![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I bought a pound of basmati rice yesterday. It came in a brown paper sack, with a printed label that said PAPER "the natural package".
That bag of rice is a surprisingly good example of the enabling technologies of our civilization. Paper, cheap enough to throw away--as I will when I finish writing this. Cheap color printing. Complex machinery that makes the bags. Containers. The rice in the bag a sophisticated variety, but grain is basic to the Neolithic Revolution. Agriculture gets the attention, but it wouldn't have been an epochal difference without containers for food storage and trainsport. Here and now, we have the technology to ship those containers halfway around the planet at a reasonable price, but the container is older than history, and essential to it.
That bag of rice is a surprisingly good example of the enabling technologies of our civilization. Paper, cheap enough to throw away--as I will when I finish writing this. Cheap color printing. Complex machinery that makes the bags. Containers. The rice in the bag a sophisticated variety, but grain is basic to the Neolithic Revolution. Agriculture gets the attention, but it wouldn't have been an epochal difference without containers for food storage and trainsport. Here and now, we have the technology to ship those containers halfway around the planet at a reasonable price, but the container is older than history, and essential to it.