Tech Refactored

Summer Staff Favorites: The Fabric of Civilization with Virginia Postrel

July 22, 2022 Nebraska Governance and Technology Center Season 2 Episode 49
Tech Refactored
Summer Staff Favorites: The Fabric of Civilization with Virginia Postrel
Show Notes Transcript

Tech Refactored is on a short summer vacation. We can't wait to bring you Season Three of our show beginning in August 2022, but as we near 100 total episodes our team needs a beat to rest and recharge. While we're away, please enjoy some summer staff favorites. The following episode was originally posted in May of 2021. 

On this episode we’re joined by Virginia Postrel to discuss her book, The Fabric of Civilization, How Textiles Changed the World. As the book’s description explains, “since the first thread was spun, the need for textiles has driven technology, business, politics, and culture” and in this episode we touch on all of that… plus a little college sports.

[00:00:07] Gus Herwitz: This is Tech Refactored. I'm your host, Gus Herwitz, the Menard Director of the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center at the University of Nebraska. We're joined today by Virginia Postrel, an author, columnist, and speaker whose work spans a broad range of topics from social science to fashion, concentrating on the intersection of culture, commerce, and technology.

Our discussion will focus on Virginia's latest book, The Fabric of Civilization. With me today is Virginia Postrel. Virginia, how are you doing? 

[00:00:45] Virginia Postrel: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. 

[00:00:48] Gus Herwitz: So, uh, first, I, I just need to fanboy out for a moment and say that this is such a, a, a pleasure and privilege to be talking to you. Uh, so we're, we're gonna be talking about, uh, your [00:01:00] recent book, The Fabric of Civilization, but we'll also touch on, uh, your, uh, prior books as well.

Your book is nominally about fabrics and textiles, but it's, it's no secret to anyone–and you talk about this in the book–it's really about, uh, other things and more. It's about technology. Um, and you start, uh, in fact with, uh, the quote from, uh, Mark Wiser, uh, "The most profound technologies are those that disappear."

I'm just wondering, when you started working on this book, did you know that this was going to be a book about technology? Um, uh, or is that a theme that appeared instead of disappearing as you were working on the book?

[00:01:42] Virginia Postrel: It was always going to be a book about textiles, technology, and trade. Um, as I, what I write in the book is that it's, it's about human ingenuity in all its manifestation.

So it became even bigger. But before there was a book, there was an article, um, and that- [00:02:00] Before there was a book proposal, there was an article, and that book was, that article was very much about the relationship between textiles and technology and the fact that we forget that textiles are technology and the things that we can discover, uh, when we think about it in those terms.

I- there were several things that I knew going into that article and going into the book that I- had people didn't know. Uh, the one thing that a lot of people do know, uh, in a sort of just-so story way, is that there's some sort of connection between computers and jacquard weaving. Um, but the things that I realized people didn't know, uh, one is that the entire chemical industry came out of dyes.

And so that the invention of synthetic dyes was extremely important in [00:03:00] the development of 20th century technologies. There, uh, was that- the, that, well, people should know this, but that the Industrial Revolution came out of spinning machines and that, that, and the reasons why that was significant, that it was spinning, uh, become more obvious when I started to do research on the book.

[00:03:24] Gus Herwitz: Yeah, and it's just the, the beginnings, the origins of the Industrial Revolution, the spinning machines, cotton gin and uh, uh, Watt's engine, it's all spinning stuff. It's amazing how much, uh, just being able to spin an axle really fast, uh, or really consistently, uh, changes everything that we as humans do.

[00:03:49] Virginia Postrel: Right. And one thing I discovered in the course of researching the book is that the belt drive, which is used in all kinds of machinery, uh, which is basically [00:04:00] when you have a small wheel being turned by, a big wheel, connected by a belt, uh, originated in, in silk workshops in China about 2,500 years ago, and that that was the first time spinning, uh, sort of waste silk into a thread; it was the first time and really the only time that particular technology was invented. 

