Rebooting Reality — Chapter 2, Labor

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Overview:

Food is the number one material factor affecting our swarm’s growth. Labor is a close second. The amount of our physical and mental power shapes how we, wittingly or unwittingly, organize to get what we want. That then determines how we arrange our labor lives, which shapes everything else. Take our last big labor change, the industrial revolution. Often, we think of it as something we planned, or as something that our leaders pushed us into. We think about the anti-slavery movement the same way. Our usual stories about the women’s movement, and the civil rights movement, reflect the same style of thinking. But this chapter shows that all those changes were more influenced by the near-accidental growth, then network linkage, of various material factors.

This chapter shows why that network style of thinking is a useful way to see our swarm. To do so, it first analyzes the first and second stages of our industrial revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then it shows how those changes affected another of our changes, the women’s movement in the nineteenth century. It caps the discussion with one aspect of the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. At the same time, it introduces two new group physics ideas: ‘reaction networks’ and ‘synergy.’ The first describes how we sometimes organize to do things. The second describes why some of the ways that we happen to organize ourselves can be strong enough to change our entire way of life. Added to autocatalysis and phase change, those two ideas then put in perspective today’s worries about offshoring and outsourcing while also suggesting how our labor lives might continue to change in the future.

Sweat of Thy Face

To her, the city is big and cold and foreign. Her journey to this place had begun the night that horsemen had raided her village, seven years before. She was then about 12. They torched the huts, slit the men’s throats, killed the aged and the infant, and raped her and all the other girls and women. Then they took her away, along with everyone else aged between 8 and 13. The boys became cattle herders; the girls, house slaves. Seven years later her mistress gave her to another family. They lived in this place, this strange city of big buildings and a strange people who spoke a strange language. Four months after that, her new owners went on holiday. Then one day, left unwatched for a time, she gathered her courage and fled the house. That day she wandered the streets, talking at strangers, seeking a familiar face or a familiar tongue. She is a slave. The city is London. The date is Monday September 11th, 2000.

Today, many of us in rich countries believe that slavery is long gone. It had to do with wearing rags and picking cotton, we think. Or perhaps with wearing chains and pulling oars. We also see slavery as always forced, and we think of slave life as worse than any alternative. We believe that slavery is about skin color, or perhaps creed, or maybe ideology. It’s something whites did to non-whites, we nod to each other—or Christians to non-Christians—or capitalists to non-capitalists. It’s odd that such beliefs are popular, because they’re all wrong.

Slavery isn’t dead. Like our drug trade and our arms trade, our slave trade occurs because we’re willing to buy what we want, not just because we’re willing to sell what we can. Whereas arms flow from rich countries to poor ones, slaves (and drugs) move from poor countries to rich ones. Today, traffic streams from Central and Eastern Europe and Russia to Western Europe and North America. It also runs from China, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand to Japan, Australia, Western Europe, and North America. Chattel slavery—fully legal ownership of our bodies—is now mostly dead, but debt slavery lives, especially for women and children. Sex slavery for women and girls, and some boys, also lives. Today, counting all forms of bondage, perhaps 27 million of us are still slaves. Perhaps 200,000 are in the United States alone.

A black-market cousin of chattel slavery itself still exists in West Africa. There, children cost about $30 U.S. Dealers buy them as young as five from their parents in one country and sell them in another. As usual, poorer countries—like Benin, Mali, and Togo—supply richer ones—like Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, and Gabon. Full-frontal slavery, complete with slave markets, still exists in Mauritania and Sudan. Across the Atlantic, Brazil also has people in bondage. Tricked with promises of well-paid work, whole families are trucked or shipped around Amazonia. There they clear forests under armed guard. Haiti too has slaves. The poorest nation in the Americas, half its people can’t read and four in five live in abject poverty. It has armies of slaves, both for sex and for labor. That includes children as young as four.

Slavery isn’t always forced though. After some of us became farmers 11,000 years ago, kids could be born into a family that couldn’t support them, but who could be supported by another family. So rather than having to kill or abandon such children, as we probably did when we were all foragers, we could instead sell them to each other. Slavery among farmers or herders can also happen when a family can’t sustain itself during famine or war. To eat, such families can try to sell themselves. The alternative is banditry or suicide.

Slavery isn’t about skin color either. Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans kept slaves. So did Africans, Indians, Chinese, Japanese. Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, all kept slaves. So did Hebrews, Arabs, Persians, Turks. You name ’em, they kept ’em. That goes for Europeans too. In Sussex a thousand years ago the king got four pence for every English slave sold. “They got the women with child and sent them pregnant to market. You would have seen queues of the wretches of both sexes shackled together... sold amidst much wailing.” Of course, the Catholic Church had a problem with that. But the problem wasn’t slavery. Churchmen owned slaves just like anyone else with two shillings to rub together. The problem wasn’t Christian slaves either. By then much of Europe was Christian. The problem was the selling of Christian slaves to non-Christians overseas. Two centuries later, Thomas Aquinas debated whether male slaves could become clerics (nope), whether their kids were slaves (yep), and so on. He argued that “offspring follow the womb.” So slave mother, slave child, even if the father were free.

Slavery in Europe also persisted long after Aquinas. On May 19th, 1248, a slave girl was sold in Marseilles (and six weeks later her new owner resold her at a profit). In 1294, Marco Polo’s uncle died and in his will freed his slaves. (Later, when Marco Polo died, he freed his too.) Around then in Yorkshire, an English slave and his family cost just a bit more than a cow. In Genoa, slaves were almost all nubile girls from Russia, Greece, Bosnia, Georgia, Armenia, Bulgaria, and Turkey. In Venice between 1414 and 1423 alone, at least 10,000 such slaves changed hands. Whether sold for a crust of bread by their parents, or kidnapped into slavery by raiders, most ended as household slaves. In England by 1547, all able-bodied vagrants were, by law, to be rounded up, branded, and enslaved. (Back then, being ‘branded an outlaw’ had literal meaning.) The next century, English theft of Irish bodies started at least by 1612. It continued until at least 1700. Nor did homegrown slavery then vanish from Europe. Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands enslaved their criminals until well into the nineteenth century. And back then, becoming a criminal could be as simple as shouting at the king.

Slavery also isn’t about creed. Buddhist China kept slaves. So did Hindu India. So did polytheist Africa. Christian Europe and Islamic Arabia were no different, especially on trips to Africa. Nor did they always have to steal to get slaves. Many villages traded their neighbors for a bolt of cloth, a metal pot, a bead necklace. Christians and Muslims also took both Africans and Europeans by force. The European-run trade took over 12 million slaves. The Arab-run trade took another 12 million or so. At least one million of them were European. They then stocked the harems and swelled the armies of Arabia and North Africa.

Finally, slavery isn’t about ideology. It didn’t matter whether we had a king, a dictator, a republic, or a collective. Britain, France, Spain, the United States, all had legal slavery. Soviet Russia enslaved perhaps 30 million of its people in its slave-labor prison system, its Gulag. Communist China did the same in its equivalent, its Laogai. Fascist Germany also held slaves. So did Imperial Japan. Until at least the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth too, millions of us were little more than disposable tools.

In short, many of us who could keep slaves, did. And many of us who couldn’t otherwise eat, sold our kids, then ourselves. We’ve been slavers and slaves for at least five millennia—or at least as long as we could write. It didn’t matter what we looked like, where we lived, what we said we believed. In part, slavery is a response to a constraint and a need. The constraint is our food tech. The need is our demand for labor and sex. In Aristotle’s words, 2,300 years ago, we all wanted ‘living tools.’ Slavery was thus long a part of our division of labor—the set of arrangements we have with each other, voluntary or not, that determines who does what work. And it began to rise with our phase change into farming.

It began to end with our phase change into industry. But that’s often not the way we tell the tale. For example, when talking about the end of chattel slavery we usually tell stories about leaders like Wilberforce and Lincoln. We also say that we ended it ‘because it was bad.’ But that can’t be all. If it were, why didn’t we end it long before the 1800s? Further, why do other forms of slavery, especially sex slavery, still exist today? Aren’t they bad too? Moreover, why did not just slavery but much of our farming world change a lot in the 1800s, after at least five millennia of not changing much at all? Something big must have happened to us in the 1800s—or, rather, the 1700s. Starting around then we started changing many parts of our labor lives, but not all of them, and not everywhere, and we’re not yet finished changing. It’ll be a long time before slavery in all its forms vanishes completely. Still, much has already changed, and it all started in the 1700s, with the beginning of our industrial revolution.

The Prime Mover

Our industrial revolution came in at least four stages, with the first starting in 1769. That year, a Scot placed his first patent at the High Court of Chancery in London. His name was James Watt. His patent was for a steam engine.

Mention the term ‘steam engine’ today and most eyes glaze over. It brings back memories of dry schooldays filled with boring stories of grimy machinery and oppressed workers. But mention it two centuries ago and many eyes would light up. Back then it was the last word in high tech, the equivalent of the mobile computer today. It was the key to the start of our phase change from farming to industry. That then went on to change our labor lives just as much as our phase change from foraging to farming did 11 millennia ago. It was also a big part of why chattel slavery, at least, has declined. Slavery itself is just part of a larger story about our labor lives and how they change, and the industrial revolution is the last big labor change we’ve had.

But why did it start? Was it that we one day simply grew fed up with farming? Was it the next obvious step on a ladder of increasing power so that’s why we took it? Was it that a genius was born who showed us the error of our ways? We often tell the story of our industrial revolution all those ways. And mainly we center it on James Watt. Our phase change into industry happened mainly because of his effort, just as if he were a new Archimedes moving the earth with a lever. Or so we often tell ourselves anyway. But such a story ignores the effort of another man. And because it does, it distorts what happened, and why.

