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Textiles: Humanity’s Early Tech Boom
We often underappreciate how much human intelligence and technology that goes into creating every piece of cloth. Cloth has been an integral part of our lives as we’re wrapped in cloth from the moment we’re born. We are clothed for the majority of our days, the first thing we reach for after a shower is a towel and even those who sleep nude are covered in a blanket. This hasn’t changed from the earliest of civilisations.
Civilisation:
The Silk Road itself is a testament to how important fabrics were in human history, being the most important network of trade routes linking the East and West during the Han Dynasty (130BCE). Weaving used to be a highly time-consuming activity until the invention of mechanised thread spinners, ie power loom, spinning jenny. The invention was a key development to the Industrial Revolution that made it cheaper and faster to produce clothes, sails, burlap sacks, bags and straps, accelerating the economy and other fields of innovation. Of course, this also led to unsavoury child labour practices, cotton picking by enslaved Africans and exploitation of developing nations due to fast fashion. The fabric of humanity, good and bad, is literally woven and interwoven together, a thread at a time.
Linguistic evidence:
Technology, Textile and Text all come from the same Indo-European root word “teks-” meaning to weave. An heirloom is called an heirloom because the loom was the most valuable thing to pass down generations in a family. There’s a reason twitter threads and comment threads are called as such. They link texts together to complete the message. Clearly there’s a strong connection between the notion of weaving and the concept of technology and information.
People who reject new technologies or methods are called “Luddites”. Well, Luddites were originally English weavers in the 1810s who destroyed sewing mills and power looms as they were threatening their weaving jobs during the Industrial Revolution. There will be Luddites in every technological boom in human history, just as there are in modern advancements and cryptocurrencies The weaving techniques and production have changed, but the basics of textiles and its place in humanity has remained. Same goes for other technologies serving mankind, the form will change but the fundamentals of human needs and desires will not.
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