[00:04:25] Gus Herwitz: Uh, so why textiles? Why threads? Why is this such a useful lens? I, I wish there were a, uh, uh, textile, uh, metaphor I could use instead of lens, uh, uh, uh, needles eye through which to look at the topic.

[00:04:40] Virginia Postrel: Well, the- textiles are first of all, very, very old. Uh, they go back at least 10,000 years, and if you're gonna talk about string, you're going back 50,000 years. Uh, so they. There's lots of really interesting [00:05:00] archeological technology that is, you know, how do you analyze them? Uh, and they are pretty much universal, uh, pretty, uh, you can find exceptions, but pretty much every human culture, every human settlement, uh, from time and memorial has used textiles. So that if you want to look on a grand scale, both globally and on alarm time scale, they're very useful for understanding the evolution of civilization. And then the other thing is they're something that everybody has some elementary understanding of, uh, you know, ceramics are old too, but people don't necessarily have any particular understanding of ceramics.

Uh, but everybody wears clothes and, uh, other textiles that they don't even think about, like duct tape. Uh, but, [00:06:00] and so, Looking at the world through textiles gives us a really great way to look at all kinds of interesting issues, uh, in the development, particularly of technology, but also of trade, of, of commerce, uh, and of the relationship between different cultures and civilizations.

[00:06:22] Gus Herwitz: Um, I, I, I remember when I learned how a sewing machine works, and I always thought growing up the sewing machine somehow magic magically took one thread and wove it through a, a, a piece of cloth or fabric when it's actually two threads and it's going up and down, uh, pushing one through the fabric and stitching it in on the other side.

Um, and the moment I learned that I thought "Wow, I'm stupid. How could I ever have thought that it was doing this impossible thing?" But I just thought it was magic. I thought the sewing machine was doing some magic. I just didn't understand. Which, uh, uh, brings me to the, the [00:07:00] question. Uh, these things fade into the background. And there's another quote about any sufficiently advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic. And to me, the sewing machine was just magic. Um, so I wonder what's the difference between things being magic or being so important and so ubiquitous, uh, and on the present fade into the background? 

[00:07:24] Virginia Postrel: Yeah. Well, the sewing machines are really interesting. You're not stupid because. The way you thought sewing worked is how sewing with a hand needle works. Um, and so in order to invent the sewing machine, there was this breakthrough of figuring out how to sew in a different way that, um, how to mechanize it in a way that didn't simply imitate what a person did with hands, and the same thing had to happen in spinning. And a lot of the technological developments [00:08:00] in textiles, as well as other fields are figuring out how mechanically to achieve the same result, but in a different way than just simply imitating hands. And that actually probably has some profound, uh, insights, uh, to offer in terms of thinking about artificial intelligence or robots or things like that.

But I'm not gonna go there because that's, uh, getting outside my expertise. Um, but yeah. So you quoted. Arthur C. Clark's famous Clark's Law and he sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I sort of turn it on its head in the book and say Any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature.

And it's an interesting question. Um, Because the things that are very, very familiar to us, we just take for granted; we don't think about how they're [00:09:00] created it unless we happen to be in that business. And this is the specialization that makes for economic progress. I mean, division of labor, um, uh, people doing what they're good at and paying attention to that one thing.

But we do lose something when we don't know where things come from. Uh, partly we tend to think we understand more than we do, and that can lead to kind of, uh, ignorant prescriptions for uh, regulation or policy, um, or it can lead for to people, um, you know, trying to start businesses that they don't-where when they don't grasp how difficult it will be.

Of course, if people diff, I mean, maybe no one would ever start a business if they didn't really have a certain amount of ignorance, and I actually have a couple of stories in my book, uh, about people who [00:10:00] started businesses not realizing how hard that would be. Everyone from William Perkin, who invented the first synthetic dye to the founders of Spoonflower, which does printing a fabric on demand, and they didn't really understand how different printing fabric was from printing paper and how much harder it would be. Um, they got- they managed to build the business anyway, but it was much harder than they realized. So I think it's, it's a couple of things.

