The most dramatic loss for the ordinary person wasn't a specific machine or a secret formula, but rather the catastrophic collapse of standardization and mass production.

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 The most dramatic loss for the ordinary person wasn't a specific machine or a secret formula, but rather the catastrophic collapse of standardization and mass production.

If you were a peasant living in Britain or Northern Gaul around 350 AD, your quality of life was supported by a massive, interconnected global economy. You likely ate off high-quality, mass-produced ceramic plates imported from North Africa. You lived under a roof made of standardized fired clay tiles. You used metal tools made of iron smelted in industrial quantities.

By 500 AD, just a few generations later, those "everyday" technologies had vanished from the lives of ordinary people.

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