Lofgeornost
Feeling Martian!
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We still have tribal societies in the world today, and their state is more of a function of isolation than anything else. You can also see tribal societies where folks live in villages out in the middle of the cuds but have cell phones.
I did a sci-fi setting where I mostly threw out the concept of tech level. There are some specific examples of isolation, which are there specifically as a mcguffin, but otherwise it's assumed that if a technology is on the market it will get pretty much everywhere fairly quickly. You can see something a bit like it in Star Wars, where the technology just sits in the ambient environment.
Yeah. Another issue is that some elements of technology really don't change much after a certain point. A spoon from Cicero's time looks a little different than one made today, but does precisely the same thing, in the same way. So are our eating utensils at an earlier tech level, or did the Romans have 21st-century spoon tech?
I suppose large and persistent differences in tech level would fit with one spin on the Star Trek setting--the p.c.s are part of an organization that visits or does surveillance on planets without 'warp drive' (or maybe just spacecraft) but does not share more advanced tech with them.