I took "mint preliminary social capital" to mean, fundamentally, trust. The kinds of trust needed for a society to consent en masse to the collective capital project of (re-)industrializing are difficult to attain in the face of decaying material needs of the skilled labor force (if those skills even propagated forward to begin with.)
I've been working on something similar (Headless Chrome via DevTools protocol) called Webfriend. It is a Python wrapper to the DevTools protocol, as well as a simplified imperative scripting environment which is specifically built for ease of use by people with a technical-but-not-programming background (lovingly called Friendscript).
It's by no means done, but it is functional and I'm hoping to see the project grow beyond a toy if there's interest in the community.
Things to note:
- Documentation is there, but there are gaps (especially w.r.t. the Python API.) I'll eventually get around to wrestling with Sphinx, et. al., but have not as of yet.
- Targets Google Chrome / Chromium 58.x - 60.x. No testing outside of those versions has occurred.
- Is Chrome only for the moment, but may evolve to work with WebDriver and other browser APIs in the future.
Also, PRs and issues are welcome, but my time to work on this is limited at the moment (which does speak to the point made elsewhere about corporate backing vs. individual maintainers, but this was built largely to scratch an itch.)