First of all, there are some practical reasons, but it also, if you have at least a modicum of understanding of where things come from, I think it makes you just appreciate, uh, the world we live in better of that the work that other people do, the, the things that people have invented in the past. Uh, these things, I think it just makes you a more fully rounded, better human being. 

[00:10:58] Gus Herwitz: And that's, uh, [00:11:00] what one of the things that tells me, uh, a book is, at least in my mind, really great, is it changes how you see things. And that, that's one of the things I, I love about this book so much. Um, I, uh, uh, yesterday afternoon I was sitting in a chair, uh, just, uh, actually thinking about, uh, some of the questions for our discussion today.

Um, and I looked, I could see my feet and they were covered in socks, and I was sitting in an upholstered chair. There was a leather chair next to me, and I could see the, the thread, uh, that was used in the upholstery in some stretched canvas, uh, uh, paintings, uh, on the wall. And I thought, "Wow, um, I see all of these things differently."

I wouldn't have noticed them, uh, in the same way. Uh, so that, uh, really, uh, it's a sign of a successful book. It changes how you see things, but also it gives you a different understanding of the world. Um, what one question that I, uh, I do want to ask, uh, Given the current political time that we're in, uh, there's [00:12:00] a lot of history in your book and a lot of the history of textiles is unambiguously bad history, not about textiles necessarily.

And some of it's ambiguously bad history, perhaps the, uh, slave trade relating to cotton. Uh, there's a lot of perception about gendered roles in, uh, textile, uh, uh, production, uh, ci- civilizations have risen and fallen based upon, uh, these trades and these technologies. Uh, I, I'm just curious if you have any thoughts, uh, or reflections on how technology, uh, uh, relates to, uh, these social issues and social movements throughout time and as we see them today.

[00:12:39] Virginia Postrel: Yeah. Well, one thing that studying sort of deep history, uh, tells you is that human beings are not always, uh, so good. Um, and they do things really terrible things to other human beings, one of which is dragging them from their homes and taking them thousand [00:13:00] some miles away, uh, in pursuit of [indistinguishable] textiles.

Uh, and the story that we of course know is the story of slavery of, uh, and particularly to the America South. And in the book I explained why there's, like, why there was a second exile, if you will, original 13 colonies, part of the uh, uh, United States, and then were in the early 19th century taken from those homes where they were slaves, but they had families, they had communities, et cetera.

And you know, a million people were displaced to the Mississippi Valley. So it really is a horrific story. It is part of the history of textiles; it's not the only time something like that happened. And another story I tell in the book is about how the Mongols took weavers from the city of Herat In Afghanistan 1500 miles across Asia because they wanted to make cloth of the particular kind that they liked, uh, closer [00:14:00] to the Mongol homeland.

And that is one way that Muslims came to the land of the Uyghurs. Uh, so that has ramifications all the way to today. Um, you know, I, the evidence from the period shortly after the Civil War, before the sort of full re-assertion of, uh, white power in the South is that in the absence of plantation slavery, you could still grow cotton in the American south.

Uh, both, uh, blacks and whites, uh, started small farms in the, in the wake of the Civil War and produced cotton successfully, in large quantities, uh, for the cotton trade. But you know, the US made the tragic, and by our standards, certainly immoral decision to [00:15:00] allow slavery to expand into what was the frontier in the Western United States in the Mississippi Valley in the early 19th century. And that had enormous consequences for people's lives, and it, and it has enormous consequences, uh, for American culture and, you know, in all sorts of ways. Uh, not all of which were bad, I mean, the, the African American contribution to American culture is absolutely essential, you know who we are as, as a people and a culture. 

