Dark age ahead
Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a Dark Age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a Dark Age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
11mentions
9people
2009–2025years
27% recommend73% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I like this comment, it may be true; it certainly should make us careful about making a final judgement. It's true of literature and art - what the next century decides was great about the last isn't obvious at the time, at all. Or not usually. If the next century lives largely in cyberspace, then we're in the golden age and No Man's Sky (a game I quite like, actually) and VR are epochal advances for all humanity. But overall, I'm a pessimist, Jane Jacobs book "Dark Age Ahead" (which is mostly about trends obvious back then) left a big impression on me.
- I'd like to add honourary mentions for Jane Jacobs' last book, Dark Age Ahead and Thomas Homer-Dixon's book The Ingenuity Gap.
- Jane Jacobs has brilliant essay on this topic; the difference between educating and providing credentials.
Dark Age Ahead, ISBN-10: 0679313109
- I guess I'm what you'd call a leftist (but I prefer progressive). I read Life+Death and Dark Age Ahead. Jacobs never struck me as conservative, whatever that even means. A preservationist, to be sure. I don't think Dark Age Ahead is going to be handed out at CPAC. Burned maybe.
BTW, what does conservative mean?
- Since we're piling up records like never before and still making tech progress (slowing down many argue) no. But... see Dark Age Ahead, May 17, 2005 by Jane Jacobs One of her largest points is that we are progressively losing our grip on what Science is in fact. I don't think she's all wrong about that.
- Scientists are generally people who don't understand what "science" is, or its history; who then freely invoke the word when they aren't talking about anything remotely related to experimental trials or testable matters. They just assume that if they're doing it, and it says scientist on their door, it must be science. That's not an ordinary error, it's a form of rank incompetence the academy has fomented for decades; often resulting in the satanic inverse of empirical science. (See Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead 2005)
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