This will become a problem even if there would be no war. Energy resources had almost finished, and no viable alternatives were found.
With the exceptions of energy, helium, and the insignificant amounts incorporated into space probes, the humans do not consume mineral resources; they concentrate them, dilute them, and move them around, but they do not consume them. For example, there is just as much neodymium on Earth as there was a million years ago, to a precision of several decimal places. The difference is that now much of it is separated from the other lanthanoids (a difficult and energy-intensive process) and concentrated in junkyards and landfills.
> Energy resources had almost finished
This is pretty hard to predict, but I think this is more a problem of knowledge and organization than of resources. The first commercial human solar energy plant was built in Egypt in 1912–3 in Maadi by Frank Shuman, the guy who invented that horrible safety glass with wires running through it. It didn't use photovoltaic cells; it used a low-pressure steam engine. (And he sold the results as irrigation water, not electricity as originally planned.) It couldn't compete with increasingly cheap oil, but at the time it would probably have operated at a profit if the Great War hadn't broken out the next year, resulting in the British Army expropriating it as "raw materials"; Shuman was quoted in the New York Times saying, "We have proved the commercial profit of sun power in the tropics and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun."
But certainly the humans managed to trap one another in a crab-bucket of material poverty for thousands of years before, and they could do it again.
Reminder that the sun exists.
Even modest amounts of bronze and iron smelting cleared forests (for charcoal) throughout the Mediterannean and European regions. Much of the reason for forest regrowth throughout Europe has been the shift to other fuels. Nonrenewable fossil fuels.
Which have issues both of abundance and atmospheric impacts.
Returning to an era of predominantly solar energy, even with our considerably enhanced technical and scientific knowledge, absent the preindustrial ease of access to specific materials (iron, copper, etc.), as well as that great advance: naturally-occurring agricultural fertilisers (saltpetre from India, guano from South America and Pacific islands), would be ... markedly different from the present.
Plants are a very inefficient way of converting sunlight into work. The difficulty was not a matter of energy scarcity; it was that the humans didn't know what energy was, how to bore a cylinder, or how to vacuum-silver a mirror. There are very significant bootstrapping difficulties, yes, but also very significant bootstrapping resources, if we can preserve them. Knowledge is the most important one.
> absent the preindustrial ease of access to specific materials (iron, copper, etc.)
Copper and especially iron are immensely more accessible in the humans' landfills than they ever were in ore deposits.
Artificial fertilizer synthesis does seem like it might be particularly tricky to carry out at a small scale.
The point remains that for primary energy, we don't have a whole lot of options, and plant productivity is much of that. A modern civilisation knocked back won't have nuclear power, reliable electrical transmission, or advanced battery technologies. Mobility of fuels will be limited.[2]
"Technology", a distractingly vague term, seems to be based on specific modalities, each with its own specific capabilities and limitations.[3] Precision boring is contingent on sufficent-quality metalurgy, based on available materials, fuels, and smelting/casting controls, as well as measurement and feedback (information/systems management) controls. At that, what you buy in, say, a reciprocating steam engine, is a net fuel-to-work efficiency gain from about 3% (Watt ~1800) to about 25% (best stationary triple-expansion engines). Locomotive steam engines were about 10% efficienty, barely 3x better than Watt's 1800 design.[4] That is: precision and technology still only bring you up to theoretical maximum efficiencies. Process and systems management technology is at best a fractional factor 0 <= t < 1. (Many proposed technologies end up with efficiencies well below 0. We typically don't adopt those.)
Fuels are larger multipliers. Increasing applied energy frequently increases potential output as a multiple factor: capital + process + n times more energy results in some tn times more output (where n > 1 and 0 <= t < 1). You can keep applying more energy to a process for ever increasing outputs, at least to a considerable extent -- generally to thermal, friction, vibrational, stress, or other limits.
Landfill mining has been suggested. It was a (minor, though not miner) element in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth* (1976). And has long been practiced, historically and presently, with a range of consequences.
