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- No, in the article I'm referencing he goes further, to concepts. It's here: https://www.amazon.com/What-Category-Theory-Giandomenico-Sic...
I had confused in my mind -tectonic with a phrase from another book I admire: https://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Ages-Americas-Technetroni.... I guess that's what I get for not double-checking; and you get a random book link :)
- I can see how he rejects 1945 as a dividing line, but technologically somebody could set a line between the kind of electronics involved in radio (circuits with say 10 vacuum tubes) and then television and computers. I like Brzezinski’s construct of the Technetronic age
https://www.e-ir.info/2011/07/22/review-between-two-ages-ame...
and feel the urge to periodize it into "lower", "middle" and "upper" technetronic even though we're way too close to it for that.
- I used to be (particularly around 2000) really interested in the history and literature of the time period 1965-1980 or so including the hippie phenomenon, Watergate, disco, inflation, etc.
Lately though I took a look at
https://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Ages-Americas-Technetroni...
and a conference proceedings about Brzezinski's ideas that came out in the next few years. Partially I wanted to roll my eyes at times because my interests have moved on but something that struck me was an essay by Paul Goodman which reflected a sentiment that was really common at that time to the effect that people were dogpiling into urban areas, that large cities were becoming unmanagable, that the exodus into urban areas had to be stopped, etc. This report was a relatively late one on the topic
https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...
which did not have any 1960s radical positioning but rather saw it is an almost universal political problem that the UK was too concentrated in London, France too concentrated in Paris, etc. All of these countries saw some need to do something about it.
That kind of talk stopped abruptly circa 1980 when we got Reagan and Thatcher and competition between international economic centers seemed too fierce for, say, the UK to give up any competitiveness at all by dispersing its financial sector out of London.
Today the message is overwhelmingly that people are more productive when they live in big cities thus it is an economic necessity for population to concentrate. There's a counternarriative now which is not positioned as a counternarriative that housing has become unaffordable in places with vibrant economies.
As I see it is the old "large cities have become unmanageable" theme that's become crystalized.
Right now it can seem like a political problem (e.g. existing residents, landlords, etc. profit from the current situation) but since growth is prevented through this mechanism there are many other problems we're not seeing (if California was adding as much population as it could could they afford infrastructure investments, could they handle environmental impacts, provision social services, etc.)
- Yes.
This was anticipated and salivated over by the likes of Zbigniew K. Brzezinski.
https://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Ages-Americas-Technetroni...
https://archive.org/details/B-001-003-798 (for the pdf)
- This same book was written half a century ago by another member of the US libertarian elite: Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave (1980).
Which itself was a bad ripoff of Zbigniew Brzezinski's Between Two Ages (1970).
- The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.
(Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1971)
