James Burke Connections, Ep. 1 "The Trigger Effect"

Years back I was introduced to a terrific BBC show called Connections with James Burke (1978). The first episode, available on YouTube [0], is all about the world's reliance on power and that within a short period of time we'd be catapulted back to the plow. [0] [VIDEO]

I highly recommend James Burke's Connections (the original series if this kind of thing interests you) [VIDEO]

For the uninitiated, Connections is a documentary series from the seventies exploring the interconnectedness of technology. In the first episode, titled "The Trigger Effect" [0], Burke shows that if electricity were taken away from us, we'd be sent back to the plow. It's a little dated (1978), but it's an excellent watch even today. [0] [VIDEO]

^^^ Thank you! ^^^ Came here to reccommend Connections by James Burke and glad to see someone else has mentioned it. It's a masterpiece of popular science production made better with the grainy film patina of the 70s and 80s. [VIDEO]

Connections is one of the greatest shows in television. The pilot episode is amazing, highlighting the problem with dependence on technology that we don't understand. "Never have so many people understood so little about so much." Even more true today. [VIDEO]

John Baez's blog has a series on how civilizations collapse, first looking at the Anasazi, and then how one might model it using agent-based modeling and also looking at general collapse through differential equations: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] James Burke is a science historian and BBC documentarian, and in his first episode of "Connections" a series on the nature of innovation, he talks about how fragile our complex infrastructure can be, and, much like this article, how hopeless individualist survival skills would be once we "leave our technological womb". [VIDEO] In his later series, After the Warming, a 1988 documentary which imagines what it would look like in 2050 if we failed to act on climate change (in which it predicted refugee crises, wars, hurricanes, mass flooding), and looks back on thousands of years of climate shaping civilizational rise and collapse, from the Ice Age to the Nabataeans to today and beyond. It gets most things scarily right, with the notable exception of failing to see Japanese economic bubble popping in 1991. [LINK] [LINK]

> " we're not going to stop being able to produce enough food to feed everyone in the US " The Great Depression? Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic? I'm sure there are modern examples as well. There may be a plentitude of food and other products but if the societal and economic structures that process it and get it to where it needs to be collapse, that food might as well be on the far side of the moon. And even producing that food is questionable. Modern production is reliant on mechanical and electronic systems nowadays, even farming. Without replacement parts and consumable supplies, everything rapidly grinds to a halt. We saw an example of this in the recent COVID-19 shortages; lack of packaging and other consumables from overseas blocked domestic production of products even when the actual content of the product was still available. Everything is interlinked today. Everything. Watch episode one of James Burke's excellent documentary "Connections" to get an idea of what occurs when that breaks down: [VIDEO]

I completely agree. For those who haven't experienced Connections-style history, four episodes are on YouTube: [VIDEO] My favorite is this one about proto-computers that came about due to the Black Death: [LINK]