I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation.
From a talk that Clay Shirky gave at the Web 2.0 on "Cognitive Surplus", a topic of his book Here Comes Everybody. The full video, via Laughing Squid, is worth your lime time:
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