"The Industrial Revolution still cannot be considered an unqualified success, for all the comfort and convenience enjoyed by a minority of people in the world. Where we stand now is the brink of unprecedented damage to the ecology of the only habitable planet in the only universe we know of, and I refer not just to climate change—which may or may not be caused by human activity —but to all the other insults and injuries we’ve done to the biosphere. While industrialism led to the formation of a prosperous middle class, it also plunged millions of people into the grimmest kind of regimented quasislavery in conditions that were arguably no improvement over their grandparents’ lives as agricultural peasants (or their distant ancestors as hunter-gatherers)."