 This is the last in a series of free, techno-critical reviews, examining the excuse that underpins the whole project of industrialisation, progress. Looking at Ronald Wright's 2004 book, That, 18 Years Later, still provides a well-observed, if bleak, view of the future. Ronald Wright is a Canadian historian and anthropologist. His 2004 book, A Short History of Progress, started as a series of lectures for Canadian broadcasts at CBC. The book also inspired the 2011 documentary, Surviving Progress, which sank into obscurity despite being better than Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation. Wright's case is stated at the beginning. The idea of material progress is a very recent one, coinciding closely with the rise of science and industry and the corresponding decline of traditional beliefs. We no longer give much thought to moral progress, except to assume that it goes hand in hand with the material. Our practical faving progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology, a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become myth, an arrangement of the past whether real or imagined in patterns that reinforce a culture's deepest values and aspirations. Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe, a seductive trail of successes may end in a trap. Wright highlights the flaw at the heart of modern society. It's a pyramid scheme. As demonstrated by recent and present-day economic crises, for the human system to exist, people need food, energy and shelter. As human society is urbanised, those commodities must be supplied not only just in time to consumers, but the consumers must be able to purchase them. They have no other recourse to survival under this system except as a unit of economic production. As Wright says, All pre-industrial cities were constrained by the difficulty of getting supplies in and wastes out. The unsavory truth is that until the mid-19th century, most cities were death traps, seething with disease, vermin and parasites. Average life expectancy in ancient Rome was only 19 or 20 years, much lower than in a Sonay settlement, but slightly better than Britain's black country. Without a constant inflow of soldiers, slaves, merchants and hopeful migrants, neither ancient Rome nor Georgian London could have kept its numbers up. Rome had several serious pandemics, possibly of Asian origin. While these caused manpower and fiscal problems, there may also have postponed the Empire's decline by relieving pressure on the land. The problems of resource supply today, from oil and gas to computer chips, were eased by the recent pandemic, only to be resurrected more perniciously in 2022's breakdown in global civility. But the reaction to the current crisis is to try and perpetuate the system, rather than fix its deep flaws. Civilisation is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. This human inability to foresee or watch out for long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo. They continue to prosper in darkening times, long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer. Does that sound familiar? Well we might see this book as intersecting with other concerns about ecological collapse, energy supply or pandemics, what the book proposes is a greater truth. It argues that the failure of urban societies are natively human. Throughout human history all settlements have been resource islands requiring a supply of materials to keep functioning. Nomadic hunter-gatherers just moved, but once society became settled it created a whole new problem, logistics. Civilisation is therefore most unstable at its peak when it has reached maximum demand on the ecology. Unless a new source of welfare energy appears it has no room left to raise production or absorb the shock of natural fluctuations. The only way onward is to keep ringing new loans from nature and humanity. Once nature starts to foreclose with erosion, crop failure, famine, disease the social contract breaks down. Right's conclusion to logistical underpinnings of historic societies and the extent that modern society has created logistical webs to capture resources is not thrilling, which is probably why the book has received so little attention since its initial success. Civilisations often fall quite suddenly as they reach full demand on their ecologies. They become highly vulnerable to natural fluctuations. The most immediate danger posed by climate change is weather instability causing a series of crop failures in the world's bread baskets. Droughts, floods, fires and hurricanes are rising in frequency and severity. The pollution caused by these and by wars add to the gyre of destruction. Medical experts worry that nature may swat us with disease. Billions of overcrowded primates, many sick, malnourished and connected by air travel are a free lunch waiting for a nimble microbe. These events are entirely foreseeable and if only the ecological lobby could escape its complacent trance of first-world affluence perhaps we'll be talking more about the precise mechanics of these problems. The case of reform that I've tried to make is not based on altruism nor save in nature for its own sake. The most compelling reason for reform in our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine. Whether it is from the point of view of who benefits from technology or its effects on those subject to it or the overarching purpose of that society, modernity has become a suicide cult and even many who are critical of it willingly work to protect and preserve the system that holds them enthralled whilst at the same time destroying their future. If there is a way out of rights progress trap then that will only materialize when we step outside of the myths which our dominant culture holds to be true.