Um, but it came from these very tragic roots. I think that, you know what, what textile history does is it, it says something about who human beings are. It's not a morality story. It's not all good, all bad, there's no Hollywood ending. This is just- people do good things, they're brilliant, they do [00:16:00] fantastically creative things, uh, they create beauty and meaning, but they also do really savage terrible things. 

[00:16:09] Gus Herwitz: Uh, I'm curious, uh, was, is there part of the book that is your most favorite part, either from, uh, the research process, the writing process, or looking back, uh, that you find, uh, uh, you you'd like to reflect upon?

[00:16:22] Virginia Postrel: Well, I think the chapter that's, in many ways the most interesting to read is the chapter on Dye As the History of Chemistry. Uh, it reminded me how much I enjoy chemistry; I haven't taken chemistry since high school, but how fascinating it is. Um, and it, it's a, you know, it's a very wide ranging, uh, very fun history.

It has science, it has smelly gross things, you know, will appeal to the little kid in you as well as to the serious adult. Um, for me, one of the [00:17:00] most fascinating things that I did in terms of research was visit the reconstructions or restorations of these enormous, uh, silk throwing mills, they're called in northern Italy, which were, uh, started as early as the 15th century, but certainly in the 16th and 17th century before the Industrial Revolution were factories that ran 24/7, uh, and the center of which are these huge, multi-story machines, made all of wood and gears and powered by water power. And it's just extraordinary to think about these things being built that long ago. 

[00:17:44] Gus Herwitz: We are speaking with, uh, Virginia Postrel about her recent book, The Fabric of Civilization. Uh, we will return in a couple of moments to continue our discussion and possibly bring in discussion of some of her previous work.[00:18:00] 

[00:18:01] Virginia Postrel: I'm Elsbeth Magilton, the executive producer of Tech Refactored. I hope you're enjoying this episode of our. And hey, do you have an idea for Tech refactored? Is there some complex thorny tech issue you'd love to hear us break down? Visit our website to submit your ideas to the show. And don't forget the best way to help us continue making content like this show is word of mouth.

We hope you tell all your tech interested friends about us and encourage them to listen. Should we sweeten the deal? Follow us on Twitter at UNL_NGTC and tweet about the show, and we'll give you a shoutout at the end or during a break on a future episode, just like Joel Corcoran. Thanks for listening.

[00:18:34] Gus Herwitz: and we're back with Virginia Postrel. Uh, Virginia, this is your fourth book, um, and it shares, at least as I read it, uh, themes with, uh, your previous books, uh, uh, The Future and Its Enemies, The Substance of Style, and the Power of Glamor. Um, and, and I'm wondering if you, uh, could tell us how, or perhaps whether perhaps I'm, uh, reading, uh, [00:19:00] into things that aren't there.

Uh, you see this book fitting in with your previous books? 

[00:19:06] Virginia Postrel: Well, it fits most closely with The Future and Its Enemies and The Substance of Style, um, both of which in very different ways are about, sort of progress, the creation of economic value, um, in different ways. Um, and this very much goes back to those themes.

You have themes around technology, uh, that type of progress. You have, you know, themes of why were people 6,200 years ago going to the trouble to not only dye cotton with indigo, which is incredibly complicated, but also, uh, create cloth that had these blue stripes in it. I mean, why would somebody who was as for 6,200 years ago do that?

And those, that goes straight to the core of the [00:20:00] arguments in the substance of style because cloth or any aesthetic art artifact has not only functional value, but it also has value in terms of the pleasure we get and the meaning we derive from it. So all of those things are themes that, you know, weave their way in and out of, of The Fabric of Civilization.

The Power of Glamor is really a book about persuasion and rhetoric, uh, visual persuasion and rhetoric, so it's a little less directly related. I mean, I can come up with examples of, of glamor manifesting itself in textiles, certain types of textiles being associated with the good life, but it that's really more of a departure than these other books, this is much more related to the future in its enemies or the substance of style. 

