Early agricultural societies in the fertile cescent that existed for 1000+ years and build rather large cities and more recent various meso-american ones that existed in a sort of patchwork with others, but which due to the climatic conditions and later pillaging by European invaders didn’t leave much historical records.

American Indians were mostly killed by the germs that the European invaders accidentally brought. In actual battles the Europeans didn’t fair so well as they were usually vastly outnumbered and the Europeans that defected or got captured mostly preferred to stay with the Indians afterwards. And yes, never trust history written by the winners.

For example, I’d argue that American Indians were living in something much closer to anarchy than anything else when the technologically vastly superior Europeans arrived with guns and absolutely demolished them.

I disagree. The native Americans were “technologically” quite advanced when it came to stewardship of the land. Think agriculture (food and forests), language and the like. Europeans basically enacted biological warfare on them.

Native American societies were quite sophisticated. Some were closer to anarchy, some weren’t. A lot of what we would like to know got wiped out before any European met them; initial contact was towards the south, but disease spread northward before Europeans did. The writings we do have about their society come from Europeans, which is hardly the best source.

What we can gather from archeology is that they had cities just as big as European ones at the time, and had trade and agriculture on the same level, as well. North America was a fully anthropogenic environment–altered to be better for humans–and the common perception of “vast, untouched wilderness” comes from the fact that Europeans were visiting a century after disease had ravaged the native population.

Edit: rereading your post, what society could solve the “higher technology oppressor” problem?

I posted more about this below, but I think it would work, it would just take much longer. Coordination takes more time, but if there isn’t a time constraint (which I think can be true in a functionally post-scarcity world) then that is much less of an issue.

Maybe it would take several decades to do what it would have taken 5 years before. But if the fundamentals are covered in the meantime, why is that an issue?

Yes, science is complex, infrastructure is complex.

i don’t see loosely connected groups being able to solve that issue

these are not “loosely connected groups”, it’s not a group of friends doing a party, it’s a complete industry.

thing is to change relations in production and to work according to needs and with solidarity towards each other and other communities. try to look at it as complete system, not just pinhole view at just scientists interested in particles or whatever scifi there is. that federated system would have to solve food, housing, medicine, education and through solving that and enabling others to work in fields they are interested in would in the end enable space travel, or whatever scifi other there is.

i would say that within that system it would be easier to develop science and more pleasant and beneficial to society than in current capitalist one

I think it’s more that it would take more time and coordination to do larger things. Like, you need to get all of the people on board, you need to convince them to work on it without coercion (either force or money), so it takes a lot longer. Everybody is going to want their basic needs met and their problems dealt with first.

But when you step back and think about it, with our current level of technology, that would be fine. Like, if I went to a hundred engineers and was like “hey I wanna build a rocket, who’s with me?” And they said “sure, once I have free time, but can we figure out food/water/shelter/entertainment/comfort first?” That would be reasonable. Maybe it takes a few decades or longer to figure those things out in a sustainable way, but at scale in society it could definitely be done.

Think about electricity. It is currently functionally limitless (yes, there are limits, but we don’t treat it like that in day to day life). And to keep it that way is relatively low maintenance, once we figure out renewables (or nuclear, or both) anyways. Same with the internet, once it’s built it’s fairly easy to maintain, and we’re at the point with fiber where it’s fairly difficult to overuse it, so giving it to everyone as baseline would be easy.

Once we had a better system for the basics, one that essentially is low maintenance and ensures everyone gets everything they need (with choice and freedom too, if everyone is fed but all we have is potatoes, the next question would be “ok how do we get more variety?”), then there would be a lot more time to focus on large efforts.

Those still would take longer, because even when we have all of the basics handled, it would take much longer to make decisions, there would be long, frustrating debates, somebody might storm off, etc. It might take a lifetime. But there wouldn’t be urgency either, because we all have the basics, plus luxuries, essentially our modern lives as they are. Just without the need to produce more every second of every day.

All of this could be decentralized too. It’s not like I’m saying there would be a command economy, necessarily. In fact, it shouldn’t be centralized too much ideally, that could over concentrate power.

Where this falls apart is game theory essentially. If I choose to be less productive and focus on that basic infrastructure, and take my time, that lets other players get ahead. If that goes on long enough, those other players may have advanced enough that they can dominate the game. It’s a literal arms race in that sense, this is playing out with AI right now. For it to work, everyone would need to agree to slow down, all at once.

This is a major issue because what’s happening is we’re hitting artificial maximum’s because of this strategy. I deal with this all the time working on software infrastructure. People want to push for product non stop, and then their code turns out completely unmaintainable. Infra comes along, analyzes, figures out a better pattern, and eventually we fix it, but not before the damage is done and it takes years to fix, or we just rewrite it all. If we had taken the time to build it the right way the first time, it would have likely been a much faster process. BUT, the startup may have folded in the meantime, because someone else put together a dumpster fire, spruced it up to look real nice, and got a bunch of people to choose them instead. And now they won.

So yeah, I think about this a lot haha 😅 we are, technologically speaking, capable of being post scarcity. Why are we still acting like technological advancement is about life and death? Why do we have to race to the bottom?

Edit: Oh, speed also does matter for coordinating in emergencies, so there is an argument for “we don’t have time because the environment will fall apart or we have an asteroid incoming, etc.” but like, re: the environment, that is not only happening, but the productivity arms race is making it worse! That’s an example of an artificial maximum’s there.

i doubt about that limit, think capitalism puts more limit on science now, i replied to some other comment in more details regarding this

I mean it’s all speculation I guess.

i agree, to achieve conditions to enable forming of free associations of workers first capitalism(capitalistic relations etc.) must be abolished which is hard thing to do already