The more general problem here is that recycling is at best less than 100% efficient, and the generational loss is r^g (g == generations, with 0 <= r < 1). The most-recycled current materials within the US is lead, largely from car batteries), with rates of 74%. At two generations, the remaining material is 55%. After 10, it's less than 5%.[5] Eventually dust is your best source. Non-ore-forming materials (e.g., rare earths) already exhibit this, the difficulty in their sourcing isn't due to their scarcity per se (they're relatively abundant within Earth's crust), but in their failure to concentrate, and the immense amounts of overburden and tailings created in their use. It's less a matter of mining than of pollution and landscape spoilage exporting, costs China have been willing to absorb in recent decades.
The next H-B alternative, not dependent on abundant natural gas,[7] or lack of one, will be hugely monumental. I'd hedge my bets on a bioengineered process, though there are others being pursued, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01145
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fu...
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Notes:
1. Both based on incident sunlight => stored energy, generally as cellulose or lipids. Algael productivity discounts the likely impact of parasites and/or disease on large-scale development (as does land cropping). Lifeforms other than human are also keen on large and convenient plant-energy stores.
2. There's little discussion of this even in histories which take an energy-centric viewpoint such as Smil or Weissenbacher, but a key liability for fossil fuel energy resources was that they were so unevenly distributed, and transportation capabilities so limited. Better to (locally) gather fuelwood, dung, press olive for oils, or render animal tallow, than to try hauling seacoal, natural tar, or the few rare oil seeps more than a few tens of km.
Even the coal-rich US didn't transition from wood until its inland rail-based transportation system was developed. On which coal still represents a large share of revenues and massive constituent of total ton-miles. Oil's development as a fuel waited in part on reliable metalurgy, the capability to construct pipes of more than ~10cm in diameter and a few tens of metres in length. Along with rights-of-way, a sufficient challenge that as of WWII, major infrastructure (the Big Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines, still in use) were constructed not by private industry but by the Federal Government.
International oil shipments were contingent on developing double-hulled supermassive oil tankers. Ari Onassis, Greek shipping magnate, was, it turns out, a Greek supertanker shipping magnate.
After water, sand, and gravel, oil is the most-transported material in the modern economy.
Natural gas likewise is more difficult to transport than oil or coal, requiring hermetically-sealed containment, and high pressures and/or low temperatures. It has a tendency to go boom in ways that coal and oil for the most part don't, which makes neighbours even edgier than for those materials.
Transport and nonuniformly-distributed fuels are co-dependent.
3. My thinking leads to identification of nine of these: 1. fuels, 2. materials, 3. process (technical) knowlege, 4. causal (scientific) knowledge, 5. network dyanmics, 6. systems management (physical, social, informational), 7. information (acquisition, parsing, processing, storage/retrieval, transmission), 8. power transmission & transformation, and 9. hygiene (addressing unintended / undesired consequences). Still in development. See (in slightly earlier form): https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww
4. Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization, (2017). Figure 5.5, p.243.
5. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/recycling-statistics-and-i...
6. A chief export of Trinidad and Tobago, and the reason for that small Caribbean island nation's hugely outsized per-capita carbon footprint.
See:
T&T EMissions Trends: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/emis/t_t.html
T&T CO2 emissions https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/trinidad-and-tob...
Global per-capita emissions https://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... (from: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-worlds-carbon-emiss...)
T&T exports / economy: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-are-the-major-natur...
If we want to compare the carrying capacity of Spaceship Earth under solar power in the future and the past, I think it behooves us to consider the whole sunbeam-to-wheels efficiency, or sunbeam-to-hooves, as the case may be. It's true that photosynthesis is about 1–3% efficient (I think beema and sugarcane can approach 4% at times), but typical crop yields are closer to 0.3 W/m² [1], which is an efficiency of 0.1% if sunlight averages 300 W/m². Also, muscles are not perfectly efficient, and animals can't spend 100% of their energy input on their muscles; they have to spend some of it on digestion, homeostasis, reproduction, and — though this may be redundant — rest. So if draft animals are 20% efficient [0] and food production by photosynthesis is 0.1% efficient, then the total sunlight-to-hooves efficiency of plowing with oxen, horses, or by pulling the plow by hand, is in the neighborhood of 0.02%.