Step back a bit further in time to Russia in 1758. Ivan Polzunov, a military mining officer, then lived in Barnaul, in the foothills of the Altai Mountains in southwestern Siberia. Barnaul was then a big (for Siberia) feudal mining town, complete with serfs. It was in the exact center of the middle of nowhere. It existed solely because it smelted about 90 percent of Russia’s silver. Then in 1758 Polzunov escorted a mule train carrying three tons of gold and silver on a 2,600-mile trip across the empty wastes between Barnual and Saint Petersburg. There he saw the czar’s fountains, powered by the first steam engine that Britain had ever exported. That engine excited him because back in Barnaul his chief problem was how to beef up the mine’s bellows pumps. Over the next five years, after his return, he designed a 32-horsepower, twin-cylinder, reciprocating steam engine—the world’s first. Impressed, Russia’s empress, Catherine the Great, promoted him and gave him 400 rubles to build his machine. But, stuck in Siberia, he lacked skilled machinists. So he mostly built it himself, by hand. Then he died, May 27th, 1766.

Three days later his orphaned engine started driving four bellows in the smelting furnaces of the Barnaul silver mine. But it was crude. As Russians say, it was ‘built by the axe.’ It worked from June to November, then it broke down. No one could fix it. Asking his unlettered apprentices to do so must have been like asking one of us today to repair a spaceship with a can opener and some chewing gum. In a world of serfs and thatched cottages and muddy tracks, it was a piece of alien high tech. It never worked again. Polzunov was a failure. History forgot him.

But a year before he died, and 5,000 miles to the west, an idea for a new kind of steam engine, a new ‘Prime Mover,’ came to James Watt in Scotland. He patented it in London four years later. Then he took seven more years to build it. By March 11th, 1776, three years after a bunch of rowdy colonists 3,000 miles further west had turned Boston harbor into a teapot, Watt’s first commercial engine was working in a coal mine. Within a year, British industrialists were after it like a pack of rats after a plate of sausages. Everyone wanted to buy what he had to sell—power. Soon our labor relations began to change in response to our new tool, first in Britain, then Europe, then the rest of the world. As they changed, so did many of our other relations. For one thing, we began to seriously question our age-old institution of slavery. Over time our whole farming world began to crumble. Watt was a success. History idolized him.

Watt succeeded where Polzunov failed. But that needn’t mean that he was any smarter. He was part of a diverse and densely linked group of early machinists, proto-scientists, shop-owners, and investors. He wasn’t acting alone, lost in the middle of a vast and empty Siberian steppe. Like Polzunov, he first needed an engine already in use to then improve. That engine came out of earlier work by Thomas Newcomen, John Smeaton, Thomas Savery, and others. To improve it, he needed to understand the physics of energy. He got that from his friend, Joseph Black, who was a professor at Glasgow University. To build it, he needed brass cylinders that could withstand high pressure. He got those from other inventors, mainly Abraham Darby and John Thomas. That’s how he made his prototype. Then to make it cheaply enough, he needed cheap iron instead of costly brass for his cylinders (Abraham Darby II). To machine it precisely enough, he needed high-grade iron (John Wilkinson). He also needed crucible steel to cut precision-ground cylinders and pistons (Benjamin Huntsman). To run it cheaply enough, he needed cheap energy. He got that from coke—that is, cooked coal—instead of wood or charcoal (Abraham Darby I). To sell it widely, he needed heavy advertising (Matthew Boulton). He also needed a ready market (Richard Arkwright, Josiah Wedgwood, and Matthew Boulton). And to do anything at all he needed ready money (John Roebuck and Matthew Boulton). But it wasn’t enough for him to make his engine, as Polzunov’s engine shows. For major labor change to follow his work, Britain too had to be ready for it. It needed growing banking credit outside of London. It needed ever improving steam engines. It needed ever improving machine tools. Plus it needed ever growing canal transport. Its list of needs is long, and the list of people who developed them is even longer. Britain needed ever expanding markets, it needed ever expanding rail networks, it needed new farm innovations until it could almost feed itself. All those tool changes by all those people catalyzed yet another network of tools made by yet another network of early industrialists in Britain. They built the early machines that led to Britain’s textile industry. That then became one of the first killer apps of the new steam tech.

Bored reading all those names you don’t know? Good. Now you know why they don’t often appear in our popular stories. The real world is complicated. But instead of that complexity we mostly get fairy tales. Those tales have more to do with limits on our attention span than on what our past really was.

We today often credit Watt for the steam engine, but we might just as well nominate Wilkinson. After all, it was only after his new precision cylinders that steam engines took off. Darby would also do. So would Huntsman, Black, or any of dozens of others. Any one of them was a crucial lever of change. And why stop there? Newcomen got the idea of using a riveted copper boiler—which could withstand high heat and pressure—from local beer makers. Darby got the idea of using coke instead of coal from local brewers too. Black too was just as dependent on others. He figured out latent and specific heat. And why? He was trying to understand the fuel needs of local whiskey distillers. Huntsman figured out how to melt steel by using a special clay to reflect furnace heat. And how? He stole the idea from local glass-makers. They in turn had stumbled upon it by accident while trying to figure out how to melt old glass.

Watt wasn’t even the only steam-engine designer in Britain at the time. He’s merely the one that today we choose to remember. In 1782 what got him steamed was that “Nature had taken an aversion to monopolies, and put the same thing into several people’s heads at once, to prevent them.” At the time, he was fighting other inventors for patents. Even the steam engine itself wasn’t new with him. Only his improved design was, and that was possible in Britain only in his time. When he first worked with steam in 1763, Newcomen’s steam engine had already been pumping out mines in Britain for half a century. Savery had patented the first prototype steam engine in 1698—the year Watt’s father was born. So James Watt didn’t invent the steam engine. He was merely the last of us to add a bit to it before it became really useful. He could do what he did only because he belonged to a large network of early industrialists, all of whom were in touch with each other at the right time.

That pattern of something big happening only after many smaller things come together in a dense enough network isn’t unique to us. A biochemist might call the system that Watt belonged to a reaction network. When one of the group built something, another reacted to build on it. They could do so because they had diverse talents and were densely linked. Because they had multiple skills they could solve problems as they arose, thereby helping each other—even if they didn’t intend to do so. Because they were densely linked, they learned about each other’s problems and could supply solutions fast enough to be useful. Many molecular reaction networks work exactly the same way, including all the ones that keep all our bodies alive.

But where did that reaction network come from? And why did it arise in Britain? It’s easy to weave a tale that turns Britain into a hero nation, just as it’s easy to weave a tale that idolizes Watt at the expense of the reaction network that he was only one part of. Only when we contrast Polzunov with Watt do we see what really happened. Similiar, the reasons for Britain’s industrial superiority become clearer only when contrasting Britain to, for example, Russia.

Britain, unlike barely settled and still feudal Russia, had by Watt’s time chopped down nearly all its usable trees. That had made fuel costly. But those vanished trees had also fed its navy, its glass-making industry, and its iron-making industry. All three had been growing since the 1530s. (Back when a panicky Henry VIII had started importing French and German experts to build his navy and weapons, but that’s a whole other story.) That unwittingly put precursors in place for the big network changes to come. But so did Britain’s growing slave wealth. That helped fuel new capitalist tools, like formal banks, mortgages, insurance, credit. Russia, meanwhile, had almost none of that. It was still mostly a land of serfs. It had vast raw materials but little industry—and little capital. Even Britain’s energy shortage helped. It increased pressure to find new fuel sources. In contrast, Russia didn’t have to worry about fuel; it still had huge forests to chop down. Britain, with few reachable trees left, had long before turned to coal. Then it looked for ways to make that coal less polluting in the towns and more useful for iron-making. So by the 1760s, tiny Britain, not huge Russia, already had the largest coal-mining industry in Europe. And it badly needed steam engines to pump water out of its ever deepening mines.

Those steam engines laying about the place then had further effects. Many more inventors in Britain than just the lonely one in Siberia could have their imaginations fired with ways to improve them. Of 182 patents issued in Britain from 1561 to 1642, one-seventh were for the raising of water. Britain thus had far more experience with steam engines than Russia. Plus, unlike Russia, it had some idea of their value. So although it had exported steam engines since 1717 it banned their export by 1753. In Russia though, after Polzunov died, Catherine the Great could care less about homemade steam engines. She gave up the whole idea, continuing to import steam talent from Britain. So once Polzunov’s machine stopped working, Russia ignored it. Russia didn’t understand that building steam engines is useful not just for the engines themselves, but also for what building them taught its engineers.

Britain had still other early industrial advantages over Russia, thanks to religious repression. Watt, and most early industrialists in Britain, were Dissenters. As Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and so forth, they were heretics in the eyes of the state. Their co-religionists had lost power soon after the English Civil War over a century before and they were still paying for it. By law, they couldn’t attend Oxford or Cambridge. They couldn’t join the army. They couldn’t hold public office. They couldn’t stand for Parliament. They couldn’t even congregate in public. Barred from high-status jobs—along with Jews and Catholics, and anyone else who didn’t fit in—they had only one option: trade and industry. There they stewed. With nowhere else to go, many of them knew each other. So they did deals with each other. Their common repression pushed them together. That’s what formed their unwitting reaction network. Britain, unlike Russia, had a large pool of literate, driven, educated, mechanically minded people. They were all working on early industrial problems, and they were all linked. Meanwhile, Russia was still running pogroms against its Jews.

