Main Points

History is Now

The Industrial Era had opened with the rise of the middle class, and while it saw the fall of monarchies and aristocracies, the political situation grew increasingly more complicated. By the Mechanized Era, the middle class had been fractured by the power of the Industrial Revolution. The ability of machines to automate work and generate large profits for comparatively little effort gave business and factory owners phenomenal wealth. However, by reducing complexity it eliminated many high-wage jobs and replaced them with relatively few low-skill, low-wage positions. The result was millions thrown out of work or reduced to destitution on poor wages. While industrialization brought Britain to the peak of its power, arguably the first true global state, visitors wrote in horror of its social conditions, noting the destruction of the family unit, widespread disease and lack of sanitation in the slums that the lower classes were economically forced into, and the masses of amputees from factory accidents.

The complications were even more extreme for countries outside the European sphere of influence. These nations had not even lived through the preparatory phases which had given birth to this titanic shift. They not only had to struggle with the challenge of mechanization, but salvaging their cultural heritage, frequently while struggling against the legacy (or continued presence) of European colonialism.

Emergence of Mechanization

When the Industrial Revolution began, it was best defined by the ability to use machines to do work. Its specific purpose had been to replace human beings. When a businessman considered machines he could build, he asked the question "What would I ask a man to do, that I could have a machine do instead?" However, the gradual growth of larger and larger machines throughout the era led to larger and larger corporations and wealthier and wealthier business owners. These gradual changes were quantitative, not huge shifts; however, things were building to a massive qualitative shift. This was only accelerated by the advent of electricity, improved steel production, and advanced communications (the telephone and radio) after 1850.

The new captains of industry, or alternatively robber barons, had grown up with the idea of machine power, and their massive wealth gave the new upper class a swollen sense of self-importance. They took up the huge machines which their fathers and grandfathers had built to take advantage of economies of scale and production. With a marginal god-complex, these men grew up with a completely different conception of machines, and that was the trigger which launched the Mechanized Era. When this new generation thought about machines, man was nowhere in their calculations for they considered themselves far above that; they thought about machines by asking themselves "What would I ask a god to do?" And so they built skyscrapers, they launched ships even larger than their buildings, and they envisioned production for customers in the millions. They didn't build factories to compete in business, following the Civil War American industrialists like Carnegie, Armour, and Rockefeller built monopolies that controlled entire industries. When the White Star Line of ships launched its two newest and most famous ships, they named them Olympic and Titanic after the Greek gods.

This is just one of the terrible ironies of the early Mechanized Era; one of the very ships which so perfectly captured the hubris of these men would take several of them down to their deaths because they overestimated their own brilliance when a small iceberg sank the Titanic on a freezing night on the North Atlantic in 1912 AD. It was a sobering moment, and yet the power of the new mechanized processes was real, and factories would never go back the way they were before. Companies and factories would continue to operate on a scale quite literally unimaginable to the men who launched the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s.

Military Mechanization

Nor were these developments confined to economics. Military mechanization was equally important given the global wars which now broke out in the Mechanized Era. In 1890 AD, Austria opened the Skoda Works in Pilsen to build machine guns for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Germans were building the finest field artillery on the planet by 1914 AD. The Central powers used these weapons with devastating effect in the trench warfare that dominated the Western front of World War I in Europe from 1914 - 1918 AD. Tanks were used by the British for the first time at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917 AD; they would become the most important land weapon of the Mechanized Era. In World War II, Nazi generals used them to drive spearheads deep behind enemy lines and conquer huge sections of enemy territory, a technique known as Blitzkrieg (Lightning War) which defined the use of tanks in modern mobile warfare for the rest of the century.

Perhaps most impressive though were the developments in naval warfare. For a continent just a few decades away from being impressed by the emergence of small, clunky ironclad ships in the US, the launch of the HMS Dreadnought by the British navy in 1906 AD is one of the most stunning achievements in mechanized technology. The first battleship, it had guns which could fire shells to destroy enemy ships more than a mile away, and armor plating so thick it could only be dented by fire from another battleship. Though less than fifty years later, the annihilation of the US battleships at Pearl Harbor would demonstrate that the long range power and terror or aircraft carriers had rendered them all but obsolete.

The steady increase in mechanized military hardware had the most direct impact of any influence on the course of Mechanized Era politics. Just as Mechanized industrialists cherished a heady superiority, Mechanized politicians were so overwhelmed by the stunning advances in military technology that they could not conceive of the idea that they could be defeated. A surge of European nationalism and the new technology led to World War I, and the brutal peace terms imposed by the arrogant leaders of the victors spurred Germany to develop military technology they felt would allow them to annihilate their enemies. This led directly to World War II which Japan saw as the perfect opportunity to conquer and subjugate China to expand their own version of a colonial empire in East Asia. However, the most stunning achievement of the Mechanized Era was the splitting of the atom; on July 16, 1945 the first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico and two bombs were dropped on Japan to effectively end World War II. Joining the US, the atomic bomb was soon developed by the other major superpower, the Soviet Union. The end of European-driven conflict had merely been replaced by the US-Soviet conflict; however the fact that this conflict was a "Cold War" as opposed to "World War III" had little to do with the combatants and everything to do with nuclear weapons.