[00:20:54] Gus Herwitz: So that, that's, uh, fascinating to me because I, I, I actually think, uh, when I read, uh, The Power of Glamor, [00:21:00] that there's a pretty direct connection. Uh, so, uh, I'm going to ask a very weird next question, that, uh, uh, at least in my mind, uh, ties them together and it's because it's something that I struggle with.

Uh, and the question is, what do you think about college sports and the NCAA in particular? And I'll explain why I'm asking this there. There's a, a big Supreme Court antitrust case right now, uh, going on. And, uh, the NCAA argues that amateurism, which it defines as being unpaid, uh, is a defining characteristic of college sports and it makes it fundamentally different from, uh, uh, professional sports. 

Um, and we can put those arguments to the side. But while, while I was, uh, listening to, uh, these arguments, uh, the oral arguments at the Supreme Court, I was, uh, thinking, okay, what are the competing values of professionalism versus amateurism? 

And professionalism, I think of as kind of being the, the glamor version of something where, uh, you're trying to present the best [00:22:00] possible version of something and making it look easy. Um, and, uh, uh, that's part of what, uh, being the professional, being the star is about. Um, whereas amateur is, uh, more experimental, lower stakes. 

You can try crazy things, you can try a new offensive play or you can try a new style, uh, of trousers. Um, and, uh, you can experiment, you can take risks, uh, and that can drive progress as well. Um, Uh, it, there's, there's a tension that I've always felt between the, the glamorous explanation of something, the, I'm going to explain this concept to my students in a way that makes it seem easy and trivial, and they'll be impressed and think I'm brilliant.

Um, but they won't learn about the difficulties, the nuance, uh, the challenging aspects of it, versus I'm going to treat them like amateurs and I'm going to be an amateur too with them, and we're going to explore the complexities and we're going to have wrong answers and things are going to fail. And that's great because that's how we learn.

But is that how we [00:23:00] teach? Um, so I, I wonder, uh, am I seeing things that aren't there in the innovative and creative process? 

[00:23:06] Virginia Postrel: Well, you're definitely, I mean, if you take it in terms of the glamor of the innovative process or, uh, that I think you- that's true. And in fact, you know, I already in the earlier segment talked about people starting companies and not realizing how hard it would be, and that was partly because they had a, a more glamorous, if you will, idea of, okay, I have this good idea now I'll make a company, I'll get rich, end of story. And they forgot, you know, oh, I have to invent the chemical industry, or, oh, basically I have to–they didn't literally invent it because it was a company in Israel called [indistinguishable] that invented it–but I have to figure out how to print on fabric.

That's a hard thing. You know, these sort of- the glamour does hide the difficulties. Uh, and amateurism, you know, is from the word that means to love amateurism in sports is the [00:24:00] idea of you do it for the love of the game. Now, do people play Nebraska football for the love of the game?

[00:24:05] Gus Herwitz: Absolutely, yes.

[00:24:06] Virginia Postrel: I mean, they love it, but you know, there's a level of effort that- tt's, it's not like people playing touch football on a, you know, in the backyard or something. Uh, there's a level of discipline and, and concentration and money involved, uh, that, uh, you know, maybe not for the players, but you know, the high stakes. Anyway, so, yes, I, I think that you're onto something in terms of how we think about innovation. 

And also you run up against this, in this sort of fiber arts world, uh, where people, for example, will, will think, and maybe not artists, maybe this is just like press releases. You'll see these things, Oh, such and such has a new, you know, world- is gonna save the planet with this form of cloth made from [00:25:00] cellulose, uh, this came up- or, or this natural dye.

And usually what's happening is people are reinventing something that was invented a long time ago and was discarded for a reason, or they don't understand about scalability. I mean, there are some practical things. Now that's not to say that you can't make progress. You can, and people are working on, you know, more environmentally benign ways of dying, of, of making cloth and all of these sorts of things.

