Medieval Horizons

The core argument is that the technological progress exponential curve we're on now didn't begin at the end of the middle ages, it began at the start - it's just the nature of exponential growth that it looks flat for a long time, despite the compounding rate being basically the same.

The point about the maximum speed of information transfer affecting the amount of necessary decentralisation, and the kinds of society structure available, sounds obvious but hadn’t considered it before. You have to have something like feudalism in a state above a certain geographical size if information takes too much time to travel.

The idea that a peasant would originally have drawn a symbol representing what they did for work, rather than a likeness, when asked to draw themselves at the start of the Middle Ages is also quite interesting.