Birth of Mass Culture

At the beginning of the Industrial Era, many people were born, lived their lives, and died in the same town. However, the adaptation of machinery to transportation would revolutionize the way people viewed their world and each other. In the Mechanized Era, they were more likely to criss-cross the globe. In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first heavier than air vehicle using twin propellers driven by internal combustion engines. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh would demonstrate the rapid strides the new form of travel had made by crossing the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris, France in just 30 hours. In 1908, William C. Durant founded General Motors and in 1913, Henry Ford created the first moving assembly line; within two years he would drop the time required to construct a Model-T from 728 minutes to just 93, making their production efficient enough to provide them at prices within reach of many people. By 1924, the Model-T accounted for one half of the vehicles on Earth. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was an international tragedy, but it did little to stem the rising business of trans-Atlantic trade in goods and passengers. This revolution in transportation literally opened up the entire globe, brought together physically people who lived far apart, and shrank the world to the size that each person could explore it.

While the telegraph had made important strides in bringing instant communication to Industrial Era nations, in the last decades of the 19th century, both the telephone and radio were invented and began to infiltrate society in the Mechanized Era. Unlike the telegraph, people had telephones and radios in their own homes making long distance communication part of their daily lives. Telephones allowed people to keep in touch with friends and family who had spread out across the country and the world. Even more importantly, radios (and television, an extension of radio technology which allowed the transmission not only of sound but pictures) allowed a single source to issue widespread "broadcasts". The new medium rapidly became a means of bringing news, entertainment, advertising, and information directly into people's homes.

This would be far more important than almost anyone realized at the time. The new signals were ubiquitous throughout all geographic areas, all races, and all income levels. The limited number of stations and channels provided a consistent, widely accessible, widely understood cultural vocabulary that even the introduction of cable and satellite television did not change though these greatly expanded the number of channels available late in the Mechanized Era. For the first time in history all strata of society from the wealthiest to the poorest began to partake in a diverse but common social vocabulary, lifestyle, set of customs, and set of expectations. This was the introduction of an entirely new kind of mass communication which supported a more in depth mass culture which developed and defined the Mechanized Era.

Mechanized Society

The fallout of these changes was just as, if not more, momentous than the Industrial Revolution itself. Nor were these even the most important changes that affected society even as they transformed the world. The Industrial Era had seen the collapse of society and the family unit. Personal hygiene had collapsed in the animal (largely horse) filled slums where people had no money for basic medicine, food, or cleaning leading to rampant disease. They were crushed under unholy hours of work for virtually no pay or unemployed outright. The Mechanized Era had a great advantage over the Industrial Era; it began 150 years later.

At the outset of Industrial Era, millions had ultimately been thrown out of work and no one had the slightest idea what to do with them. By the Mechanized Era, new careers opened by the new technology were beginning to answer that question and introduce skilled jobs back into the economy. The increased efficiency of the new mechanized factories reduced the cost of consumer goods to within reach of many of these new job holders, so that the purported benefits of industrialization were finally reaching a wide audience – this in fact was the key change which Marx had not foreseen in the Communist Manifesto (1848 AD) and which invalidated most of his conclusions.

Nor did it hurt that 150 years of slow government progress had by this time eliminated most of the worst excesses of corporate employment. Work conditions were still harsh in most places, but the abolition of child labor was a reality or not far off in most countries. Government regulations limited the number of hours in the workday for adult workers. Company towns were vanishing and with them a corporation's ability to maintain their workers' personal expenses far above their personal income. Even corporations began to push for change in their battles against each other, they pushed for and achieved laws to support competition in the marketplace – in the US, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act outlawed monopolies and trusts in 1890 AD, though it was not significantly enforced until the Mechanized Era. Even labor movements which were frequently put down with military force during the Industrial Era won legal recognition from government creating a second means for the restraint of corporate power.

The result was that slowly but surely, a mass consumer culture developed. In nations that used taxes and other instruments to re-circulate the vast wealth of corporations, corporations became the central monetary engine for driving entire national economies. Given the proper climate, laws demanding fair treatment and compensation of workers engaged the middle class and helped it to grow again. Laws regulating the workplace and business practices ensured that businesses provided a safe working environment and had to abide by standards that ensured their work was not only personally profitable but beneficial to the larger economy. US businessmen at the end of the Industrial Era had demonstrated the most aggressive innovation and been a key reason in the US's rise to world prominence. However, the most revolutionary developments in the Mechanized Era were the slow and disorganized attempts of government, economists, and labor to channel the wild forces of the capitalist economy which resulted in the ability of that economy to do real work improving people's lives. This allowed the US to achieve the global power which its pre-Mechanized history had promised, and with it the ability to champion it's political, economic, and social policies with great success across the globe.

Colonialism Redux

While governments could display intense nobility toward their neighbors across the globe one moment, they were perfectly capable of equally intense betrayal of the high moral values that they consistently spoke about. Nations continued to fight over territory, most importantly during the two world wars, and if less directly the Cold War saw US-Soviet conflict frequently fought by proxy through a host of small nations scattered around the world.