By contrast, low-cost photovoltaic panels are 16% efficient, as you say; electric motors and generators are typically about 90% efficient in combination, and the rest of the electrical system is typically about 90% efficient, as long as no batteries or high-voltage transmission are required. This gives a sunlight-to-wheels efficiency of about 13% for the best realistic case of solar, about 600 times better than corn-fed oxen. (Multijunction cells could push that up to 33% or so, but they're far too expensive with current production techniques.)
However, it might prove difficult to refine silicon in the case of a collapse of the post-1970s industrial infrastructure, so perhaps it is best not to calculate based on photovoltaic panels. A more conservative low-tech case is, as you imply, a CSP-driven steam engine like Frank Shuman's 1912 Sun Power Company power station Solar Engine One, which I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22363678 and which reputedly achieved about 4% efficiency [2]. If applied to Watt's 3%-efficient vacuum engine driving a generator, a solar thermal collector with an easily accessible efficiency of 50% would produce sunlight-to-wheels efficiency of about 1.2% — not great, but still 60 times better than oxen or corn-fed farm boys.
So there are, I think, excellent reasons to believe that solar energy could sustain current levels of human population on Spaceship Earth, even after a hypothetical systemic collapse.
As for proposed energy technologies with efficiencies below 0, these would be perpetual-motion machines: if applied to a 100-watt load, an engine of efficiency -10% would supply the load with 100 watts while consuming -10 watts, which is to say, producing 10 watts in some other form, perhaps electricity. I do not expect to see many of these. Perhaps this was not what you meant?
I will respond separately to your comments about materials recycling.
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[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2016/07/18/fueling... Tour de France riders eat 6000 to 8000 kcal per day (25–35 MJ in modern units, 300–400 W), 30% of which is just their basal metabolism, while racing 6 hours per day at about 400 watts of power output. That's about 30% cornbread-to-wheels efficiency, but it omits the power usage of reproduction, growth, and homeostasis — racers can't train year-round at Tour-de-France intensity levels without dying, nor can they do it while pregnant or growing out of childhood. Even during the race, most days are less than 6 hours of racing, and there are two official "rest" days with no racing at all.
[1] http://www.worldofcorn.com/#us-average-corn-yield-metric says US corn yield is 11 tonnes/hectare, presumably per year. If corn is the standard 15.5% moisture and the rest carbohydrate and protein at 4 kcal/g — not precisely correct, but close enough — that's about 0.5 W/m². https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/circulars/production.pdf table 04 says the world produced 1079.9 million metric tons of corn in the 2017/18 year on 192.12 million hectares, for a yield of 5.62 tonnes/hectare, so that seems reasonable, but that's only ¼ W/m².
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/power-from-sunshi... is an article Shuman wrote before building it. The actually built plant was reported to produce only about 50 to 60 horsepower when the sun was shining; according to M. Ragheb's Solar Thermal Power and Energy Storage Historical Perspective, it had five 62 m × 4 m troughs at 7.6 m spacing, totaling 248 m² of collector. However, this would collect 248 kW of insolation, implying an efficiency of 15–18%, which is implausibly high for a steam engine. Ragheb also, contradictorily, reports that it was 4% efficient. I suspect a unit conversion error.
On net ag efficiency: I've ... looked into this somewhat, with Vaclav Smil and Howard & Eugene Odum being generally recommended sources.
One aspect of the ecological approach is to look at plants not so much as inefficient, but as the end result of about 3.5 billion years of process refinement, optimising for numerous characteristics, not simply stored carbohydrate/lipids energy, including diseases, weather, pest, and other tolerances. Much of human ag selective breeding borrows energy from those plant services in favour of food productivity. The result is plants less able to thrive on their own. Optimising fertiliser and watering quantities and schedules also allows greater productivity. How much of that is specifically reliant on additional energy inputs is harder to pin down, though fertilisers pre Haber-Bosch were reliant on accumulated deposits generally moved by sailing ships. We could (if necessary) revert to sail, but those deposits are largely gone.
Looking at annual areal output is a good metric. US productivity actually lags Europe if I recall -- Holland is especially efficient.
On animal energy output levels, athletes are best considered as demonstrating a maximum possible short-term output, not a long-term population average. Particularly in the face of suboptimal nutrition, disease, and injury.