So Britain succeeded and Russia failed, but like Watt versus Polzunov, to explain that we needn’t assume that one country was smarter than the other. Britain didn’t plan to have an industrial edge in 1765 any more than Russia planned to not have one in 1765. Our surge into industry didn’t come about when and where it did because Britain happened to be full of geniuses while Russia wasn’t. An industrial reaction network existed in Britain then because of a long chain of reactions going far back in time.

That chain went back centuries because a steam engine can’t work without a vacuum, and for most of our history we didn’t believe a vacuum could exist. Denied vacuums, we couldn’t imagine making one. So we couldn’t use one to do mechanical work, which is what a steam engine does. So while both Watt’s and Polzunov’s steam engines used vacuums, neither arose in one. Before we could stumble into a steam engine, and from that, an industrial revolution, hundreds of early scientists all over Europe first had to drop things from heights, go down mines, and climb up mountains. They had to figure out that even air could have weight. They had to discover the first principles of how liquids, gases, and energy flow. Further, that pyramid of early scientists wouldn’t have existed without an even larger pyramid of people stretching back at least 2,300 years into the past to our first stirrings of rational thought about the universe. Finally, that pyramid is only for the science behind vacuums. There are still other pyramids behind Britain’s reactions networks that built its new textile tech, its new food tech, its new banking tech, and so forth. Plus, without the much earlier printing press, and all the changes it triggered, little of that knowledge and those tools would have spread as fast and as far as they did. The skein of links goes on and on. If we knew enough, they’d probably stretch all the way back to the first one of us who chipped stone, who knows how many millennia ago. Our tools don’t simply arise whenever needed. Even Shakespeare knew that. We can call spirits from the vasty deep, but will they come when we call?

Thus the fuel of the industrial fire that started in Britain in 1776 wasn’t merely wood and coal and coke. Nor was it solely commercial changes in Britain as its slave wealth grew, money concentrated, and credit markets expanded. Nor was it only the toolbase that the newly concentrated money made possible—more canals, more ships, more insurance, more capital. Nor even was it solely Britain’s rising literacy, metallurgy, and scientific insight. It was also the result of financial and creative capital built up by more than a century of bigotry in both the slave trade and in religion. It was a network made of all those networks together. Thus, by 1776 we’d accidentally heaped up a lot of pre-industrial tinder in one small place—Britain. Then, Watt’s reaction network tossed in a lit match, a more efficient steam. The result was an industrial explosion. But we didn’t plan it. It came about after centuries of accidents in many countries, with none of us having any idea what was coming next. Our industrial explosion wasn’t something we did. It was something our swarm did.

That swarming behavior, that unplanned, uncontrolled, centuries-long reaction network process, isn’t unique to steam engines. It helps explain every major change we go through. In 1676, exactly a century before Watt’s first engine began to chuff, Isaac Newton, one of England’s superbrights, was in the middle of one of his usual catfights with another superbright, Robert Hooke. One night he wrote to Hooke that “If I have seen further [than you] it is [only] by standing on ye sholders of Giants.” Today, most of our books credit him with the saying, but he didn’t invent it. He was quoting an expression common in his day. The original went back half a millennium to a French monk. But that monk was only adding metaphoric color to a idea that went back a further half millennium. A Roman grammarian originated it over a thousand years before Newton. Yet even he may have only polished a hand-me-down thought. The ancient Greek story of Orion tells us of a blinded giant who carried a man on his shoulders to see for him. Of course, that’s only a myth, but, often, myth is history melted down into poetry. While history speaks only of our past, myth speaks of us. That long network change is our story in a sound-bite. Blinded by our superbrights, we too often fail to see it. So we often can’t see the true details of our past, nor can we see its many links to our present—and to our future. Our prime mover isn’t the genius. It’s the network.

The Synergetic Machine

That network, and our resulting phase change into industry, has brought us many things. Besides power from steam—its first stage—its later stages gave us mass production, combustion engines, electricity, and electric motors. New tools led to new labor resources, and together they changed how many kids we had, how we traveled, how we lived. Without them, we’d all still be farmers. We’d all still get around on horses—if that. Women would still mainly be baby-makers. Children would still be cheap farm labor. But none of our changes happened simply or in any planned way. And although the steam engine helped trigger many of them, other things first had to come together in a new network before we could change in any major way. Before that could happen, most of us were stuck in a way of life that had barely budged for at least 5,000 years.

It’s September 25th, 1585, and Pope Sixtus V has a problem. He wants to move an Egyptian obelisk. He’s rebuilding Saint Peter’s Basilica and in front of it he wants to put the stone, which stands just 280 yards away. For Sixtus, the monolith stood for the Roman slaughter of Christians. Legend had it that Saint Peter himself had been crucified in its shadow. Thus, it perhaps, also stood for Sixtus’ current plight. His big problem, besides the usual one (money), was the Protestant Reformation. Just one decade after it had begun, Protestant troops had invaded and sacked Rome—something that hadn’t happened in 443 years. They’d spent six months pillaging, torturing, killing, raping. They’d even raped the nuns. As Protestant power rose, Catholic power fell, and Sixtus was determined to reverse that. For him, the stone had other symbolic value too. It hadn’t moved in over 1,500 years because ever since the western Roman empire had declined and fallen all over the place, no one could shift it. Re-erecting it would demonstrate Rome’s new virility. That wouldn’t be easy though. It weighed almost two-thirds of a million pounds.

For millennia we’d moved that same stone with mostly the same tools, because we had no others. Egyptians had been making and moving such monsters four and half millennia ago. Two millennia ago, Octavian dragged it from Heliopolis to Alexandria. Soon after, Caligula hauled it to Rome to grace his new circus. By Sixtus’ time, it stood in the ruins of that. Moving it and raising it in front of the growing basilica then took a year, 907 men, 75 horses, miles of rope, and dozens of wooden machines. But at last it stood before the new Saint Peter’s, a phallic beacon for Rome’s new millions of pilgrims. Sixtus had finally gotten it up.

Sixtus himself isn’t important, nor is his erectile problem. What’s important is that for at least five millennia we had nearly no new tools. For all that time, mostly all we had were levers, ropes, cranes, and such. Our only other common tools were the tools to make those tools—axe, hammer, saw, and so on. We also only had simple measuring tools like the plumb line, the spirit level, the set square. For millennia too, nothing moved physically unless we, or our draft animals, moved it. Waterwheels were our only other prime movers. A 20-foot-high one can move about 700 pounds forever, but it’s stuck in place. A horse can pull about one-seventh of that for about a day. A man can sustain about one-seventh of that for several hours. That was it. For five millennia.

For all our written history those labor limits told us what we could do and build, and that limited what we could think and be. Those limits trapped us in a world of farms and hand labor. They told us that enslaving hands made sense, and they told us that women had to be yearly baby-machines to make yet more hands. So we toted that barge, we lifted that bale, we got a little drunk, we landed in jail. Had our tool and power limits never changed, likely little else ever would have. After most of the status-seeking and blood-letting that stuffs our history books, we lived and died much as before. We did sometimes change, but usually only very slowly. And when we did change quickly, usually it was for the worse—a new famine, a new plague, a new war. The sack of Rome, for instance, came and went. Lots of us died. Many of us were raped and tortured. Perhaps 45,000 of us fled. Many of us had unplanned pregnancies. Most of Rome’s wealth was lost. But nothing really changed. We still made about as many babies. We still had roughly the same amount of food. We still tilled mostly the same land. We still traveled only on foot or by horse.

For millennia we didn’t see our farming life, and the labor relations and various constraints that flowed from that, as things that could change. ‘New’ was the same as ‘bad,’ and another word for ‘inventor’ was ‘lunatic.’ In the United States in 1803, a pastor put the prevailing attitude thus: “Let us guard against the insidious encroachments of innovation, that evil and beguiling spirit which is now stalking to and fro through the earth, seeking whom he may destroy.”

It takes a huge force to change our ways of life in any major way because that force must first change our toolbase, which is vast and thus slow to change. Our imagination is the crowbar we use to bend the world to our will, but merely wishing for a thing to happen rarely changes anything. (Especially when most of us are wishing for it not to happen.) To realize a new idea we need an expanded toolbase, which is itself the result of earlier acts of imagination. That toolbase includes power sources, skilled people, and specialized tools, and those began to change a lot only with the steam engine.

With an efficient steam engine by 1776 our power sources grew, but skilled people and precision tools were still rare. However, as the steam engine spread, new generations of toolmakers arose to service it. For example, James Watt forced his machinists to specialize until they became expert at building just one thing. As they specialized, they specialized their tools too. Then Watt paid them to bring their sons to their workbenches, to train. Then he paid their sons to bring their sons. By then, enough of us were expert enough in enough different skills that, armed with our new tools, we could quickly churn out a precision-made steam engine. As demand for steam grew, so did demand for such specialists, and their new tools. New generations of toolmakers improved their skills, and their tools. So now we had engines, engine makers, engine-making tools, toolmakers who made those tools, and all were improving together. Engine building had gone autocatalytic.

By 1800 the first fruits of that new autocatalysis were already clear in Britain. That year, a British textile factory installed a 100-horsepower steam engine. It worked all day and all night, helping us make 226 times more cloth than before. By then, 84 cotton mills in Britain had the new steam engine. So did 31 coal mines, 12 waterworks, and many mills for salt, flour, wood, wool, iron, and steel. Britain alone already had about 2,000 steam engines. Then, as it began selling them overseas, they spread all over Europe. Excited, those of us with the means quickly improved the new tech. A few of us got more wealth, some of us got more exploited, and many of us got more clothed. In Britain, the cottage started turning into the slum tenement, the farm day into the work day. As the newly cheap goods spread and the profits rose, we improved our engines and tools and skills still faster. More and more of us got sucked in to solve any remaining problems. By then, we already knew enough science to gain further technical insight quickly. So we did. In short, we’d completed our first three industrial autocatalytic cycles—engine, skill, and tool improvement. They then fed on each other, just as had happened with food 11 millennia before.