However, while advances in the laws of Mechanized societies helped to make capitalism benefit civilization, there was little advancement in international restraints upon corporate power. In developing nations that had not yet transformed into fully Mechanized societies, there were relatively few options for emerging into the upper tier of wealthy nations, and none of them were particularly attractive. And so corporations were frequently able to influence politics and wield power in these nations as they passed through the Industrial Era just as industrialists had done in the Industrial Era of Europe. Nor were the Mechanized Era industrialists above bending national development to suit their own needs.

For a variety of reasons, some economic, but some wrapped in other issues like the Cold War, corporations (frequently in partnership with government) often influenced political development to ensure that nations remained in the highly profitable Industrial Era. Less developed nations were might be significantly helped in order to lay the groundwork for Industrial society, though naturally this only came at the price of allowing foreign corporations to virtually rule these "beneficiares". However, once the groundwork was laid, aggressive corporations acted to ensure that further "unprofitable" avenues of social development were stifled. A carefully planned expenditure might collapse an emerging democracy in favor of a more malleable dictator. A word in the right ear could launch local militias with assault rifles through the offices of a developing labor movement. Though colonialism was formally over as the developed nations moved out of the Industrial Era, there was an unavoidable lag time between when superpowers like Europe and the US emerged into the Mechanized Era and when Renaissance, Medieval, and even Formative societies completed that transition. The gap allowed unscrupulous industrialists to operate by different rules from place to place around the globe and effectively extend a form of corporate colonialism throughout the entire Mechanized Era given the right local conditions (which they often helped to arrange).

Triumph of Urbanization

Ever since the first town on Earth swelled with people like the water in the irrigated fields around it, cities have defined culture. No more, no less, than the communities which maximize the potential of people working together, cities have driven society and civilizations. While there have been many developments throughout history, the city is one of the most basic and successful. Cities allow people to get together and enjoy the fruits of their common effort whether direct and consciously-directed or indirect and incidental. The city allows career specialization because one person can use their special talents to the advantage of many others, acquiring wealth for doing what they most like, and using the currency they acquire to furnish all the other needs which they are not doing for themselves.

And yet throughout human history, no matter how important the city has been to civilizations and no matter how much cities have dominated the countryside around them, most people have lived on the land. While cities have been the engines of change in the lives of cultures across the globe, only a comparatively small proportion of people have had the luxury of living in one. Larger numbers of farmers were required to support those living in the cities. Many societies have had major social problems because urbanization outpaced the number of farmers who could grow food, or because land distribution and the ability place land under cultivation declined for a population that was growing.

And so the application of mechanized production to agriculture effected what is perhaps the greatest shift in history. While urbanization was a major trend in Europe during the Industrial Era, the Mechanized Era is the first time that more than half the population actually lived in the cities vs. the country. Typically, pre-mechanized societies had urban populations of roughly 20% while 80% of people lived in the country. In the Mechanized Era this percentage flips and 80% of people resided in cities. While percentages range from as low as 60% to as high as 90%, Mechanized societies see the majority of their populations move into the cities.

Moreover, the developments in transportation and mass communication changed the lives of those still in the countryside so that country life was more connected to city life than during any other Era in human history. This fundamental change in human interactions was just as important in the success of mechanized societies as their mechanical advantages. The advantages which cities had always provided were now being put to use on a scale that was wholly unprecedented.

Mechanized Era economies grew faster than any other time in history. Nations wielded a level of power at home and abroad that was unprecedented. And yet it was not any of these things that would launch the next great transformation in society. On the contrary, the builders of the new technology would do that all by themselves. Just as literacy had helped to power the most successful civilizations of the Ancient Era, and mass printing had been a key factor in the success of Renaissance Era powers like China and England, new transformations in learning would change the shape of the Mechanized Era and open the doorway to something new.

In 1946 AD, the first digital computer was turned on; ENIAC inaugurated an entirely new kind of "machine" and created the field now known as electronics. Advances rapidly reduced the size and increased the power of these devices, but the most important developments in computer science emerged when the US Defense Department wanted a way to provide a defensive system that could survive a nuclear attack. With no way of knowing which of its installations would be annihilated and which would survive, the military decided on a concept called "distributed networks". Effectively, no computer on which US security rested would be more important than any other. Each computer would be connected, could talk to one another, and depending on the commands given to it could act as a simple worker for a request from another computer in one second and in the next could become the central control issuing commands for the entire system.

In 1969, DARPANET became a reality and as more military contractor and government offices were added the system, it would eventually expand beyond its original intent to become a public network for the transfer of information. The internet, an outgrowth of military technology for fighting nuclear war, was the single largest library of information on the planet; and it was interactive allowing people to publish anything as well as read. While accuracy is still a key challenge in the current system, the internet became the most important tool for communication and the exchange of knowledge in human history. Governments, individuals, and entire industries have reorganized themselves to place the internet at the core of their lives in order to gain the phenomenal advantages that it offers in the Information Era.