Smil's got an impressive set of tables and charts (making excellent use of logarithmic scales) showing output of humans, various draught and domesticated animals, etc. One factoid I've stored away is that a blue whale has roughly the metabolic output of a tractor-trailer rig. And yes: sustained animal output is pretty sharply limited, across scales: per day, sustained over weeks or months throughout the year, or even over lifetimes. Overexertion or overuse severely curtails output, and peak outputs are not sustainable over long periods. (Something Frederick Taylor rather famously omitted from his "scientific" studies.) Figuring about 25% of a typical human's 2,500 - 3,500 calories gives a range of about 30-45 watts of continuous output.
Note that the acre was originally unit of area derived from a measure of work: the amount of land a farmer and team of oxen could plough in a day. In German: Tagwerk, literally "days' work". The unit was variable (condition of land, soil, oxen, and plough determined tillable area), and represented less than a full day's work as the animals had to be rested and pastured.
(Smil notes that a large waterwheel or windmill, and many early Watt steam engines, delivered about 5-20 horsepower, about 3.7 - 15 kW, of power. And that made a huge difference.)
On carrying capacity net net, one of the most highly recommended sources I've run across (though not yet read) is Joel E. Cohen's How Many People Can the Earth Support? (https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-many-people-can-the-earth...). My understanding is that he explores the basis and implications of values ranging from < 1 billion to > 1,000 billion, which includes most credible (and possibly some less than) estimates.
One point most serious discussions hammer is that "how many" goes along with "how much", in terms of resources:
I = P * A * T
On energy systems and conversion mechanisms: the interesting thing is how little the story's changed in 50, 75, or even 100 years. We've added fission, and PV's gotten remarkably better. Batteries have improved tremendously. Fusion's still a pipe dream. Otherwise: plants, sun, wind, water, geothermal, waves. Flux per unit area is a very good analysis metric, see the late David MacCay's Renewable Energy Without the Hot Air (http://withouthotair.com)
My suspicion is that direct solar thermal (avoids conversion losses) and CSP power (simple and robust) are likely mainstays. There's been some interesting research into low-tech silicon-fabrication processes, with the Global Village Construction Kit (now apparently rolled into Open Source Ecology / Appropedia) doing some work. Purity and process control are major limitations.
See:
https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia
Among the higher DDG results is your own GitHub laserboot repo:
https://github.com/kragen/laserboot
NB: Technologies with a less than zero efficiency factor remove useful energy from the system. A brake would be an example. Perpetual motion technologies have efficiencies >= 1. Which seems unlikely in practice.
(It's a joke, laugh.)
Your ontology in particular is very interesting. I'll probably spend some time looking into it.
As for perpetual stuff, it's just a matter of signature... ;-)
They're interesting and important questions.
It also helps to have review of ideas -- both for correcting and clarifying them.
Are you saying that 74% of lead discarded in the US is sent for recycling, or that of the part sent for recycling, 74% is successfully recovered, the other 26% being lost in various kinds of waste, or what? "74%" does show up in your source https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium... as the "percentage recycled" for lead in 2012 (table 1), which is explained as "Calculated by dividing the amount recycled by the apparent supply". On its face, this seems to suggest that 74% of the lead bought by lead consumers, such as battery manufacturers, was sourced from recycling, while the other 26% came from mining or importation, without providing any information about losses in the recycling process. Aluminum has 50% for 2016 in that same table (down from 57% in 2012), but only about 10% of aluminum is lost to oxidation during recycling.
The interesting question from my point of view is how the available waste compares to natural ores, whether that waste is from recycling losses such as dust around smelting mills, or from other sources such as treasure hunting, in the difficulty of recovering useful material from it. Since the concentrations of many interesting elements are orders of magnitude higher than their natural concentrations in ores — particularly in elements like the lanthanoids which, as you point out, do not concentrate very much† — my naïve supposition is that landfill mining will be considerably cheaper. (Moreover, because landfills are at the surface, it can be done without the risks of the black-damp or the stink-damp, though perhaps surprise PCB-filled transformers might compensate.)
As for H–B, it can be carried out perfectly well on electrolytic hydrogen, but that is only economic in the absence of a source of methane, or when energy is abundant.
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I love the way you dis "technology". In your mindmap I think there is a very significant thing missing, one which, as an illegal immigrant in a third-world country, I am constantly aware of.