That was already a big change, but an even bigger change was soon to follow. Under the influence of our autocatalytically improving tools, the steam engine got so small and well-made that we could put it on rails. The locomotive was born. As rail travel broadened and the new engines, skills, and tools, spread, British industrial production exploded. In 1800, thanks to Britain’s tree shortage, Russia and Sweden exported iron to Britain (smelting iron takes a lot of fuel). But by 1815, Britain exported over five times as much iron as it imported. By 1848, Britain made more iron than the rest of the world combined. Nor did it only make iron—from 1800 to 1900, many of its industries grew by a factor of between 10 and 30, and in some cases, much higher. The railroad pushed Britain straight off the industrial charts and into unknown territory.

Sheer British genius, you say? But no, the same thing went on to happen in our other industrializing countries. Wherever the railroad took root, production exploded. By 1850, the United States had already laid 9,000 miles of track. That was more rail than the rest of the world combined—including Britain. By 1865, it had 35,000 miles of track. By 1916, it had 249,433. Sheer Yankee ingenuity, maybe? Nope. By 1893, Germany produced more steel than Britain did. By 1914, it doubled British steel production. France, the Netherlands, and others all took off too. Sheer European genius perhaps? No again. The same thing happened in Japan starting in 1872, then in other countries in the next century.

The steam engine is thus the key to the first stage of our switch to industry. It started three autocatalytic improvement cycles—in engines, skills, tools—and those triggered our first stage of industry. But had that alone happened, it might well have petered out in a generation. By 1830 or so we might well have stalled out with cheaper clothes and deeper mines, but that might have been about all. The invention of the train then led to our second stage of industry. It created a whole network of catalytic cycles, and that’s what mostly drove our huge shift away from farming. By 1830 the train started to link places into a network. They started working together. Together they then made things that simply weren’t makeable before. In time, they made things that weren’t even thinkable before.

Here’s how it worked. An autocatalytic reaction is simple: two or more things react together to make something, plus more of the reaction’s own catalyst. But that’s just a special case of a more general process, where many things might react together. Instead of just one reaction, there could be a whole set—a reaction network. Each reaction in that network could make catalysts that other reactions in the same network need. For example, steam-powered water pumps need coal for fuel. You can get that coal by digging coal mines. But water pumps also help you dig those mines without drowning. So steam pumps not only need coal, but by their action they help get coal. That’s an autocatalytic cycle, but all it’ll give you is piles of steam pumps and heaps of coal. Similarly, steam-powered water pumps are made with iron. So stick a pump in an iron mine and you get another autocatalytic cycle. All you’ll get is more steam pumps plus tons of iron. However, each mine needs things that the other makes. The iron mine needs coal to fuel its pumps. The coal mine needs iron to build its pumps. When you link them with railroads, both mines take off. Plus, the railroad that now links them needs iron to make its rails, and its trains need coal to move. So the railroad takes off too. When linked, the mines fuel each other, they also fuel the link between them, and the link between them in turn fuels them.

That’s already a larger process than mere autocatalysis. But now add factories. They can make rails if they have iron—and coal to smelt iron—and railroads to bring them both. So with railroads to link everything, the factories can burn coal to smelt iron to make rails, which grows railroads, which link more factories to more mines. So factories spread, as do railroads, and mines. Factories can also use coal and iron to make machinery. That machinery might be anything at all, including locomotives. So factories catalyze locomotives. Locomotives catalyze railroads. Railroads catalyze mines. Mines catalyze factories, and so on. So when railroads link all those parts into a network, you get more factories, more locomotives, more railroads, more iron, more coal, and more machinery. Each part catalyzes all the others. All the parts together form a single, self-stimulating reaction network.

As usual, that kind of networking isn’t unique to us. Biochemists might call it a synergetic (‘jointly self-stimulating’) network. It’s more than a single autocatalytic (‘self-stimulating’) reaction. It’s many co-catalyzing reactions linked together. All happen together, with each stimulating the others. Together they form one synergetic reaction network. Such a network is like one machine that just goes on working, as if by itself. That’s why our switch to industry was such a vast phase change for our species, and that’s why it happened so immensely fast wherever conditions were right for it.

As a sign of just how fast our industrial reaction network knit itself together, British railroads created the idea of time zones. They standardized time zones in 1847, just 17 years after the first commercial railroads there. North German railroads standardized in 1874. Swedish ones in 1879. Those in the United States in 1883—just 14 years after the first transcontinental railroad there. After millennia of staying essentially the same, suddenly we were in motion.

Canals, steamboats, and steamships, then later trucks and planes, and today phones and computers, catalyzed the same sorts of changes. They too linked people and places that could benefit each other. Make beer here and bread there and with a steamship linking you, you can trade beer for bread cheap enough and fast enough for it to pay. Each of you can then specialize, doing what you do best. Both beer and bread get cheaper and better made. But not just economics changed; politics may have too. For example, without the railroad, the United States might well have been disunited by geography into separate nations by 1900. There may have been military effects as well. Without the steamship, all Britain’s remaining colonies might have gone their own way far faster than they in fact did. As all those network links established themselves, all our lives changed.

They didn’t change easily though. Our switch from farming to industry was just as painful as our switch from foraging to farming. The first time around we got broken teeth, stunted growth, and more disease. This time around we lost fingers, eyes, limbs, lives putting the new synergetic network in place. Our new machines, especially early on, needed muscles to build. Factories, many of them, were hard on us. Mines were even harder. Railroads wiped out whole villages. The network that those parts then formed ripped apart whole ways of life, causing much fear and distress as the ground shifted under our feet. Building that network’s parts also took planning and effort. A factory didn’t simply happen. A mine didn’t dig itself. Many of us also resisted creation of the network’s parts. Yet even with all that, we still didn’t plan the synergetic network that those parts then formed anymore than we planned the long-term network changes that would come after our first steps into farming 11,000 years ago. We built the network’s parts, but we didn’t foresee the network that they would form. We didn’t plan it; and once it existed, we didn’t control it either. In a strong sense, it ran itself. It still does.

Synergy doesn’t merely explain the immense speed of our industrial phase change, it also explains why we didn’t change for millennia before it. For all that time we were trapped in a synergetic network based on farming. A synergetic network is like a massive flywheel. Getting it to spin is hard. Changing the angle of its spin is hard. Stopping it from spinning is hard. But while it spins, it makes everything else we might want to do far easier—just as long as what we want to do fits into how it works. As we build new things we become more capable of building more new things—but only those things that catalytically fit with the synergetic reaction network we’ve already built. In sum, by about 1830 a metronome began to beat that we’d never heard before. It was the first thready pulse of a growing industrial age. That synergy is the heart that still thumps, unnoticed today, at the base of all our industrial nations. And that synergy, too, is largely what last changed our largest, and oldest, division of labor—that between male and female.

Rebirth

“It is well known how difficult it is for poor inventors to obtain money to aid them in making experiments. People, generally, would much rather invest in lottery tickets.” So said the main investor in Isaac Singer’s invention, the first practical sewing machine. Then he handed over the sum in question—$40. That money, given to Singer in Boston in 1850, was to make him a millionaire in a time when laborers earned $1 a day. That same $40 had other effects too. For one thing, it helped change the lives of millions of women. Singer’s machine, and many other new tools, restitched the fabric of women’s lives. But not everyone wished that, least of all Singer. A brash, semi-literate, wife-beating bigamist, he ended up with at least five wives and at least 24 kids. He was once sued for alimony by seven women at once. His attitude, and that of many men in 1850 or before, whether in the United States, Britain, or anywhere else, was that women were best when supine and silent.

Billions of women around the world today lead lives that Singer couldn’t imagine. But why did we keep to one way of life for thousands of years then suddenly change? One common story today is that our lives changed because a bunch of women, and a few men, pushed for change. But consider just how many things had to change before women’s (or men’s) lives could change a lot. For example, in the United States it wasn’t enough simply for women to be paid money, not compliments, for their work. Being paid wouldn’t have made any difference unless they also controlled their own income. They didn’t. By law, their husbands or fathers did. Women in the United States also needed to learn to read to get many jobs—teaching, for example, or nursing. So they had to be schooled. Thus they needed practical ways to get to school. That transport also needed to be cheap—and buggies mostly weren’t. They also had to be able to travel alone more safely. Plus, they needed more control over their time. So they needed at least some time off from childcare. Which means daycare must exist—and it must be affordable. They also needed more control over their own bodies so that they weren’t always pregnant. It’s a long list. Changes in female labor weren’t a simple matter of merely passing a law. Why then did so many of those constraints change for so many women just in the past two centuries? A look at the changes that the United States went though during the nineteenth century shows how labor lives changed there.

