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John Carter's avatar

The role of the rise of Islam in shutting down Mediterranean trade and thereby triggering the dark age is an interesting thread to pull. There's an argument that it had a deleterious effect on literacy. In classical antiquity something like 10% of the population was literate if I recall correctly, and the primary medium was papyrus which was cheap and available in large quantities. With the loss of Mediterranean trade to Islamic piracy Egyptian papyrus was no longer available in Europe. It was replaced by parchment, which, being made from animal skin, was far more expensive. This had a limiting effect on the quantity of books that could be produced, which in turn led to a collapse in literacy.

One can imagine something very similar happening today if e.g. the rare earth elements necessary to produce semiconductors became much harder to obtain. Information technology would abruptly become scarce, and the Internet would likely scale back dramatically, retreating from a household technology to an elite institutional technology, with a consequent widespread disappearance of programming skills - no point learning how to use a technology that isn't available.

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Fat Rabbit Iron's avatar

Interesting point about immigration and assimilation. I’ve thought my whole life that our modern non-assimilating immigration is categorically bad. But a less homogeneous society makes for a more decentralized society, so perhaps there are some positive unintended consequences.

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