☞ The Slow Work of Making Sense of History

The task of distilling history from the messiness of facts into the stories that make sense of our past is not an easy one. It takes time, requires meticulous work, and often a bit of temporal distance. The researcher examined the perils of making hasty judgments of the past with this story:

In 1972 Richard Nixon made the historic first visit by an American president to Communist China. During this visit, Nixon was engaged in many lengthy discussions with the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai. At on point, apparently at lunch, the conversation turned to revolutions, both successful and failed. When Zhou Enlai was asked about the implications of the French Revolution, he famously said, “It’s too early to tell.”

Chas Freeman (whom I had the honor to meet once) was Nixon’s interpreter during this visit. He later explained that Zhou Enlai’s response was not about the Great Revolution of 1789, but about the student uprising in Paris in May 1968. Sill, even if not nearly two centuries, four years had passed, but Zhou Enlai cautiously refused to pass the judgment.

I have previously mentioned my love for the CIA World Factbook, specifically its capsule summaries of the history of the entire globe’s 20th and 21st centuries (so far) in a single paragraph. Sadly, the World Factbook has been shut down, but I had a chance to capture one of its most recent such historical summaries, from the end of 2025:

Globally, the 20th century was marked by: (a) two devastating World Wars; (b) the Great Depression of the 1930s; (c) the end of vast colonial empires; (d) rapid advances in science and technology; (e) the Cold War between the Western alliance and the Warsaw Pact nations; (f) a sharp rise in living standards in North America, Europe, and Japan; (g) increased concerns about environmental degradation including deforestation, energy and water shortages, declining biological diversity, and air pollution; and (h) the ultimate emergence of the US as the only world superpower. The planet’s population continues to expand at a fast rate: from 1 billion in 1820 to 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999, 7 billion in 2012, and 8 billion in 2022. For the 21st century, the continued exponential growth in science and technology raises both hopes (e.g., advances in medicine and agriculture) and fears (e.g., development of even more lethal weapons of war).

The first year it published such a world summary was in 2001, which I found from the CIA’s now-offline archives. From 2001:

Globally, the 20th century was marked by: (a) two devastating world wars; (b) the Great Depression of the 1930s; (c) the end of vast colonial empires; (d) rapid advances in science and technology, from the first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (US) to the landing on the moon; (e) the Cold War between the Western alliance and the Warsaw Pact nations; (f) a sharp rise in living standards in North America, Europe, and Japan; (g) increased concerns about the environment, including loss of forests, shortages of energy and water, the drop in biological diversity, and air pollution; (h) the onset of the AIDS epidemic; and (i) the ultimate emergence of the US as the only world superpower. The planet’s population continues to explode: from 1 billion in 1820, to 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1988, and 6 billion in 2000. For the 21st century, the continued exponential growth in science and technology raises both hopes (e.g., advances in medicine) and fears (e.g., development of even more lethal weapons of war).

Between these two, there is little change in the way that the 20th century is described, aside from some different phrasings and a removal more recently of the mention of the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 20th century. The 21st century’s description remains quite brief.

This feels to me to be the slow work of historiography, slight modifications and a push against the tendency towards hasty reappraisals or anchoring on recent developments. Making sense of the past takes time.

And this slow work is also one of the reasons why the demise of the CIA World Factbook is so sad. Its steady collection of data and its spare analysis can be valuable in helping to construct “first drafts of history.” These sorts of resources are the precondition of making sense of our past and our current moment.

While the Internet Archive has much of what was lost (and others are building tools with the data), the very fact that this effort is no longer going forward is a sad one for those who used this resource.

But separate from the loss of the CIA World Factbook, there is simply a greater need to withhold judgment: to take our time in assessing what has happened in history and the effects of events and decisions. When embedded within a complex system—and for each of us, that’s our civilization—it is difficult to know how changes add up and ripple outwards. Patience and historical humility are necessary virtues here. ■

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The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 Scent, In Silico: “Once a primal instinct, olfaction is now being mapped, measured, and modeled by machines.”

🜚 America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs: This is delightful: “The argument goes like this: Before AI can transform a company, it has to access the company’s data and be woven into existing systems—which sounds easy, provided you’re not a chief technology officer. A trade secret of most Fortune 500 companies is that they still run many critical functions on lumbering, industrial-strength mainframe computers that almost never break down and therefore can never be replaced. Mainframes are like Christopher Walken: They’ve been going nonstop since the 1960s, they’re fantastic at performing peculiar roles (processing payments, safeguarding data), and nobody alive really understands how they work.”

🝊 A Brief History of the History of Science: “What do ‘Works in Progress’ and ‘Social Text’ have in common?”

🝤 From Earthbound to Stars: Analyzing Humanity’s Path to a Type II Civilization: “Our simulations suggest humanity could plausibly reach Type I status by 2271 CE through planetary-scale energy harnessing, advanced computation, and sustainable population management. Under optimistic assumptions of technological progress and resource use, Type II status may emerge between 3200-3500 CE, contingent on breakthroughs in stellar-scale infrastructures such as Dyson swarms or Matrioshka Brains and sustained interplanetary integration.”

🜚 “4 billion unique (and sometimes very memorable) sentences”

🝳 Paediatricians’ blood used to make new treatments for RSV and colds: “Antibodies harvested from the blood of paediatricians are up to 25 times better at protecting against the common respiratory infection RSV than existing antibody therapies, and are now being developed as preventative treatments”

🝤 x86 CPU made in CSS: “x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required.”

🜹 Chains of loving care: “Francesco felt right for a very human story about rediscovering a sense of wonder and unlocking the power of imagination. Its gentle, bookish, and human-made aspects are no accident. Frank Jalleau, the most influential French type designer of the past half-century (fun fact: he designed the typeface used in French passports), drew inspiration from Renaissance typefaces for this particular design.”

🝊 The Legibility Problem: “What happens in a world where AIs make scientific discoveries that humans cannot understand?”

🜚 HyperCard Changed Everything

🜹 Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It: “In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.”

Until next time.

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