Around 1800 in the United States women’s lives had barely changed for centuries. They had only two main avenues out of the home: domestic service and paid sex. Few had even those options. Most were stuck down on the farm. They made their family’s clothes and linens—including bed, kitchen, and bath linens, plus curtains and tablecloths. (Their men made the shoes; the village hatter made the hats.) They made the soap and candles and preserves. They made the bread and cakes and pastries. They made the cornmeal and salted the pork. They did the laundry, housework, and childcare. For none of that were they paid. They also rarely traveled alone—it was unsafe. It was also costly and slow. (The 100-mile trip from Philadelphia to Baltimore costs $11. It took three days.) So they were, and had to be, self-sufficient. When they did trade, it was for salt, sugar, tea, coffee, whiskey, spices, ribbons, and trinkets. So they would often spend three months at a time without seeing a new face. Many also couldn’t read. Learning how was considered both indelicate and irreligous. And, as in ages past, their local church was still their calendar and their news source. It was also the decider of when, how, and how much, they must reproduce. Many married at 15 or before; then they got pregnant every two years or so until menopause. Of all their births, many would die—only about seven or eight would survive. And on average, they died, exhausted, before 40.

By 1820 nothing had changed for women there, but the country itself was changing fast. In just one generation, the traditional fear of change had largely vanished because the country was expanding fast. European nations had recently stopped supplying natives with guns. With the natives disarmed, the settlers pushed west, killing them and gobbling land. In just nine years the number of states had jumped by over a third. Natives were dying left and right and virgin land cost $1.25 an acre. Every free-born white, whether male or female, felt themselves the equal of anybody. Population was swelling by 30 to 35 percent every decade. Even at that furious pace, only 9.6 million census-counted people (that is, whites and their black property) then lived in the United States. Britain had 21 million. The infant country was land-rich, labor-poor, and skilled-labor-even-poorer. Europe was land-poor and labor-rich. Its hereditary aristocracy held most of the land, and its nearly hereditary artisans held most of the skills. Landless and unskilled immigrants had fled that world to make a new world. So the laws of the new land, especially those governing inheritance and political power, worked against both aristocracy and guilds. It thus astounded rich European visitors that many white girls in the United States saw being a servant as degrading. They preferred to work half-naked in mills for less money. That attitude especially puzzled visitors because the new nation still held nearly a million slaves, plus it had native blood wet on its hands. But perhaps that was why. European visitors also puzzled over the young republic’s topsy-turvy attitude to age. In the past 20 years alone, anything old had become suspect. Anything new was now, if not embraced, at least not smothered right away.

That puzzling attitude extended to new machines as well. Even when machines cost more than hand labor, they were still prized. European aristos, used to a world teeming with peons, couldn’t fathom a frontier land, where labor was scarce. Even when you could hire it, you couldn’t rely on it. Singer, for instance, like many boys in his time, left home at 13. He kept moving for the next 26 years. Like him, most white men were on the move, and women followed their men. Whites were stabbing west into an expanding native-free vacuum. It was the usual story: farmer and herder migration followed by hunter and gatherer slaughter. The same slaughter was happening at about the same time for about the same reasons in Russia, Australia, and South America. The same had happened in Africa around 3,000 years before, when Bantu farmers and herders, armed with cows and iron, first expanded south and east against Khoisan hunters and gatherers armed with stone and wood. The Bantu swallowed the Khoisan, and most of sub-Saharan Africa, into farmerhood. This time around though, our tools had changed. So a wave of machines followed the wave of new farmers and herders. And those machines made labor more reliable. In the nineteenth century, and for the first time ever, machine labor was becoming more reliable than our own. A similar change in reliability had happened with our food production 11,000 years before.

By 1830 in the United States, women’s lives there were still much the same. Mainly they were still unpaid homemakers and unlettered baby-makers, supine and silent. At the time, only six percent of the new nation lived in cities—and calling them ‘cities’ stretches the current meaning of the term. In the few cities, older single women, mostly widows, kept shops or boarding houses. Spinsters took in washing; became seamstresses, cooks, or maids; lived with relatives; or rented their bodies. The more educated became governesses. Genteel urban females lived under the same rules. The only difference was that their menfolk could afford slaves or servants. They were also taught to read, draw, and sing—but only to make them more marriageable. Even with a severe labor shortage, the idea of paying most women to work was still too alien to imagine—and of course paying slaves, male or female, was unthinkable. Nor did women, slave or not, expect to be paid. Nor did they expect to have any control over their lives. If married, they were property of their husbands. If single, they were property of their fathers, uncles, brothers. If enslaved, they were property of their owners. If native, they were fleeing the invaders, or trying to find some way to survive with them. And many women, whether single or married, slave or free, white or native, still couldn’t read.

But that didn’t make the United States unusual. Britain, and the rest of Eurasia, wasn’t that different, except for being more urban. That pattern had held for millennia. For example, in seventeenth-century England, neither of Shakespeare’s daughters could read. The pattern wasn’t uniform though. Small newly rich places could be different. For instance, in fourteenth-century Florence, Dante pined for the good old days—back before rich Florentine women grew so uppity. Mostly though, wherever the plow had touched down women had fallen over, supine and silent. Thus, nineteenth-century British women were, by law, inferior to men. Married women didn’t even exist, legally. They were home-bound, unable to vote, barely allowed to trade. They also had to be widows before they could control their own property. Outside of brothels and nunneries, half of us in 1830, in the United States, Britain, and everywhere else, were wards of the other half, not counting slaves and natives. But also by 1830, seven factories in Pittsburgh churned out 100 steam engines a year.

By 1840 the railroad and the steamboat had arrived and the factory was spreading. Things were now starting to change for women—unmarried, white, urban, literate women anyway. They were taking paying jobs—mostly in sweatshops. They could take those jobs because the expanding country had by then killed, exiled, or swallowed enough natives to bloat west and discover the coal and iron of Pennsylvania. It had also discovered the vast wheat-growing capacity of the ‘northwest.’ One day that would come to be known as the midwest, but at the time it was the frontier. Natives were still trying to fight whites. But whites had guns and smallpox and numbers. Natives had bows and arrows and no chance. As they died, and the Conestoga wagons rumbled west—manifesting their destiny—eastern towns stopped being self-sufficient. With the railroad, regions began to specialize. Heavy industry fled to Pittsburgh. Farming made off for Ohio. Light industry remained in New England (where it had started back in 1790). New England was ideal for industry because it sat on the river fall line, which gave it the waterpower to run its waterwheels. At the time, the young nation had only about 5,000 steam engines, so river power was still vital. New England also had skilled labor and loads of people. So the sweatshops spread. Then came massive European immigration as transatlantic steamship service started. The sweatshops spread still more. More women got jobs.

All that started happening then because the new railroads and canals linked everything. So labor began to divide and specialize. For example, a swampy fort smelling of onions in the middle of nowhere started calling itself Chicago. It rapidly grew into a transport hub—first by water, then by rail (and today, by air). With the new regional specialization, droves of New England girls were no longer needed on the farms. They went to work in the new textile mills. Soon they made up nine-tenths of the workers—and factory owners loved them. They weren’t violent as men are. They wouldn’t complain as men would. They couldn’t leave town as men did. They also took less—$1.25 a week plus bed and board was common. Their working day was 12 to 14 hours long, six days a week. Sometimes the job got so hard that even they went on strike. But they had no leverage. Owners simply replaced them from an overflowing tide of immigrant girls. By 1848, a rich lawyer’s wife named Elizabeth Cady Stanton thought it was time for a change. She organized the first women’s rights convention in the United States. She wanted to vote.

By 1860, the nation grew more populous than Britain. Singer’s sewing machine was then ten years old. The New York Times boomed that it was the “best boon to woman in the nineteenth century.” Maybe that was true for a few rich urban women, but general adoption was still low. Two years before, of over 40,000 seamstresses in New York at the time, at most 3,000 had found work the previous winter. All of them stitched by hand. None wanted sewing machines. Even if one wanted a machine, she couldn’t afford it. Even had the machines been cheap and easy to use, women wouldn’t use any machine. That was men’s work. Besides, they thought, men would only offer them low-paying work that no machine could yet do. They were right, too. For instance, at the time Bridgeport, Connecticut, employed a little over a thousand women. Of them, a thousand sewed shirts; twenty-nine made boots; nine made lace; seven made carriages; six made hoop-skirts; and three made saddle parts. None used the latest machines.

Singer’s company helped change that. It came up with the installment plan, a piece of financial engineering whose importance we today rarely notice. After opening the first mass-production factory not devoted to guns, it cost the company $10 to make a sewing machine. They charged $50 for it, but you only needed $5 to bring it home. In 1860 the company sold 13,000. By 1880 it would sell half a million worldwide. Mass production exploded as everyone bought on credit. That expanding credit market then locked into the rest of the growing industrial cascade, becoming just another synergetically linked part while also fueling the whole network still more. Suddenly it was the biggest boom market in the history of the world. Goods gushed out of the growing synergetic network at ever falling cost. Plus, with the new cheap and fast steamships, some of those goods came from far away. Mass trade was going global. Every country involved in it specialized madly as each hooked itself into the growing industrial network. For instance, British industrial cities used machines and cheap labor to make finished cotton goods to sell to the United States after white Americans had used black slaves to pick raw cotton. At the time the United States still had 3.9 million slaves. That slave-machine trade cycle sucked yet more white, urban women out of the home.

Meanwhile, 73,000 mechanical reapers were already cutting 70 percent of the corn in midwestern fields. Also, as the railroad puffed west, bison slaughter stepped up. By the 1880s nearly all would be dead. The plains natives would have nothing to eat, wear, or live in. So even when they weren’t being massacred or exiled, they died and died. As the railroads steamed on, dragging a skein of raw new towns behind them, and credit markets expanded, and mass-produced harvesting machines cheapened and spread, grain shipments shot up. In 1838 Chicago had shipped 78 bushels of corn. By 1860 it was shipping 31 million. By century’s end the United States alone would already produce 29 percent of our entire supply of wheat. By then, Chicago would become the fifth largest city in the entire world.

