Consume Product - Arete Network

It's *not* that extraordinary. You are viewing this on a screen of some sort. In order for that screen to have gotten into your hands, *thousands* of intelligent people were involved. Whatever screen you're viewing this on probably came in some sort of package - have you seen the assembly line machines that automatically build and package goods? It's a mind-boggling feat of engineering, little goddamn flipper arms throwing things around, all meticulously engineered to move the package in just the right way, and do it consistently, every single time.

It's not just "one really smart guy". There's tons of people like that out there and they're all working on their own engineering projects. Are you typing on a keyboard? Pull one of the keys out and look at it. Look at the design that the simple key uses to interface with the switch mechanism underneath it.

Every structure of the key required engineering that your average manual laborer could never do. The keyboard key was mass produced on a machine that your average manual laborer could never have conceived. It was painted with chemicals your average manual laborer could never synthesize.

You look at our world of wonder and see things like a keyboard as a sort of singular object that simply 'exists'. That's a manual laborer's view of the world.

I look at the keyboard and I think "even the simple spring that pushes the key back up after I press it, someone at some point had to come up with just the right compression force of that spring for the ideal feel of the key press, and someone had to engineer a machine that would extrude and wind that tiny spring, and someone did enormous amounts of math to come up with the exact material and shape to wind in the correct way to compress and decompress properly".

Your average ConPro farmer will think about how great he is for being a farmer and look down at the 'educated' elites with their 'fake degrees'.

Then he [pulls this thing out](https://dickey-john.com/products/moisture-testers/portable-moisture-testers/gac-500xt/), a device he utterly relies upon to tell him whether or not his crop of grain is worth anything at all, that was invented entirely by those very same elites.

Meanwhile half of the work of farming is completely computerized these days. You literally just tell the tractor where to put the tramlines and off you go.