Social Technology Is as Important as Physical Technology

We are acutely aware of the material technology that powers our lives smartphones, satellites, antibiotics but largely blind to the non-material technology that makes it all possible. Politeness, professionalism, legal systems, and government itself are technologies, designed and iterated upon, that reduce coordination costs and enable complex cooperation.

"Social technology works by convincing people to knowingly or unknowingly take certain actions, and by directing people's actions, it reduces coordination costs between people, causing them to work together more effectively towards a goal." Samo Burja

The default state of human society is not peace and order but violence and chaos. Every functioning community rests on social technologies from queuing norms to property law to the concept of citizenship that had to be invented, implemented, and maintained. Just as HTTP is the operating protocol for the web, courtesy is the operating protocol for social interactions. Reddit itself is not social technology, but the use of moderators is.

This insight reframes how we should think about "backward" societies. Costly-seeming social norms in other cultures are not destroying a peaceful default state, because the default state is not peaceful. They are expensive solutions to real coordination problems that we may not face because we have different, perhaps more efficient, social technologies in place. The question to ask about any puzzling social practice is: what coordination cost does this help reduce?

The relationship between social and material technology is symbiotic and fragile. When Roman social technology collapsed when the state lost tax revenue, large-scale construction ceased, and engineering fell out of use material capabilities like arch-building were lost for centuries. The only material technologies that routinely survive civilizational collapse are small-scale agriculture and metallurgy, because they require only the social technologies that small communities can generate organically. Everything else rests on institutional foundations that must be deliberately maintained.

Takeaway: Every material capability you see around you is downstream of a social technology you do not see and the social technology is harder to replace.

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See also: Functional Institutions Are the Exception Not the Rule | Institutional Knowledge Is Fragile and Easily Lost | Culture Wars Are Won Over Generations | Signaling Is Louder Than Substance