As the natives kept dying, and the trains and steamships kept mushrooming, and the cities kept exploding, newly urban women’s lives kept changing. They left home to earn money, which helped push them into literacy. In big cities the new gaslight made the streets safer at night, which in turn made evening classes possible. Women began to learn to read. Once many could read, cheap steam-printed newspapers and a cheap and swift steam-powered postal system helped them organize. The railroad also helped them move about relatively safely, cheaply, and quickly. It also fed the cities still more as it made leaving the farm easier and cheaper. Those growing cities then shortened the distances women had to travel. Instead of never seeing a strange face for months at a time, many women were now urban. They could now meet each other and share their grievances.

Women’s labor options were changing fast now, but their reproductive options, and thus the age-old constraints on their labor lives, were still much as they had been for millennia. Then in 1861 the New York Times carried the first ad for mass-produced rubber condoms. By 1873 a scandalized government had banned all birth-control ads, aids, and books. It needn’t have bothered. Three in four census-counted women were still rural. Further, there were vast amounts of land still to be stolen out west. The young nation was still killing natives and gobbling land, and machines were still costly, so farm labor was still valuable. So the cost of babies relative to their future labor value was still low. Plus child deaths were still high, so most women still made plenty of them.

By 1880 though, with half the still-exploding population employed non-rurally, the New York branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association was just about to buy six of the then-new type-writers. It planned to teach eight women to type. Uproar followed. Letting women replace male type-writers would lower wages. It would displace men. It would loosen morals. It would destroy the family. White women, barred from commerce, were more virtuous because they kept out of odious money matters. Of course, most black and native women were already working, but they didn’t count. They didn’t matter anyway because whites wouldn’t educate them enough to do clerical work anyway, so the argument continued to ignore them. Many whites, both men and women, argued that because white women were innately virtuous, they must be kept away from the defilement of commerce. Commerce wasn’t for them. Religious doctrine said as much too. Besides, their frail bodies couldn’t hold up under the strain of office work. They belonged in the home.

But within six years, 60,000 women would become type-writers. The Type-Writer Girl then became an icon for literate women in both Britain and the United States. The new steam-printed magazines and newspapers used her in advertising aimed at adventurous women searching for an independence. Then the same thing happened with shorthand schools. In the cities, office work then became the new thing. The new pressures also forced kids off the farms and out of the factories. They got stuffed into schools. Like their mothers, they needed to prepare for the new industrial demands. They had to learn to read, for a start. That then freed women from childcare and created demand for teachers. Men now decided that it was okay for women to be paid to teach, but they still barred most women from higher education. So, white urban literate women now had another paid-labor option besides harlotry, domestic service, factory work, and office work—they could become teachers, nurses, and librarians.

Our changing division of labor was now rapidly emptying the countryside. The growing synergetic vortex sucked everyone, white, black, and native, into the new towns nucleating around the railway lines and factories. Women in the newly big cities now had many ways out of the house. For millennia, synergetic agrarian needs had forced women all over the world into baby-making—and into home food and clothing production, the two jobs that best fit with child watching. In Sumeria 5,000 years ago, it was spinning thread and weaving—and milling flour and cooking. Nothing much had changed since. But such tasks now mattered far less. Our new synergetic cycle was pumping out mass-produced goods in vast peristaltic waves. Machines were making it cheaper to buy clothes rather than make them at home. Clothes got so cheap that many of us could even afford more than one set. Our old agrarian synergetic network was crumbling as an industrial synergetic network replaced it.

By 1890, 62 million people lived in the United States—nearly double Britain’s 32 million. And 35 percent of them were urban. As cities grew, wages rose as machines spread and profits rose. As new sewers spread in the cities, mortality fell. Overall health rose. From 1890 to 1930 average life expectancy rose by about 16 years. Over the same period, average heights also rose by about 2.4 inches. Child deaths fell. As urban concentration rose, urban education rose with it, and as that rose, the cost of kids relative to their labor value also rose. Making loads of babies began to make less economic sense. Many more would survive than before, plus they’d each cost more to raise. For urban white women their average number of children dropped to about three. The means to prevent them, or to abort, also cheapened and broadened, especially in the increasingly literate cities. The total fertility rate for married white women plunged 58.7 percent from 1800 to 1920.

Also by 1890, the native population had plummeted from perhaps five million to about a quarter million. That is, 19 out of every 20 were dead. Native fertility rates before 1890 are unknown; however after that date they were high, yet native mortality rates were so high that the native population barely changed. From 1890 it took 70 years, until 1960, to double. Black rates before 1850 are also unknown. After 1850, they too were higher than white rates, but they also fell as white rates did. However, even today they’re still higher than white rates. Black infant mortality was also far higher and still is higher today. Black life expectancy is also still lower today. Today, urban-rural differences in the United States have vanished. Black-white and native-white differences still haven’t. In the rich world today it’s still common to say “women’s lives” and really only mean “white women’s lives.”

The changes for white women by 1890 were vast but not every white woman was pleased. Freed of one corset by our new tools, she now had new choices, but she was also laced into new corsets, for she also had new pressures. Aside from a handful of successful female writers, singers, and actors, most working white women were young, single, urban immigrants. Most saw their low-paying jobs only as ways to mark time until they could get married and stop getting paid. Since 1860 in the United States, only about one woman in three was being paid for her labor. Nearly all were both unmarried and non-white. From 1890 to 1980, many more married, non-white women had paying jobs than married white ones did. For married white women in 1890, just 2.5 percent worked for money. It took until 1950 before that reached even 20 percent. By 1990, it was still only about 59 percent. The overall proportion of paid women stayed roughly constant for about a century. It rose to 43 percent only by 1970. By 2004 it was still only 59 percent.

In sum, all through the nineteenth century, and in all our industrializing nations, the sexual, reproductive, and labor lives of the child-bearing half of our species changed. As they changed, politics changed. Women’s groups grew as child deaths fell. Women gained political power, then the vote. In Britain, the vote came to women over 30 in 1918. In the United States, it came to literate (that is, mainly rich and white) women in 1920. That same year, the United States became half-urban. Today, our species as a whole has just became half-urban, and most of our female half can now vote—legally, at least. But our phase change isn’t over yet. As of 2007, Saudi Arabian women still can’t vote. They also can’t drive their own cars. And they’re responsible for any accidents their male drivers caused. Also as of 2007, men in Alabama, Georgia, and Texas can buy erection-enhancer drugs but women can’t legally buy vibrators. Also, a few richer families are already outsourcing baby-making. As with food machines, we might one day have baby machines, just as we might one day have food machines. But it’ll be a long time, if ever, before most baby-making moves to specialists and factories, the way that clothes-making, food-making, childcare, teaching, and nursing once did. Our sex differences are likely to persist for a long time to come.

Today, despite our many changes, many sex differences remain. For example, in 2007 in the United States women make up 28 percent of White House senior aides. They’re 24 percent of the active federal judiciary. They’re 15 percent of Congress, and 14 percent of the Senate. They’re also 14 percent of the half-million strong active duty force in the uniformed services. And of the 39 active duty four-star officers, zero are female. Across the globe in 2007, of our 758 Nobel Prize winners, 33 are female. Of our 793 billionaires with publicly traded fortunes, 78 are female. Of those, six are self-made; all others married or inherited wealth. Of our 500 largest companies, seven have female CEOs. Of our 100 richest countries, three have female elected heads of state. The numbers are still small, but two centuries ago they were all zero. Had Isaac Singer, who died in 1875, lived to see how women’s lives would change, he would’ve been as surprised as if a butterfly had pulled a knife on him.

Critical Mass

The first two stages of our industrial revolution led to massive changes in our labor lives. We intended neither of them. Yet that’s not how we usually see our group physics. Typically, we see a world dominated by intention, a world made by a series of mostly planned changes leading to our lives today. Which works fine only as long as we don’t ask questions about timing. Why didn’t we stop chattel slavery millennia ago? Why didn’t we build steam engines millennia ago? Why didn’t we pay women for their work millennia ago?

To answer such timing questions, while still preserving intention, we might simply assume that we used to be stupid, or callous, or selfish, then, somehow, we changed. But while such stories might explain our changes after they happen, they don’t explain why we changed when we did and not before. So we save them by further assuming that a hero triggered the otherwise mysterious change. Thus we could, for instance, explain why women’s lives didn’t change for millennia by saying that our species had to wait all that time for the right woman to be born. She then showed us the error of our ways.

But to accept such a hero story, we must assume yet more. We must, for instance, assume that all our male ancestors were ruthless. We must also assume that all our female ancestors were cowed by that ruthlessness—until the birth of our brave hero. Such a story could work. But what about all our groups that still limit women’s choices today? Many do. Women in Afghanistan, for example, lead far different lives than women in Iceland. Why? To answer that we then assume that it’s not because of the synergetic labor network that they live with, but because of something wrong with them. Carrying the logic yet further, we must then implicitly assume that women who still put up with limits today must be brainwashed monkeys.

Suppose all that were true. Why did the birth of an Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1815 lead to change while the birth of an Anne Hutchinson in 1591 or a Mary Wollstonecraft in 1759 didn’t? Why didn’t the birth of Pharaoh Hatshepsut change Egyptian women’s lives 3,500 years ago? Why didn’t Empress Wu change women’s lives in China? Or Elizabeth I in England? Or Catherine the Great in Russia? And why do women today lead different lives in our industrial nations versus our non-industrial ones? On top of everything else, must we also assume that non-industrial women are stupid?

