this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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That’s just America and the Industrial Revolution. A new tech emerges, not perfect but good for the times, and then the industry around it has enough profits to delay and deny better future tech from ever taking over. Kodak invented the digital camera then buried it to protect their film selling racket. Oil companies print money to destroy anything they don’t control, but refuse to become energy companies that sell modern renewables instead. If an oil company took their profits from back then and built a solar r&d department we’d have better tech today, and they would profit off it.
They went for the quick buck rather than sustainability and as the oil runs out and they start starving, they still buy politicians instead of investing in future viable tech. Idk if there’s a word for this, I’ve been calling them doorstop industries.
It's... really not restricted to that. Not even broadly.
... what do you think the pace of technology progress was like before the industrial revolution?
We talking antiquity, medieval, age of sail, or early modern? Because all of those have vastly different progress, for example the medieval period saw vast leaps in metallurgy and chemistry while antiquity was had a shit tonne of early mechanical engineering going on.
The point is that all of that pales to the pace of technological progress during and after the industrial revolution, which casts doubts on the uniqueness or efficacy of the narrative of 'industrialists are strangling technological progress'.