YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM
due to all the 20th century conflicts
I assume he’s referring to the same question I was asking: did you just extrapolate this from the phrase “fucked up, disastrous mess” (referring to the sheer number of different systems in Europe?), because I think the big long reply above seriously undersells the fact that “20th century conflicts” aren’t even mentioned or gestured at in the video. There’s a map showing…different countries…but while 20th century conflicts changed various borders in Europe, they aren’t the origin of the borders between countries in Europe, or the origin of different European countries developing their own independent rail systems without any centralised plan - because they’re different countries, and the various bodies which today unify much of the continent only began to come into existence after the Second World War.
If we were talking about Former Yugoslavia, you’d actually be right! The integrated rail infrastructure of that region was completely devastated by the 1990s. But that’s not the focus here.
That does clarify the point, but I also don’t think that it’s true. It may well be that a major reason proposals for unified European rail never got off the ground before recently was that European countries rejected such proposals on grounds that it would make it easier for them to be invaded. But the rail systems in different European countries nonetheless developed independently, using different technology and standards, mostly (arguably) in the 19th century.
This complex process doesn’t reduce to 20th century FUBAR, even insofar as diplomatic and security considerations were involved in its evolution (and yet of course beginning in the 19th, not the 20th, century).
I still think that this represents a bias towards a military-geopolitical interpretation of history that’s not wholly sustainable, in spite of its appeal. In the Russian Empire case, I’m quite certain that that’s a popular myth, because I know that it is certainly the case that when the first railway infrastructures were being built, the political powers, administrators, and engineers responsible were as much influenced by technological and physical geographical imperatives as they were by geopolitical. The Russian Empire’s decision to use what would become the Russian gauge was multi-factoral - indeed looking it up, it appears that they were persuaded by Brunel’s own preference for a wide gauge, which was famously thwarted in the early development of the British railways.
Sorry, but the history of technology is one of my things, and I think that there’s a misrepresentation going on here about how technology develops. Not only is it rarely mono-causal, it’s extremely rare that one cause even predominates in the evolution of a technology (such as a railway system). I don’t think it’s the case that 20th century conflicts have remotely a large enough impact on the development of the European railway systems to properly explain why it is that they aren’t more integrated.
These people really need the Tao Te Ching
Ahhh Jaan Tallinn, the Diet Coke of batfuckery. Jaan “Diet Batfuckery” Tallinn.
The interesting thing about this is that these people never stop to think that the future they dream off might never happen. Aside from the fact that their cryo company might just go under, they don’t ever consider that in 200 years they might just wake up under a dystopia.
At one time I was going out with someone who was into Max More, without either of us being cogniscant of the rationalist link back then, and she gave me the infuriating justification that it was all a probabilities game with a bizarre political economy in the background. The thinking goes that if your society becomes a dystopia, there’s no reason and/or no resources to wake you up. Looking back, it’s amazing to see it as a combination of that characteristically (neo/)lib failure of imagination and Promethean ideology.
To use “wikipedia editors went batshit over an editor’s decision” as evidence of anything is just wild to me, a man whose knowledge of wikipedia editing extends to the one thing everybody knows about wikipedia editors (their tendency to go batshit over each others’ decisions)