By papering together more and yet more such assumptions we could ‘explain’ anything that happens to us as intentional. But if we abandon intentionality, it’s easier to see that for any big thing to change a lot of smaller things first have to change and then fall into synergy. Given any set of constraints, each of our groups builds itself into a stable synergetic network with that set of constraints fixed in synergetic stone. Inertia locks them in place because all the network’s parts make catalysts for all its other parts. Thus, each part constrains how every other part can change. Woman-as-baby-maker is the linchpin of every synergetic network that we built around farming thousands of years ago. Farming couldn’t work without it. Whether we farmed corn and beans in America, millet and sorghum in Africa, soy and rice in China, or wheat and rye in Europe made no difference. In Akkadian, a language we spoke at least 4,300 years ago, the word meaning ‘owner,’ ‘master,’ or ‘lord’ was bêlu. It denoted ‘husband.’ Hebrew today has the same word, ba’al. In Arabic, it’s ba’l. The Phoenician b’l, the Syrian ba’la, the Ugaritic b’l were the same. For millennia, men were owners; women were owned. For millennia, women’s lives didn’t change. But that wasn’t because we didn’t have the right person. It was because we didn’t have the right conditions in which such a person might act.

It’s the same when we look at steam engines, railroads, sewing machines, installment plans, or any other tool or idea that spread in the nineteenth century. Our mistake comes when, instead of looking at our swarm, we look at various individuals. We pick someone who helped the new tool or idea along then declare that it came to be because they were especially smart, hardworking, or motivated. That’s such a common reasoning error it even has a name: base-rate fallacy. In this case, it means ignoring all of us, for millennia before, who were also especially smart, hardworking, and motivated.

For instance, must we assume that those of us in ancient Rome didn’t invent a steam engine because we were too stupid to build one? Or that we were too selfish to care about slave welfare? Conversely, must we assume that since Singer’s invention changed women’s lives that he therefore intended its effects? Must we assume that because Watt’s invention helped change chattel slavery that he must have intended that? (In fact, Watt didn’t like slavery. But he did business with slave owners just as with anyone else. His own father and brother were slave traders. Until recently, slavery was part of normal business practice.)

In general, instead of trying to figure out how our swarm behaves across time we usually prefer to start from some particular end then work backward. Missing the big network picture, we tell stories about our changes only after we’ve made them. Then we focus only on those of us who seemed vital just before the change happened. That’s true whether we base the story on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Britain, capitalism, or the steam engine. We can make, and have made, any one of them into heroes.

But if our usual hero stories don’t explain much, then what other big thing can alone explain the timings of our big changes? Perhaps that’s the problem. It’s the wrong question. Think of a big hourglass with such a tiny waist that only one sand grain at a time can fall through. Over time, the sand piles up on the bottom. Usually the next grain simply adds to the pile. Less often, it starts a small avalanche of grains. Every so often, it triggers a big avalanche. Many of the grains in the pile then change position.

When we plot the sizes of all those small and big avalanches on a graph, a mathematician recognizes the shape as a power law. That is, the most frequent avalanches are tiny—they affect only a few grains. One grain might tumble into another, which sets off another, which hits another, but that last one may be buttressed by many others, so the avalanche of change stops there. The next most frequent avalanches though affect as many grains as, perhaps, the square of that small number. The next most frequent affect the square of that, and so forth. Thus a few falling grains trigger huge avalanches, which affect many sand grains. Most falling grains appear to trigger nothing, but every grain matters. Aside from our few superbrights, our individual lives don’t seem to amount to much. But that’s wrong. Each of our lives affects our swarm. Even our smallest actions change it. Buy coffee instead of tea today and tomorrow the world is different. Each of our actions binds us ever more tightly into an ever denser reaction network, in unwitting preparation for the next falling grain.

The core question about how we change, then, is this: Can all sand grains be about the same size even though the pile they form has big avalanches now and then? Or does the existence of big avalanches require that sand grain size vary widely? For example, did our invention of an efficient steam engine require an earlier big change? (That is, a big sand grain.) Did our abolition of chattel slavery require the same? How about women getting the vote? We tend to assume that every time we have a big change, it’s because of the actions of a big sand grain (a hero, a genius, a leader). But big avalanches in a growing sand pile will happen whether or not sand grains differ in size. Big avalanches are no different than small ones; they’re merely rarer. So when trying to explain the existence of big avalanches, we needn’t assume that sand grain size matters.

However, that needn’t mean that all sand grains are necessarily the same size either. It could still be that some are bigger. We do differ. Some of us are simply more capable than others. But how much more? Are the differences between us as big as that between a grain and a boulder? If so, we could salvage our ‘big effects need big causes’ assumption. But all avalanches, big or small, can be triggered by the same small change: one new falling grain. What makes the difference between a big avalanche and a small one isn’t so much the size of the next falling grain, but the intricate network of links between grains already in the pile when that new grain hits. All of us together build that network.

That sand-pile analogy works for other things besides us, too. The railroad, the sewing machine, the installment plan, and all our other new nineteenth-century tools, affected us deeply. They didn’t merely change our physical landscape. They didn’t only induce some behaviors and deter others. They also changed our mental landscape. Once their presence started to change many of our most basic facts of life—like how fast we could travel, or how much food we could grow—we started to ask ourselves about other of our basic facts of life.

Britain is a good example. After 1800, all sorts of radicals there pushed for political change. That was partly because of the French Revolution in 1792, and the Napoleonic wars that followed. But it was also because of the steam engine’s autocatalytic effects on goods, labor, transport, and living conditions. Everyone could see that they were living in a time of great change. Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that Britain, our first industrial country, was also our first country to turn from legal slavery permanently (in 1834). Of course, the steam engine alone can hardly be the sole cause of that abolition. That would just be another hero story, except with a machine instead of a person. The train, for example, was a crucial piece of technology behind enslavement in Germany over a century later. But perhaps chattel slavery didn’t begin to end when it did simply because some hero woke up one Thursday morning and told us that it was wrong. We had other options, physical and mental, thrust on us, then we put away chattel slavery once we found that we could manage without it—and maybe sleep better at night, too.

Similarly, mass production had such explosive results in the United States because the country was primed for it. It wouldn’t have happened there as fast as it did had the political system there not first deterred guilds and a hereditary aristocracy. Also, had the distances—and thus transport needs, and thus pressures for the railroad—been far smaller, there wouldn’t have been as much need for fast transport. Machines would also have grown more slowly there if Pennsylvania’s mineral resources hadn’t existed. Or if Ohio wasn’t such a great place to grow wheat. Or had its settlers not committed genocide. Had they not killed 95 percent of the natives, the infant country couldn’t have expanded as fast as it did. Factories and railroads then wouldn’t have spread as fast as they did. So mass production wouldn’t have happened as fast as it did. And that in turn hastened many other things there, including the vote for women and slavery’s abolition. Did the settlers intend that, thus somehow excusing their genocide?

So if you ask why women in the United States in the nineteenth century started taking paying jobs, a swarm-based answer might have nothing to do with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Or even women in general. It was because internecine war in Europe led to a decline in the weapons reaching natives. Armed with bows and arrows but facing guns, they nearly died as a people. At the same time, the steam engine got small enough to be put on rails, and so it went. Thus, the lives that industrial women lead today are a function of recent genocide, of centuries-old political decisions made for completely different reasons, of how much coal formed in the mountains of Pennsylvania millions of years ago. Many things had to come together in a network to make the country so machine-welcoming.

When we focus on individuals and look for intention behind everything that happens, we miss a much bigger picture. We’re all part of a swarm, a giant network evolving in time. That network includes our tools. Everything we make or do, or that the world does, changes that swarm. Steam engines can aid factories but also sweatshops. Cars can destroy buggy whips and manure sweepers. They can induce gas stations, suburbs, and meter maids. That also works for our institutions and everything else we live with or invent. Banks can induce both big projects and bankrobbers. Polio can induce an iron lung industry. A polio vaccine can later destroy it. A volcano can help cholera spread; new statistical data can stop its spread. When we add anything new to our network, whether it’s a new baby, a new idea, a new tool, a new genocide—or our world adds something (a climate change, a disease, a volcano)—it catalyzes some of the reactions already in the network. Each new thing inhibits or induces—catalyzes—the next possible thing.

Our swarm organizes itself to a critical state where many grains are linked and teetering on the brink of change. It builds potential for future changes as it adds more links among the grains already there. In a manner of speaking, our swarm itself is always striving to reach critical mass. Then once it does, we phase change. Thus, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a grain falling on our sand pile just when we as a species had already organized ourselves to critical mass. She came after a long series of ever denser links had prepared our pile so that the next falling grain of a particular type would trigger an avalanche of change. The same was true for James Watt. And William Wilberforce. And Abraham Lincoln.

But if that’s so, why then do most of our popular stories present our changes in terms of heroes (whether person or nation or machine or creed)? Why do they assume intention behind all our changes? Why do they explain history as if we were all along striving for some goal and that’s why we achieved it?

A recent civil rights push in our industrial countries might explain why. It’s often said to have begun in the United States in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1st, 1955. On that day, one black woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her bus seat, or so the sound-bite version of the story goes. But while that was indeed the trigger, it wasn’t the cause. Many such triggers had existed before. Earlier that year, Claudette Colvin did the same thing that Aurelia Browder was to do two months later, and that Mary Ware was to do five months after that. Then Parks did the same six weeks after that. Those earlier sand grains mattered. They all changed our network, biasing it in different ways, preparing it for further changes. So did all the changes preceding them, going back centuries. Together they brought our network to critical mass, waiting for someone like Rosa Parks to put her foot down. Our usual folktales though, ignore all those failed trials and that long history. Instead they focus on the last person before a memorable change—the last falling grain before an avalanche. Why?

