And what if you believed that the knowledge that was once commonplace, and which could help to soften the fall — be it gradual or cataclysmic — is on the verge of disappearing under the waves of industrial-scale production, consumption, digitalisation, specialisation, co-dependence and the strategy of divide-and-conquer?
Welcome to forthefall.net — an open-source documentation and research-and-development project which aims to capture and collate as much of the knowledge as possible that could soften the fall of industrial civilisation, and to reimagine or reinvent the tools, techniques and systems of the early 20th century using the technological developments of the intervening years — but in a way that doesn't assume the indefinite production or availability of modern parts or services.
Quick Aside: Why is this website so slow?
Thanks for asking. It's 'slow' because the per-user access speed has been limited to 33,600bps; it's slow because it doesn't need to be any faster, and to demonstrate that it was — and will be again — perfectly possible to obtain and share information at acoustic modem speeds; and it's slow to consciously reject the perceived need for faster and faster computers and communications links which, on whole, just serve to appease the 'need' for instant gratification, consumption and distraction.
(But don't worry — once this site has enough information on it to warrant mirroring and the creation of off-line archives, any such snapshots will be made available at normal speeds.)