Neotechnics
Lewis Mumford’s term for the third epoch of technological revolution, characterized by an “electricity and alloy complex” that carries the potential for decentralized production and a restoration of autonomy. In Technics and Civilization (1934), Mumford describes three historical epochs: the eotechnic (water/wind power, heterogeneous innovation, roughly 15th–18th centuries); the paleotechnic (coal/steam, centralization, the Industrial Revolution); and the neotechnic (electricity, distributed manufacturing, late 19th century onward).
The neotechnic phase is characterized by tools scaled for workshop, neighborhood, and village — CNC machines, refined information circulation, alternative energy — that imply a “marriage of town and country, of industry and agriculture.” As interpreted through Kevin Carson’s Homebrew Industrial Revolution, the neotechnic toolkit is largely mature but politically underutilized: the exit from extractivist, centralized regimes has not caught up with the liberatory capacities of the neotechnic energy paradigm.
In the context of Ethereum and web3, “we are the neotechnics” (— We Are the Neotechnics) is a call to recognize that decentralized ledger technology is continuous with a longer history of distributed production infrastructure, and to create coordination mechanisms — Quadratic Funding, DAOs, p2p supply chains — that allow these technologies to reinforce each other across scales. The neotechnic framing aligns with Vitalik’s d/acc philosophy of defensive, decentralized technology.