If you ever read Il Principe by Machiavelli you know he describes how after a war the ruler should punish and kill the worst animals in it, the cruelest butchers, because they have no use in the new peacefull society achieved. Also if a ruler wants to prevent uprisings there should be no fortifications left standing around cities, so they are defenseless and can be easily threatened or dominated. This is an example of tool removal, to prevent abuse.
Humanity makes a lot of tools and technology, and the economy tries to make whatever is made generate as much cashflow for banks, regardless of utility or consequence for nature, humans etc. If a company invents a thing that people like to use, they can keep doing that until a popular uprising or new law prevents them. Example are DDT, Sigarettes, dangerous cars, the list is endless. The advocated free market economy does not protect anyone and only serves to maximize bank cashflow. Economics is still making fossil fuel based expansion plans as our oceans are starting to boil from fossil fuel powered tool use.
[I don’t use pictures because copyright hawks will fine 200 for use even without the author getting any money]
The big error is that we do not strive for specific outcomes. A city can be designed with a specific outcome in mind, this is the nature of design, but the world is discouraged from designing an outcome. It is the most natural thing. But this does not allow maximal cashflow for banks, and to retain their power banks must strive for it no matter what. It seems Singapore is the best planned society. The reason why planning in building works is because it makes bank cashflow predictable. You can not plan for the elimination of banks by adopting 100% self owned renewables to do everything you need.
But back to the tool story. When the french revolution happend there as demand for guillotines, and after it that demand dropped, but the guillotine makers where trying to sell them to anyone because they knew how to make em. The same with electric chairs, they where sold as thrones in Africa, The economy does not watch the proliferation of products or tools that makes no sense, it does not care.
It would make much more sense to both guide the growth and shutdown of some companies, because their existence becomes damaging and problematic after a while. When talking about big building projects, if its done with a lot of equipment, the economy assumes that equipment will be redistributed across the world to do work elsewhere. But often the people and money involved allows them to corrupt local people into initiating a next project that uses all the resources already present, the tools persist and because money flows banks don’t object. You could take the concrete jungle found around some cities in Italy (Palermo) as an example of tool persistence through corruption.
Tool use must be based on a vision, tool retirement or demolishing should be a common thing to prevent overuse due to corruption
A main reason this went wrong in the past was lack of oversight, of monitoring and care, but today we have computer systems that can model the use of equipment, tools products across the entire world. We can even detect vehicles from space, track progress by image analysis. We can prevent overuse of tools by retiring them or allocating them to better projects that are more usefull and intelligent than another depressing brutalist monster. At the same time its important to promte a shared vision, so people know when tools go off the rails or in overdrive. That includes industries like farming or fishing, where you basically see tools invested in for cashflow reasons while the planet is not prepared for their use, so they can’t actually realize their potential. Still the get used.