Dark age ahead
by Jane Jacobs · first published 2004
11mentions
3recommended by
9HN commenters
2009–2025first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a Dark Age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a Dark Age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost.
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Jane Jacobs has brilliant essay on this topic; the difference between educating and providing credentials. Dark Age Ahead, ISBN-10: 0679313109
on “Why College Shouldn't Take Four Years” ↗I'd like to add honourary mentions for Jane Jacobs' last book, Dark Age Ahead and Thomas Homer-Dixon's book The Ingenuity Gap. http://raisethehammer.org/blog/455/
on “Why nations fail” ↗…lives largely in cyberspace, then we're in the golden age and No Man's Sky (a game I quite like, actually) and VR are epochal advances for all humanity. But overall, I'm a pessimist, Jane Jacobs book "Dark Age Ahead" (which is mostly about trends obvious back then) left a big impression on me.
on “How Peter Thiel’s Palantir helped expand the NSA’s global spy network” ↗Indeed: I just read Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs, and it's depressing. Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Age-Ahead-Jane-Jacobs/dp/14000623...
on “Apollo Astronauts Didn't Need Heavy Boots” ↗Jane Jacobs, more noted as an urban planning visionary, started taking a hard look at institutions, including education and the role of credentialing. Her book The Dark Age Ahead is (as you might suspect) a dark vision of the future: http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9781400062324-3 She addressed the topic in an essay, "Credentialing vs. Education": http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2004/spring/jacobs-credent...
on “Crowded Out of Ivory Tower, Adjuncts See a Life Less Lofty” ↗…it must be science. That's not an ordinary error, it's a form of rank incompetence the academy has fomented for decades; often resulting in the satanic inverse of empirical science. (See Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead 2005)
on “Trees Could Change the Climate More Than Scientists Thought” ↗Since we're piling up records like never before and still making tech progress (slowing down many argue) no. But... see Dark Age Ahead, May 17, 2005 by Jane Jacobs One of her largest points is that we are progressively losing our grip on what Science is in fact. I don't think she's all wrong about that.
on “Are ‘Dark Ages’ Inevitable?” ↗I guess I'm what you'd call a leftist (but I prefer progressive). I read Life+Death and Dark Age Ahead. Jacobs never struck me as conservative, whatever that even means. A preservationist, to be sure. I don't think Dark Age Ahead is going to be handed out at CPAC. Burned maybe. BTW, what does conservative…
on “On Jane Jacobs (2017)” ↗…few different theories of social collapse which could be applied to understanding possibilities for academia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Theories And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead "Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and…
on “Time to talk about why so many postgrads have poor mental health” ↗…her name. Jane Jacobs wrote, among other books: - Cities and the Wealth of Nations - The Death and Life of Great American Cities - The Economy of Cities Her last book, in 2004, was ominously titled "Dark Age Ahead". Incidentally, I worked down the street from where she lived at the time of her death (the Annex, in Toronto). Her ideas were a recurring topic at the pub, the Duke of York.
on “Megacities, not nations, are the world’s dominant, enduring social structures” ↗…schism between public/private. Jane Jacobs also wrote critically of what Universities had become (credentialing), and how it might (negatively) affect our culture sometime down the line in her book, Dark Age Ahead.
on “Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills” ↗