The clearing of Strathnaver in Sutherland is a perfect example. In 14 days in May 1814, 430 people were evicted and forced to move to Brora on the coast where they were to become fishermen. Sellar himself personally directed the clearances. To force the people to move, the roofs of their houses were often pulled down and the roof trees set alight to stop rebuilding. He was later tried and acquitted of the murder of some of the elderly evicted tenants.

For the people moved to the coast, life was inevitably hard. [b]They had to adjust to a new lifestyle and try to eke out a living from fishing- something most had had no experience of.[/b] In many cases they continued to farm on their small plots of land.

and again from the same website, in reference to kelp and wool processing:

[A]ll Highland landlords strove to make the most money out of the boom period Britain was going through at the turn of the century. With wool and kelp prices rising, the chance was there for the taking. The Highlanders themselves could not take this opportunity because of [b]their individual lack of capital and expertise[/b} and so they were at the mercy of the landlords.

(Source: http://www.scottishhistory.com/articles/highlands/clearances/clearance_page1.html)

What these examples show is that eight generations ago people had some skills, and knew how to sustain themselves, but that was it. They didn’t know about every extant industry, or every existing skills set.

Further back in the Medieval period, it took up to nine years years to complete an apprenticeship in a Guild (any Guild, bakers, weavers, potters, stone masons, brewers etc). In many towns you couldn’t produce and sell said products unless you were a member of the relevant guild. Which means that people wouldn’t have had knowledge of making such things, because the guilds would have prevented them from learning about it. Division of Labour is nothing new, and Division of Labour = division of knowledge.

European guilds imposed long standardized periods of apprenticeship, and made it difficult for those lacking the capital to set up for themselves or without the approval of their peers to gain access to materials or knowledge.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild#Medieval_guild)

Yes most people (and most people lived on the land) would have known about their own industry, and some basic life skills, like spinning wool, or woodcraft, but that was it.

For early man, one man could reproduce all of the items: stone knives and spear points, spears, making fire, finding game and wild carbohydrates, and so forth.

By the time you get to 15th century farm towns, it’s more complicated because of the use of metal. You need to find raw materials, get them out of the ground, transport them, treat them and get finished ingots into the hands of craftsmen. You need an organized society to make it happen, possibly a military to “negotiate” for resources, etc. And of course many of those guys are married with children, who form the next generation, who feed them, etc.

Today, it probably requires a high functioning national economy and a country with hundreds of millions of disciplined people to get the part that makes millions of iPhones each month. Being able to create a transistor in a lab is nothing in the context of a manufacturing system like China has now.

If our social system collapses, it would take hundreds of years to get it back, if ever. All of the easy-to-find materials are in landfills now, in a completely useless form. It took hundreds of years to create the labs that made the advances, hundreds of years to create the manufacturing techniques, creating and perfecting disciplines like programming. People would forget the “example of our modern society” in a generation. You might never get that many people to work that hard and sacrifice that much for something that might not benefit them personally.

Also, centuries of peace are needed. America was uniquely placed because of our two great generals, Atlantic and Pacific, who protected us while we grew up.

Realistically, I think if we lose it, we might never get it back. Let’s try not to drop the ball, people.

19th Century fisherman on barren scottish islands wouldn’t know much about how their cotton clothes were made, how the looms were constructed, how the cotton was grown (how much water, fertilizer etc it needs), or how the dyes were made, but they still benefitted from them.

At the end of the day that’s all that matters.

I’m in a place I think a lot of people are now – historically unusual – that I know why lots of things work, but have almost no understanding of how to build any of them. Any attempt to reconstruct technology might be easier than without that theoretical knowledge, but I’d be deep in painful trial and error for every step.

The same applies to any technology, regardless of how advanced it may seem to us. It’s still just technology at the end of the day. Stuff that is used as a means of allowing us to do our Will. Whether it’s been manufactured in a hi-tech lab in Japan or Aunty Maggie’s yurt doesn’t matter, because it’s technology.

If we want to get metaphysical then Joe Rogan’s notion of knowing about technology also applies to our own individual human bodies. As they are merely technologies that our Will uses to do it’s bidding. My kidneys filter out all kinds of gunk, but I don’t know how, or why it filters out this from that, all I know (from what I’ve been told) is that it does. And it’s irrelevant if I know how or why they work because I benefit from them. And the same applies to the rest of the organs in my body.

We just need to know that things work rather than why they work. The ‘why’ is secondary in importance to knowing the benefits that a technology brings.

Will comes first; questions come second.

How do you rebuild 21st-century America, knowing that we haven’t been able to bring most of the existing world to that level, even with a working example?

Start by reading Gingery’s books…

That’s a frivolous answer, but in fact the question is very, very deep and very, very important.

The GVCK is one attempt to answer it, but that team is limited in its abilities.

Starting over and rebuilding will probably center on food production. In this regard, the anarchists are surprisingly advanced.

The “desktop regulatory state” might be a bootstrap.