But I see a lot of, um, press releases and short items in the sort of, uh, fashion press, you know, that are clearly- this goes back to that question about why do you need to know where textiles come from. Uh, people don't necessarily understand what's new and what's not new and what the constraints are.

[00:25:53] Gus Herwitz: Yeah. That, that's a nice connection between the, uh, production side and the consumer side. We could [00:26:00] turn this into a conversation about Adam Smith very easily and, uh, the, the make versus buy decision, and in order to be an informed producer or consumer, you need to know how you make a thing, the costs of production in order to make an informed make versus a by decision.

And I, I, I like how, uh, You tie together there, Uh, uh, the producer side, if you want to innovate, if you want to bring something to market, you need to understand the costs associated with it. You can't just say, "here's the, the glamorous version of, or vision of what this product can do," without getting into the microeconomics of producing it and scaling it.

Um, and you can't be an informed consumer. Uh, uh, at the same time, uh, I, I will wear with pride, uh, the badge of having been, I assume, the only person to ever ask you about NCAA sports. Uh, so, that, that will be, uh, my, a badge of pride. Um, that back to textiles. Uh, a- another, uh, uh, slightly off the cuff, perhaps question about textiles, though, [00:27:00] most of the, the textiles that you talk about, um, are, uh, cloth or, uh, uh, I guess densely woven or densely knitted, uh, uh, uh, fabrics.

Um, what about loosely woven fabrics by which, uh, I'm thinking nets and networks? Um, I, I was again, uh, thinking about and reading, uh, uh, your book, uh, during the recent Suez Canal, uh, incident. Um, and that's a transportation network, um, part of a transportation network and transportation networks; uh, these are networks that are also invisible, but they're not surrounding us in the sense that I, I, I'm wearing my clothes, I'm wearing my textiles.

I'm not wearing my, uh, uh, uh, transportation networks or my communications networks around me. Uh, Uh, this is kind of an open-ended question I guess, but, uh, are reflections on different types of, uh, technologies and how representative the, the technologies at issue in, uh, the fabric of civilization and [00:28:00] textiles are of other invisible technologies?

[00:28:04] Virginia Postrel: Yeah, so first of all, nets, literal textile nets, are probably the oldest textiles for various forms of nets. Uh, because before you have weaving, um, you have knotting and people making fishing nets, and even there's some- there's an ancient, uh, what's thought to be some sort of head piece that is kind of created in a net sort of way.

Uh, but yes, I mean, I have this chapter in the book called Traders, which is devoted to, uh, what I, I use the term social technologies, and this would include a lot of the kinds of networks that you're talking about. I don't really talk too much about transportation, but I do talk about communication. I mean things like how do you send letters, um, you know, how do you create mail [00:29:00] networks?

I mean, the textile trade needed to do this in, in Europe. How do you send money, um, when you don't wanna send–you know–coaches full of bullion across the Alps. How do you transmit money? So people had to invent various kinds of networks, uh, that weren't- they weren't wired together in the way we, in some sense, when we think about networks, we think like literally you've got, you know, fiber optics or something, there's some kind of physical thing.

Uh, but yeah, that's a huge part of the textile story. And, and you've also had these supply chains going back to ancient times, um, where you have, you know, people sending, Uh, where textiles are, the earliest long distance trade involves textiles, or at least the earliest long distance trade for [00:30:00] which we have records.

And so how does that work? How do you correspond over those, those. Networks, Uh, and how do you go from fiber to cloth to dye, to final cloth, to selling it elsewhere? You've got a long, uh, series of steps that aren't necessarily done by the same person, and that raises questions about how do you have working capital?

How do you have trust? All of those very important network questions. 

