Textile Technology Quotes

About 1.2 million jobs—more than three-quarters of domestic employment in the textile sector—vanished between 1990 and 2012.

Between 2009 and 2012, US textile and apparel exports rose by 37 percent to a total of nearly $23 billion.7

In the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it you need to understand twenty-first-century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms. These powers are far more potent than steam and the telegraph, and they will not be used merely for the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons. The main products of the twenty-first century will be bodies, brains and minds, and the gap between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not will be far bigger than the gap between Dickens’s Britain and the Mahdi’s Sudan. Indeed, it will be bigger than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals. In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction.

At various times in the past, technological optimists have predicted that textile workers would benefit from factory automation, that women would be emancipated by washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and that racial discrimination would vanish in the age of computers. If only.

Between 1811 and 1817, a group of English textile workers whose jobs were threatened by the automated looms of the first Industrial Revolution rallied around a perhaps mythical, Robin Hood–like figure named Ned Ludd and attacked mills and machinery before being suppressed by the British government.

Strong European states had simultaneously created barriers to the import of foreign textiles just as they built a system for the appropriation of foreign technology. By orchestrating economic processes in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well as in Europe, Europeans gained the paradoxical ability to direct the global trade in Indian textiles while at the same time keeping Asian cloth increasingly out of Europe, instead trading the products in Africa and elsewhere beyond Europe’s shores.

In this way the original arrival of textile machinery not only replaced cottage hand manufacturing, it set up an opportunity for a higher-level set of arrangements-the factory system-in which the machinery became merely a component. The new factory system in turn set up a chain of needs-for labor and housing-whose solutions created further needs, and all this in time became the Victorian industrial system. The process took a hundred years or more to reach anything like completion. The reader might object that this makes structural change appear too simplistic-too mechanical. Technology A sets up a need for arrangements B; technology C fulfills this, but sets up further needs D and E; these are resolved by technologies F and G. Certainly such sequences do form the basis of structural change, but there is nothing simple about them. The factory system itself needed means of powering the new machinery, systems of ropes and pulleys for transmitting this power, means of acquiring and keeping track of materials, means of bookkeeping, means of management, means of delivery of the product. And these in turn were built from other components, and had their own needs. Structural change is fractal, it branches out at lower levels, just as an embryonic arterial system branches out as it develops into smaller arteries and capillaries.

English exports, led by cotton textiles, doubled between 1780 and 1800. It was the growth in this sector that pulled ahead the whole economy. The combination of technological and organizational innovation provides the model for economic progress that transformed the economies of the world that became rich.

However anomalous to European eyes, this form of writing has deep roots in Andean culture. Knotted-string communication was but one aspect of these societies’ exploration of textile technology (see Chapter 3). In these cultures, Heather Lechtman, of MIT, has argued, cloth “was the most important carrier of status, the material of choice for the communication of message, whether religious, political, or scientific.

Tolerance for copying and IPR theft is a tactic commonly used by technologically backward nations to catch up on the technological frontier. The development of the European porcelain industry in the early eighteenth century depended substantially on reports by Jesuit missionaries on Chinese ceramic techniques, which the Chinese state considered trade secrets. Theft of tea plants whose export was prohibited by China enabled the British to establish a tea industry in India. In the early nineteenth century, the United States was cavalier in its treatment of European intellectual property, and its first great textile complex in Lowell, Massachusetts, was founded essentially on industrial espionage.20 After World War II, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan relied in part on reverse engineering and copying of Western technologies, in violation of Western patent rules. Before China became the main target, the US government engaged in constant IPR skirmishes with Japanese and Taiwanese firms. The point is not that IPR violations are morally defensible, but simply that they are routine and last until a country has enough IPR of its own to decide that protection produces more benefit than stealing. This shift occurred in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and in the East Asian states in the 1980s and 1990s. It has begun in China with the establishment of specialized IPR courts and the use of criminal penalties for some violations.