When we focus on the last grain we gain three emotionally important benefits. First off, our focus makes that last actor into a change-maker, a hero—someone we can admire and model our lives on. Also, by ignoring all earlier failed attempts we get to ignore all awkward questions about why they failed. Further, since a dramatic change follows soon after our hero acts, we also get to admire our nation, whichever one it happens to be. After all, doesn’t it at once allow changes that reduce injustice, or increase choice? (Or whatever else we wish to believe.) That helps keep our groups together—or to use far older words, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That three-ply comfort blanket works just as well if we later don’t like the changes that follow. All we have to do is turn the hero into a villain. Hitler personally gassed all those people, not us. Pol Pot personally pickaxed all those people in the back of the head, not us. Nor need any of that spin doctoring be conscious. It also needn’t be the result of some conspiracy among a few leaders who would otherwise be embarrassed. We all benefit. We get to live in an intended world. We get to explain everything surrounding us solely in terms of human will: We wanted X, so we made X happen. We never have to explain all the times we wanted X but didn’t get it, nor all the times we didn’t want X but still got it. Hero stories also make it easy to know who to blame and who to praise. Our whole system of law is based on that. Hero-history is thus nation-stabilizing history. It’s a magic mirror that lets us admire even our ugliest warts. Every time we ask: ‘Magic mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest species of all?’ we all get to answer: ‘Us!’

In the Grip of the Metal Hand

In terms of our labor lives, the currently richest fifth of our species recently went through a major phase change. It’s our single biggest change since we started farming millennia ago. Take the United States. A century ago, a year’s worth of food for an average family in that country had cost about 1,700 hours of work. Today it costs 260. Were it to keep falling at that rate, a century hence a family there could feed itself for a year with about 40 hours of work. In the last two centuries the country shifted from 95 percent rural to 75 percent urban. At the same time, its population jumped from 5 million to 300 million. In the last century its job market switched from one-quarter to three-quarters professional, managerial, clerical, and sales and service. Farmers, laborers, and servants, once the main job categories, each dwindled to almost nothing. For instance, in 2000 fewer than a million people in the United States listed their principal occupation as farmers. That’s 0.35 percent of the population. That percentage is still falling. In our rich countries as a whole, since 1800 the average amount of leisure time we have before we retire rose four-fold. Our average time spent retired rose five-fold. The proportion of us who live long enough to retire rose seven-fold. The autocatalytic and synergetic reaction network effects that grew up around the steam engine pushed us into that phase change. We didn’t plan it. Nor did we even foresee it. And many of us didn’t want it. (Some still don’t.) It happened anyway.

That labor phase change hasn’t yet ended. Half of us are still farmers. Today, many of us in the rich world don’t see that. So we worry about industry’s flight to poorer countries. We fear a future of economies centered on knowledge. There’s much talk of ‘hollowing out,’ of offshoring, of outsourcing, of automation. What will we make?, we wonder. But a century ago, our rich had a similar fear. It was about farming’s flight to poorer countries. Back then, those of us in the rich world feared a future of economies based on industry. We couldn’t imagine what it might be like. What will we eat?, we said. Back then, only 13 percent of our species was urban. Today, 50 percent is. Back then, nearly all of us, everywhere, lived on the land. A different future was unthinkable. Today, a future different from today’s world seems just as unthinkable. It’ll happen anyway.

Autocatalysis, phase change, reaction networks, and synergy didn’t only shape our past; they’re still at work today. They’re still changing our labor lives, still changing what we can think and do and be. Just as with the steam engine two centuries ago, today one large set of changes centers around the computer. Today’s global data network is now doing for the computer what railroads and steamships began to do for the steam engine back in the 1830s. It’s magnifying and reinforcing the computer’s effects. As a result, the computer is growing a synergetic network around itself. It’s now on a development spiral just as the steam engine once was, and for the same reasons. Just as the steam engine once did, it’ll one day hit a wall of economic and physical limits. Those limits will be dictated by the extent of our current knowledge of the world and the density and linking speed of our current network of digital tools. But by the time that synergetic network loses steam, our labor lives, and with them our economic, political, legal, and military lives, will once again have changed a lot.

Now, you might argue that computer performance must plateau. True. Thus, you might continue, computer-powered change must come to an end. Also true. But that won’t happen anytime soon. Changes powered by the steam engine didn’t end when we perfected large ones around 1800. They didn’t end when we made ones small enough to run on rails and stick on ships around 1830. They continued when we made the steam engine cheap and widespread around 1850. They continued when we replaced it with internal combustion engines around 1880—and electric motors around 1890. Even today, small changes continue in its direct descendants, the steam turbine and the Stirling engine. Today our eyes may glaze over when someone talks about the steam engine but that’s merely ignorance talking. It still matters.

Similarly, today’s solid-state chip performance might well peak by about 2020. By then it’ll have run up against the laws of physics and economics. Today’s fab plants, which make computer chips, already cost billions. But that won’t mean the end of computing. Big computers will switch to more exotic tech. Instead of using today’s flat chips, perhaps they’ll use three-dimensional ones. Instead of today’s racks of chips they may use supercooled parts. They’ll still be big and costly. But small computers will by then be so cheap and small that we’ll weave them into our shoes, glasses, contact lenses, clothing. They’ll be dirt cheap—literally. We’ll have billions more of them than today. And they’ll all be linked wirelessly. Any one of them will be able to call on the effort of many others, big and small. That’s when our next big labor changes will start.

Today we already have a lot of computers, but outside of our technoelite we still link them only about as well as we linked our coal and iron mines back in 1800. Even with our orbital comsats and fiberoptics and the like, when moving data around today most of us are still stuck on the equivalent of canals and muddy packhorse trails. We’re still missing two things vital for full synergy: railroads and factories. Today, despite much boasting of a world web, and even some brave talk of a global brain, we still have neither. At best, we now have a global folk-database. It’s the first rude beginnings of a global self-organizing memory. It can’t become a global brain until its parts interact with each other at speeds we can’t match. That can’t happen for a while yet.

Today, many of our computers worldwide are now physically part of a global network, but almost none of them yet act together to do things on their own. When it comes to group work, they’re still mostly just conduits, not conversants. However, our digital network will continue to spread, densify, and speed up, just as our railways once did. We’ll then grow our ‘digital railroad.’ Once in place, our resulting digital network will also cycle far faster than our industrial one did, since so much less has to change in the physical world. Thus, mental production will likely soon explode, just as physical production did once rails linked coal and iron. The digital cascade might go something like this: datamine the human brain to find new engineering ideas. Use those ideas to enhance computers. Use those enhanced computers to make new machinery. Use that machinery to build new computers. Use those computers to improve data exchange. Use those data exchanges to enhance computers. Use those enhanced computers to mingle more ideas to make more machinery to build more computers to datamine the human brain some more.

Now put that coming synergetic cycle together with our other network effects. By about 2040 or so we’ll have nearly stabilized at around nine billion. By then, most of us would be well-fed. And most of us would be urban. By then, our computers would be far stronger, cheaper, and more linked. Billions of us would each be able to afford thousands or millions of them. Most of our urban population, from Mexico City to Lhasa, would by then be a global digital hive. That’s billions of us, fed, urban, and online. Of course, by then our global network would likely have fractured along language lines. English might still be our most used network language, but Mandarin would also be popular, as would Hindi. Big chunks of southern Eurasia would by then have surged into industry. But digital translation would let many of us gossip and work and play together. Our computers would then finally have their ‘digital railroad.’

By then a new term may have entered our languages—metaconcert. It might denote how we behave when we swarm together to solve our problems. In constant touch with each other, and enhanced with ever better thinking aids, we might attack problems in ever larger, ever more organized metaconcerts. Millions of us might be working in concert across vast distances. Those transient metaconcerts might become our new ‘digital factories.’ Out of that new mental muscle will likely come new foods, new jobs, new tools. Such metaconcerts would be on-demand superbrights, called into being to solve a problem, then dissolved. We’d need them too, because we’ll also likely generate new ways to snoop, to manipulate, to kill. Everything we do would amplify and speed up. In the age of metaconcerts, there’d no longer be any difference between the superbright and the network, and we’d begin changing in near-realtime. Intelligence would by then be as tappable as electricity. It would be just one more production factor, like concrete or steel, except that year by year its price would keep falling as our digital network keeps growing and we fit into it better.

But our new ‘digital factories’ won’t end there. We’ll likely build real factories too. Except that we won’t run them. Robots will. As our digital tools grow, so will our physical tools. Our toolbase acts as a lever, a giant machine to turn our ideas into tangible things. As we now begin to deploy capable robots, our toolbase is starting to grow itself metal hands, feet—perhaps even brains. We’re cutting us out of the development cycle. Once we have cheap, smart, mobile robots, the distance between thought and device likely will drop ever more quickly. That new synergetic robotic cascade is also welding itself into place today. It might go something like this: build robots and robot factories and robot intelligences to give mobile robots smarts. Use those robots outside factories. Analyze their experiences. Put their distilled experiences back into the factories to make smarter and cheaper robots and robot factories and robot intelligences. Once that synergetic cycle closes, it’s robots for war, robots for labor, and robots for sex. But it’ll likely be a long time, if ever, before we have robots for reproduction. We’re doing all this but we’re not intending it. We’re gripped by a metal hand and because of it our rich are starting to leave our later middle ages. Meanwhile, our poorest will continue to be taken by night.