[00:30:28] Gus Herwitz: Yeah, so li- literally the invention of supply chains and financial instruments, which is a, a fascinating aspect of, uh, uh, the book and, uh, uh, your research. Um, uh, at the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, what we, what we study is institutions and how technological change, uh, changes institutions and institutions are systems of, uh, formal and informal rules. Uh, the, the legal, uh, rules or any rules that kind of tie us together as [00:31:00] society. And it, it, it's fascinating; these rules didn't exist when textiles were being created and, uh, all these things that you're talking about were coming into play.

Uh, a lot of this stuff was invented in order to accommodate the, the needs of, uh, industry and society adapting to, uh, uh, this industry. Um, uh, are, are there interesting, uh, examples or stories of, uh, legal rules, uh, either being developed or changing in response to, uh, these, uh, technological changes? 

[00:31:33] Virginia Postrel: Well, one of the most interesting institutions is money, uh, which in- which you need in order to conduct trade in some form, and in several parts of the world, textiles actually were money. That is, they were, there were standard bolts of cloth that were recognized as denominations of money, uh, in, uh, the trade that originated in West Africa and [00:32:00] in Iceland, they started as merchants, customs and then developed into law. So they, the law followed the customs. In China, as is somewhat typical of China, they, they were more top down. Uh, taxes were levied into textiles. Textiles were, uh, they were legal tender, you had to accept them, and partly that was because there was a coin shortage. So that's an interesting example of an institution developing from a need and textiles being used as not just what was being traded, but as the medium of exchange.

[00:32:39] Gus Herwitz: So a a another of the, the fascinating things, The entire history of the world is in a sense told, uh, in the book and not just told in the book, it, it's captured in the language of textiles, um, uh, uh, uh, India, China, Egypt. These are countries whose names are embedded in the names, uh, of various [00:33:00] textile products.

I'm wondering if you, uh, could reflect on the geopolitical story that you are able to tell in the book or that we're able to tell with textiles.

[00:33:09] Virginia Postrel: Is well because textiles are found worldwide and, uh, are also a major subject of trade, uh, it does bring you into contact with many, many different cultures and, and many institutions.

So, uh, some of that is simply, You know, you learn a lot about the history of China because China produced a lot of textiles, even just internally, and, uh, governed them in various ways and invented a lot of things. Uh, you learn about the influence of Indian textiles on what happened in Europe because they were a revelation to Europeans about what possibly could be done.

And partly what happens is at the end of, so- at the end of my [00:34:00] first book, The Future And Its Enemies, I talk about, uh, an idea called The Fertile Verge. And this was an idea that I took from the historian, uh, Daniel Boorstin. And the idea was that you often have great bursts of creativity where things that are different come together.

And he had everything from, you know, urban and rural, wilderness and settlement; many different things, but also different cultures. And you definitely see that in the history of textiles where there's a lot of cross fertilization and some of that is through voluntary trade. Some of it's through warfare and you know, captives- 

There, there are lots of different ways that happens. Sometimes it's indirect, but it definitely shows you how having developed different- separately, uh, cultures can then [00:35:00] cross fertilize each other to make something new and different that wouldn't have happened if they hadn't come in contact with each other.

[00:35:08] Gus Herwitz: And Virginia, this has been, uh, a real treat for me. Thank you so much. Listeners, Virginia Postrel, vpostrel.com is her, uh, website and blog. You can find information about her books, links, including the Fabric of Civilization. Uh, I- I've been your host, Gus Herwitz, thank you for joining us on this episode of Tech Refactored.

And if you want to learn more about what we're doing here at the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, you can go to our website at ngtc.un.edu, or you can follow us on Twitter @UNL_NGTC. This podcast is part of the Menard Governance and Technology Programming Series hosted by the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center.

The Nebraska Governance and Technology Center is a partnership led by the Nebraska College of Law in collaboration with the Colleges of Engineering, Business, and Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska. Colin McCarthy produced and recorded our theme [00:36:00] music, Casey Richter provided technical assistance and advice.

Elsbeth Magilton is our executive producer, and Lysandra Marquez is our associate producer. Until next time, keep on weaving.