https://going-medieval.com/2023/07/26/on-successor-states-and-websites/
"This month, like everyone online, I have been watching with a mixture of
chagrin and schaudenfruede as platform capitalism digs itself into ever more
complex and narrow burrows. By this I mean it’s really funny how a bunch of
very rich dudes are breaking stuff online and making worse versions of existing
products in response to said breakage. Obviously it is quite amusing to be
shown how stupid rich people are, and I very much enjoy it. However, it is also
useful for my purposes as a medieval historian in that it serves as a really
excellent way of explaining to people what happened in the early medieval
period.
I know I have told you all this roughly a million times by now, but we define
the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe as happening with the deposition of
the Western Roman Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476. I, like most medieval
historians, don’t really subscribe to the theory of the “fall” of Rome. There’s
a number of reasons for this, from the fact that Eastern Rome very much was
still a thing, and would be for another thousand years or so over in
Constantinople, for one thing. For another, people didn’t really see it as
necessarily a “fall” at the time and that’s just something that we impose with
the benefit of hindsight.
However, we can all agree that there was at one point a structure called Rome
and in the fifth century it had been ticking along quite nicely for quite some
time. This isn’t to say that there weren’t different stages to that. There was
that cute lil’ time when they did a republic for rich guys, remember? That was
neat. And then something something very powerful men took over and you have
Emperors. OK cool, it’s not like there was a real equitable democracy going on
or something, so fine I guess. This isn’t also to say that it was a
particularly nice place. Yes it was absolutely kept afloat on the back of
enslavement and required ongoing warfare to conquer new lands and enslave new
peoples, and also grab whatever resources it could. There was religious
superstition that kept things like human dissection from happening thus
thwarting medical progress. There was rather a lot of feeding Christians to the
lions or sending them down the mines until everyone became Christians. But
there was also bread and circuses and some pretty cool buildings in the
imperial core if not necessarily everywhere else. Um amphorae came from
Tunisia! Things of this nature! So yeah, you know, Rome."
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