Anyone who was, say, sixty years old in Manchester, England, would have witnessed in his or her lifetime a revolution in the manufacturing of cotton and wool textiles, the growth of the factory system, the application of steam power and other astounding new mechanical devices to production, remarkable breakthroughs in metallurgy and transportation (especially railroads), and the appearance of cheap mass-produced commodities. Given the stunning advances in chemistry, physics, medicine, math, and engineering, anyone even slightly attentive to the world of science would have almost come to expect a continuing stream of new marvels (such as the internal combustion engine and electricity). The unprecedented transformations of the nineteenth century may have impoverished and marginalized many, but even the victims recognized that something revolutionary was afoot. All this sounds rather naive today, when we are far more sober about the limits and costs of technological progress and have acquired a postmodern skepticism about any totalizing discourse. Still, this new sensibility ignores both the degree to which modernist assumptions prevail in our lives and, especially, the great enthusiasm and revolutionary hubris that were part and parcel of high modernism.

To reverse Arthur C. Clarke’s famous adage about magic, any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature.

Gise had deep experience in the way the government worked and was privy to some of the most advanced and secretive technology of his day. During those summers on the ranch, Bezos says that his grandfather would tell him stories about the missile defense systems he worked on during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a deep impression on the young Bezos. Today, among the Silicon Valley titans, he is one of the most pro-government CEOs. Amazon’s cloud computing business has won multibillion-dollar contracts from the Pentagon and the CIA. The significance of that business to Amazon is one reason why, in 2018, Bezos put his new second headquarters in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and why he paid $23 million for an old textile museum in D.C.’s swish Kalorama area—his neighbors are the Obamas and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump

The people of Mosquitia, even though they left behind impressive stone sculptures, did not erect great buildings or monuments in stone, the kind of structures that become dramatic ruins wowing people five centuries in the future. Instead, they constructed their pyramids, temples, and public buildings out of river cobbles, adobe, wattle and daub, and probably tropical hardwoods. They had gorgeous woods at their disposal such as mahogany, purple rosewood, aromatic cedar, and sweet gum. We have reasons to believe their weaving and fiber technology was truly spectacular. Imagine a temple made out of highly polished tropical hardwoods, with adobe walls that had been skillfully plastered, painted, incised, and decorated, the interiors draped in richly woven and colored textiles. Such temples might well have been just as magnificent as those of the Maya. But once abandoned, they dissolved in the rain and rotted away, leaving behind unimpressive mounds of dirt and rubble that were quickly swallowed by vegetation. In the acidic rainforest soils, no organic remains survive—not even the bones of the dead.

Waist Trainers from Hourglass Waist aim to burn tummy fat as well as shave off inches around your waist and thighs. With over 7 years of experience, Hourglass Waist has designed several award-winning waist trainers that are comfortable, affordable & always in style. Corset has been used for hundreds of years and today we have products such as the gym waist trainer pro which use smart textiles. This new design has a sauna-like effect when you train, meaning more sweat and more calories burnt. This new technology and many others have made Hourglass Waist the market leader in Australia.

Aren’t fears of disappearing jobs something that people claim periodically, like with both the agricultural and industrial revolution, and it’s always wrong?” It’s true that agriculture went from 40 percent of the workforce in 1900 to 2 percent in 2017 and we nonetheless managed to both grow more food and create many wondrous new jobs during that time. It’s also true that service-sector jobs multiplied in many unforeseen ways and absorbed most of the workforce after the Industrial Revolution. People sounded the alarm of automation destroying jobs in the 19th century—the Luddites destroying textile mills in England being the most famous—as well as in the 1920s and the 1960s, and they’ve always been wildly off the mark. Betting against new jobs has been completely ill-founded at every point in the past. So why is this time different? Essentially, the technology in question is more diverse and being implemented more broadly over a larger number of economic sectors at a faster pace than during any previous time. The advent of big farms, tractors, factories, assembly lines, and personal computers, while each a very big deal for the labor market, were orders of magnitude less revolutionary than advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving vehicles, advanced robotics, smartphones, drones, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of things, genomics, digital currencies, and nanotechnology. These changes affect a multitude of industries that each employ millions of people. The speed, breadth, impact, and nature of the changes are considerably more dramatic than anything that has come before.