What's missing? Well, suppose you want to replicate Watt's vacuum steam engine; let's analyze it in your framework, and see what's missing.
You need some kind of fuel, both to shape the metal and to run the steam engine once it's finished.
You need materials — at a minimum, you need some kind of material that can withstand the steam while holding the precise tolerances needed to seal the cylinder, and you need some kind of sealing material, whether that's hemp, leather, rubber, or the cast-iron, bronze, or carbon steel for Ramsbottom's miraculous piston rings. (And, yeah, something for lubrication.)
You need the technical knowledge ("process and system knowledge" in your diagram) to shape and assemble the parts of the engine, and the causal knowledge ("symbolic expression and manipulation") to troubleshoot it, fix it, and improve its design for your situation.
Although it may not be absolutely necessary, the network dynamics that enable you to obtain all of the above, and distribute the fruits of your steam-engine, are certainly an immense boon. Similarly for systems management ("Governance, Management, & Organization" in your diagram).
I'm not sure that you need much in the way of information processing, power transmission, or hygiene to build your steam engine.
So, suppose you have all these things; you're a master machinist and mechanical engineer in a post-apocalyptic village just uphill from a spring with an urgent need to irrigate their fields (the network dynamics). You have an ample supply of scrap metal of all kinds, plenty of books on steam-engine design, and friends who are willing to risk their lives operating your steam-engine once it gets built. The alpine forest nearby provides all the firewood you could need. What are you missing?
You don't have any tools! You aren't going to get very far building a steam engine by banging bits of scrap metal together. You need to invest in some capital goods, which are classically considered one of the three primary factors of production, along with land and labor. You're going to need a foundry with crucibles and casting flasks; a lathe, with gears or a whip to drive it, at least some centers and a dog if not a chuck; vises; hammers; drills; hardened steel cutting tools for the lathe, and abrasive tools to sharpen them with; files for detail work; at least some vernier calipers if not micrometers, and probably scales, surface plates, indicators, and a balance; and some way to measure the composition of your scrap metal, of which I have no idea. You can bootstrap these from raw materials, but getting there is going to require some further intermediate tools — at least a pottery kiln, and probably also a wood shop and some means for assaying soils.
This is an amusing omission because, in my experience, it's common both for the vulgar to confuse tools such as cellphones with "technology" as a whole, which of course includes the whole technological matrix that you're analyzing; and for ignorant rulers to believe that the crucial ingredient in economic prosperity is for an outside company to open a factory in your town, thus "providing work".
Speaking of ignorant rulers, maybe this is in some sense implicit in your "network dynamics" or "Governance, Management, & Organization" categories, but I think it deserves special attention: a major obstacle to technological development always and everywhere is violence, in a couple of different forms. First, outright witch-burning is a constant threat, as experienced by Giordano Bruno, the Maya codices, Steve Kurtz, Aaron Swartz, Charles Lieber, and numerous others; second, and not entirely separate, unfreedom, expropriation, and wanton destruction, all by means of collective violence, destroyed Shuman's Solar Engine One, the first RepRap, Archimedes' life, Galileo's career, and Zuse's Z1, and nipped many other promising developments in the bud.
But such violence does not arise in isolation; it proceeds from a social climate that nurtures and foments it, which can impede progress even when it doesn't erupt into outright vandalism and murder. So I think there's a certain necessary element of tolerance and admiration of technical excellence whose lack strangles any hope of progress in most social climates. Not only did they laugh at Fulton, the Wright Brothers, and Bozo the Clown, they laughed at William Kamkwamba; how many other Kamkwambas has Malawi lost that way?
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† It isn't true that lanthanoids don't form ores at all; monazite and bastnäsite are ores of lanthanoids (as well as actinoids). Cerium in the earth's crust, for example, is about 60 ppm on average, but typically almost half (which would be 500 000 ppm) of either of these ores, so it's more concentrated there by three or four orders of magnitude. The difficulty is that they all form the same ore because they're damn near identical, chemically speaking, which is why many of them were among the last elements to be isolated. But this is very much not the case with landfill, in which the lanthanoids are conveniently separated not only from one another but from the hazardous actinoids — although cigarette-lighter flints have many lanthanoids, if you're mining catalytic converters, they'll be entirely free of both thorium and lanthanum.
