One way to see how technology can be factored out is to consider a time when it changed more slowly. For instance, technology in ancient Rome hardly changed between, say, 180 A.D. and 400 A.D., at least by 21st century standards, and yet there's no doubt that Roman civilization declined precipitously during that time.

One of Moldbug's claims is that similar declines in the last two centuries or so have been masked by technological improvements. For example, in the 1960s many people routinely left their cars unlocked, often even leaving their keys in the ignition. [1] Meanwhile, technological improvements in the intervening ~50 years have made it much harder to steal cars. The way to factor out technology in this case is to imagine what would happen if modern cars had no alarm systems, no LoJacks, were easy to hot-wire, etc., and if people routinely left keys in the ignition of unlocked cars. It's not even hypothetical—you could actually do this as a real experiment. The result would, I predict, show that (at least in this narrow respect) American civilization has declined in the intervening years.

[1]: http://www.vdare.com/articles/why-hasnt-crime-fallen-further...