant militaries like US/USSR/China backed the shit out their pet guerrillas.

>>18516456
But even the US has struggled against armed guerilla forces, even with an overwhelming military advantage, because an armed populace still makes achieving political goals logistically difficult for the larger side

>>18516424
>the factory that builds the phones is riotously expensive
>unless your bank account has more digits than you have fingers
Are we talking about Somalia tier decentralization? Egypt built the pyramids in the bronze age with a population of 3 million. Most countries have the capital to build chip factories, they just wouldn't be able to compete with Taiwan's hyperefficient plants as well as its low corruption and good reputation important with a product such as this, not being able to compete is not the same as lacking ability entirely.

>just nuke everything bro
Nuclear weapons are limited in scope. If you start a nuclear war it will ruin your own economy as well as the enemy's, you will then have to fight a years long conventional war with the enemy using its backup tactical nuclear weapons to wipe out your tank columns and aircraft carrier fleets, assuming your own generals don't remove you from power after realizing how completely futile and pointless it all is.

>>18516431
Strong centralized states with a monopoly on violence are usually better than disjointed feudal states full of warring warlords

>>18516517
I won't argue with that, but I am just adding to OP's examples on how tech leads to centralization.

>>18514783
Your example is valid but you can find counterexamples too.
The internet has caused one of the biggest decentralization of information in human history, similar only to the invention of the printing press.
Nuclear weapons, they make states extremely powerful, so that must mean centralization of power, right? Well, yes, but now you also have that tiny states like Pakistan have to be respected by their neighboring superpowers, because they too happen to have nuclear weapons. So it's not as easy and clear cut.

>>18516495
>nukes
doesn't have to be a nuke. One factory makes basically all the high-performance chips in the world. You could fly a historic B-17 bomber from WW2 over there, pretend it's an airshow, and drop enough bombs to knock that factory out for a few months.
That and there are chip-factories in Russia and the USA. The highest end tech is so capital-intensive that even those don't really compete, it all comes from TSMC.

>Egypt pyramids
Over what time period? Took them ages.

>>18516587
The internet has also allowed new levels of control. Your new dishwasher probably connects to the internet and reports data back to 30 different governments. My state has AI cameras that take pictures and send you a fine if you don't wear a seatbelt. That and all the massive computerised systems that run on one massive database. Now, you can't just write your name as whatever and sign up to a job, you need ID, a police check, etc, and it all gets "verified" on massive databases. There's no "oops they lost the files" anymore. (There is, but it requires innovative levels of bureaucratic incompetence)

>>18516697
>You could fly a historic B-17 bomber from WW2 over there, pretend it's an airshow, and drop enough bombs to knock that factory out for a few months.
Then everyone will realize the world is fucked and they need their own chip factories, among other things, that can be repurposed by the military. That it's worth paying 0.01% of GDP in subsidies to make sure they develop a domestic industry.

>Over what time period? Took them ages.
A chip factory is probably only a fraction of the cost. The biggest problem is not even capital rather reliable expertise and noncorrupt oversight by the government to make sure it serves the intended purpose. Though this can be assured via an impending existential threat.

Your silly scenarios though prove that there is probably a general slow trend towards centralization. In the past you only needed to know how to bore a cannon and high school level mathematics to calculate trajectories, a small town and surrounding villages could probably construct a star fort and equip it with cannons and support a few 50 cannon frigates. Now you need increasingly specialized resources from all over the world. The complexity is approaching the point where a typical nation of a few million can't support it alone. Not quite there yet, but one day I'm sure.

>>18516713
LLM

>>18516697
>The internet has also allowed new levels of control.
I don't disagree, although in practice nobody gives a fuck how many times a day you turn on your dishwasher, they just do mass data collection because it's the only way to go about it.
I think some kind of relationship between concentration of power and technological progress definitely exists, because in many ways technology is power. I just don't see it as ultimately inevitable.

>>18514783
Oh yeah, because there's only 1 company today that owns ALL the telegraph lines, right? Fucking moron.

>>18516873
LLM?