On the ontology: that's an ontology of technological mechanisms.
It is not a reclassification of technological fields or domains. And it really is not a dis of technology, it's an attempt to clearly define what it is that technology does, and how. A question that's otherwise often very frustratingly avoided.
Economics treats "technology" simply as a synonym for "efficiency" or some "productivity multiplier".
There are both a theory of technology and a philosophy of technology, but neither really addresses this point. (Both tend to focus far more on social interactions and elements, which has been argued as a consequence of the more-socially-oriented philosophers and theorists not being comfortable with the, erm, technical aspects of technology.
So, to the ontology.
Your basic tools are often largely power transmission and conversion systems. "Simple machines" was much of what I had in mind in that category, though it includes more: levers, wedges, ramps, screws, gears, pulleys. Rope (tension) and stone (compression) both have transmission components. (Combine them, as a fibre-composite material: adobe-straw bricks, fibreglass, carbon-fibre, reinforced concrete, and you end up with a material with force-management properties.)
It's not that I don't consider tools. It's that tools themselves are not independent of the ontology, which concerns mechanisms and dynamics. Tools are not dynamics, they are implements embodying or achieving one or more dynamics. (I'd argue always at least two: material and, typically, power transmission or measurement, though usually also process knowledge, possibly others.)
Your simple tools -- hammers, saws, drills, planes, chisels, lathes, etc., are largely specific devices for converting one form of power or motion to some useful effect.
Electric devices are similar: generators convert motion to electricity, motors convert electricity to motion. PV converts light to electricity, LEDs convert electricity to light. Microphones convert audio energy to electrical signals, speakers convert electrical energy to audio waves.
Then there are furnaces, smelters, ovens, kilns, etc., measurement and monitoring tools. Maths if necessary to model your design. Etc., etc.
Most power transmission operates through thermal, kinetic, or electromagnetic forces. There are some which might operate through strong or weak nuclear force. Arguments could be made for chemistry as a mechanism, though that decomposes to electromagnetic interactions.
(I belive it's Smil who describes hydraulic accumulators as an early-stage technology and one which still substitutes for electricity in some applications: dentist's offices, auto repair shops, Amish workshops, and through liquid hydraulics in many heavy-lift applications. In the late 19th century there'd been hydraulic distribution networks spanning kilometers in industrial blocks and ports especially. For intermittent high loads they're particularly well-suited.)
So: to build a steam engine, you'd need the raw materials, the know-how, power transmission (rocker beam, flywheel, and gearwork, shaft or belt drives, etc.), and yes, some earlier instances of technological mechanisms implemented in materals suitable as tools: hammers, chisels, drills, lathes, grinders, and the like.
As for the hygiene factors of a steam engine: you have issues with radiating thermal energy, combustion gasses and ash, and the changes that any such machine might have on business, economic, social, and environmental considerations. All of those are emergent or unintended consequences, often not immediately evident. Robert K. Merton's study of latent vs. manifest functions has recently struck me as highly relevant and interesting. In particular, his observation that as tools of understanding, latent functions are far more significant than manifest ones because they are not as apparent. This itself likely has further ... latent ... consequences.
On ignorant rulers as a governance mode: yes, effectively. I'd lump military leadership, governance, business management, courts, ecclesiastical organisation, industrial process controls, robotics, etc., as forms of management. The essential elements are system, state, sensing, decision, action, and feedback. Fundamentally: cybernetics.
There's a wonderful quote from the world of sailing:
"The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."
-- Charles H. Cotter
There's more to it than that, and the quote misses the elements of observation, decision, and action (or implies but doesn't explicitly state them). Still, I think it captures the essence of what I mean by "management".
On the resistances to technological innovations, I'd strongly recommend Bernhard J. Stern's 1937 work of the same title:
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
Which I liked so much I retyped in Markdown, suitable for PDF or ePub via Pandoc:
https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is
Stern, a sociologist, develops a theory of what drives this, which I think you'll find interesting and applicable to recent examples you cite.
Dysfunctional as that response is, it is part of the inherent, and I'd argue default governance mode. Which like many other default modes of behaviour, has to be modified or adapted if you wish to get past it.