ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s, a recurring political and intellectual thread has focused on the possibility that less-developed nations might skip the phase of despoiling, heavy industrialism, and chaotic urbanization – leapfrogging what Lewis Mumford (1934) called the ‘Palaeotechnic’ and embracing a clean (green) ‘neotechnic’ version of modernity. Until now, this vision has intersected little with the reality of economic modernization. As Pinker has argued, a great many societies have become richer, more urban, and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. But the ecological and social costs of such development have been enormous, little resembling the decentralist visions of Mumford or Gandhi. However, over the last two decades, on the back of the Internet and the emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution there are real possibilities for ‘neotechnic’ development trajectories that bypass the zero sums of traditional modernization. This chapter reviews these linkages and outlines the possibility of a convergence between the need for real development in the Global South and the likely informalization of Western economic and, by extension, civic welfare systems.