But the “Luddite” tag left me wondering . . . who were the Luddites, really? It turns out that the original nineteenth-century Luddites were hardly “Luddites” in our contemporary sense at all. We think of such people as being rabidly and unthinkingly anti-technology. But in fact the Luddites of Nottingham, and Lancashire, and Yorkshire—the textile workers who attacked the “power loom” in 1811 and beyond—were socialist revolutionaries, a group of workers who fought against crippling pay cuts, child labor, and changes to laws that had protected their livelihoods. They were fighting not against technology, but for fair treatment at the hands of a manufacturing elite.

It was already an age of scientific wonders that promised to reshape economies and boost productivity. From the first steam engine that James Watt built in Great Britain in the 1760s to the hot-air balloons that floated across French skies in the 1780s to Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin and the use of interchangeable parts in the 1790s, it was a time of technological marvels. No industry was being transformed more dramatically than British textiles. Sir Richard Arkwright had devised a machine called the water frame that used the power of rushing water to spin many threads simultaneously. By the time Hamilton was sworn in as treasury secretary, Arkwright’s mills on the Clyde in Scotland employed more than 1,300 hands.

Until the time when intellectual capital could acquire property rights status and could benefit from government protection, “Americans saw [the] immense hoard of technology [being developed in Europe] as theirs for the asking – or for stealing” (Morris, 2012, p. 301). Morris mentions that Tench Coxe, who was Alexander Hamilton’s assistant treasury secretary in the first US Treasury Department, “had no compunction about ​offering awards for stolen British textile technology and paying bounties high enough to induce [British] craftsmen to risk prison for emigrating [to the US] with trade secrets” (ibid.). He added that “the United States set out to steal whatever [technological knowledge] it could” (ibid.).​

Like any of man’s inventions, artificial intelligence can be used for good or evil. In the right hands and with proper intent, it can do beneficial things for humanity. Conversely, it can be used by evil dictators, sinister politicians, and malevolent leaders to create something as dangerous as a deadly weapon in a terrorist’s hands. Yuval Noah Harari is a leading spokesperson for the globalists and their transhumanist, AI, and Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda. Harari is also an advisor to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. Barack Obama refers to Harari as a prophet and recommends his books. Harari wrote a book titled Sapiens and another titled Homo Deus (“homo” being a Latin word for human or man, and “deus” being the Latin word for god or deity). He believes that homo sapiens as we know them have run their course and will no longer be relevant in the future. Technology will create homo deus, which will be a much superior model with upgraded physical and mental abilities. Harari tells us that humankind possesses enormous new powers, and once the threat of famine, plagues, and war is finally lifted, we will be looking for something to do with ourselves. He believes the next targets of our power and technology are likely to be immortality, happiness, and divinity. He says: “We will aim to overcome old age and even death itself. Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn homo sapiens into homo deus. When I say that humans will upgrade themselves into gods in the 21st century, this is not meant as a metaphor; I mean it literally. If you think about the gods of ancient mythology, like the Hebrew God, they have certain qualities. Not just immortality, but maybe above all, the ability to create life, to design life. We are in the process of acquiring these divine abilities. We want to learn how to engineer and produce life. It’s very likely that in the 21st century, the main products of the economy will no longer be textiles and vehicles and weapons. They will be bodies and brains and minds.48

Radical fungal technologies can help us respond to some of the many problems that arise from ongoing environmental devastation. Antiviral compounds produced by fungal mycelium reduce colony collapse disorder in honeybees. Voracious fungal appetites can be deployed to break down pollutants, such as crude oil from oil spills, in a process known as mycoremediation. In mycofiltration, contaminated water is passed through mats of mycelium, which filter out heavy metals and break down toxins. In mycofabrication, building materials and textiles are grown out of mycelium and replace plastics and leather in many applications.