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Title: Against the Megamachine
Author: David Watson
Date: (1981-1985/1997)
Language: en
Topics: anti-technology
Source: https://radicalarchives.org/2010/09/06/dw-against-the-megamachine/

David Watson

Against the Megamachine

“Industrialism is, I am afraid, going to be a curse for mankind… To

change to industrialism is to court disaster. The present distress is

undoubtedly insufferable. Pauperism must go. But industrialism is no

remedy….” — Gandhi

How do we begin to discuss something as immense and pervasive as

technology? It means to describe the totality of modern civilization—not

only its massive industrial vistas, its structural apparatus; not only

its hierarchy of command and specialization, the imprint of this

apparatus on human relations; not only the “humble objects,” which “in

their aggregate … have shaken our mode of living to its very roots,” as

Siegfried Giedion has written; but also in that internalized country of

our thoughts, dreams and desires, in the way we consciously and

unconsciously see ourselves and our world.

Questioning technology seems incoherent in the modern world because,

invisible and ubiquitous, it defines our terrain, our idea of reason.

You cannot “get rid of technology,” you cannot “destroy all machines”;

we are dependent upon them for our survival. In any case, the story

goes, technology has always been with us. When an ape pries termites out

of a tree with a twig, that, too, is supposed to be technology.

Everything changes, and yet stays the same. Plugging into a computer is

no more than an improvement on prying termites out of bark. Therefore,

one is expected never to discuss technology as a totality but only

specific styles or components of technology, which are to be embraced or

discarded according to the criteria of the technological religion:

efficiency, velocity, compatibility with the entirety of the aggregate.

No one denies that different modes of life existed; but they have been,

or are rapidly being, forgotten. Hence the idea they must have been

defective, backward, underdeveloped, and eventually surpassed by

progress. You can’t “go back,” “return to the past”—“you can’t stop

progress.” When mercantile capitalism emerged, the individualistic,

entrepreneurial spirit was thought the essence of human nature. Even

non-western and indigenous societies came to be judged mere preparatory

stages of modern market society. As mechanization took command, humanity

was seen fundamentally as the “tool user,” Homo faber. So ingrained was

this notion of human nature that when the paleolithic cave paintings at

Altamira were discovered in 1879, archaeologists considered them a hoax;

Ice Age hunters would have had neither the leisure (due to the “struggle

for existence”) nor the mental capacity (since sophistication is

demonstrated first of all by complex technical apparatus) to create such

graceful, visually sophisticated art.

Taking the part for the whole—ignoring the complex languages, symbolic

exchange, rituals, and dreamwork of diverse peoples, while fetishizing

their technics—this ruling idea continues to see all cultural evolution

as only a series of advances in technical activities. There is never any

suspicion of qualitative difference; the mathematics, techniques, and

technical implements of early peoples are seen only as incipient

versions of modern cybernetics, rational mastery, and industrial

apparatus.

Technology is a way of life

To define technology as any and every technical endeavor or artifact, to

think of it as the means by which human beings do everything from

picking fruit to firing missiles into space, is to render the word

meaningless. This ideology can make no sense of the dramatic changes

that have occurred in life; it conceals the fact that technology has

become a way of life, a specific kind of society. It assumes that a

society in which nearly every sphere of human endeavor is shaped by

technology is essentially the same as a society with a limited, balanced

technics embedded in the larger constellation of life.

Just as capital has been reductively confused with industrial apparatus

and accumulated wealth, when it is more importantly a set of social

relations, so has technology been reduced to the image of machines and

tools, when it, too, has become a complex of social relations—a “web of

instrumentality,” and thus a qualitatively different form of domination.

Technology is capital, the triumph of the inorganic—humanity separated

from its tools and universally dependent upon the technological

apparatus. It is the regimentation and mechanization of life, the

universal proletarianization of humanity and the destruction of

community. It is not simply machines, not even mechanization or

regimentation alone. As Lewis Mumford pointed out in Technics and

Civilization, these phenomena are not new in history; “what is new is

the fact that these functions have been projected and embodied in

organized forms which dominate every aspect of our existence.” (Thus

critics of technology are commonly accused of being opposed to tools,

when in reality modern industrial technology destroyed human-scale

tools, and in this way degraded human labor.)

The constellation of terms related to the Greek root techne (meaning

art, craft or skill) has changed over time. Words such as technique,

technics, and technology tend to overlap in meaning. They are not

static, universal, neutral terms, as a simple dictionary definition

might suggest; they reflect actual social relations as well as a process

of historical development.

In his Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in

Political Thought, Langdon Winner observes that the once limited,

specific meaning of the word technology as “a ‘practical art,’ ‘the

study of the practical arts,’ or ‘the practical arts collectively,’” has

in the twentieth century come to refer to an unprecedented, diverse

array of phenomena. The word now “has expanded rapidly in both its

denotative and connotative meanings” to mean “tools, instruments,

machines, organizations, methods, techniques, systems, and the totality

of these and similar things in our experience”—a shift in meaning that

can be traced chronologically through successive dictionary definitions.

There is no clean division between what constitutes technique (which in

its earliest usage in French meant generally a certain manner of doing

something, a method of procedure), a technics which is limited and

culture-bound, and a technological system which tends to swallow up

every activity of society. A provisional definition of terms might be

useful, describing technique as that procedural instrumentality or

manner in which something is done, whether spontaneous, or methodical,

which is shared by all human societies but which is not necessarily

identical in its motives or its role in those societies; technics as

technical operations or the ensemble of such operations using tools or

machines—again, not necessarily identical from society to society, and

not necessarily either methodical or spontaneous; and technology as the

rationalization or science of techniques, an idea close to the

dictionary definitions—the geometric linking together, systematization

and universalization of technical instrumentality and applied science

within society. This last definition underscores technology’s emergence

as a system, hence as an autonomous power and social body. While such

definitions may not be perfect, they make it possible to explore better

the complex nature of the technological phenomenon and modern

civilization’s intrinsically technological codes.

A certain procedural instrumentality is shared by a painter applying

paint to a canvas (or cave wall), a farmer planting seeds, and an

electronics technician testing the strength of some metal in a nuclear

device. That doesn’t make the character of their activities identical.

As Jacques Ellul observes in The Technological Society, “It is not … the

intrinsic characteristics of techniques which reveal whether there have

been real changes, but the characteristics of the relation between the

technical phenomenon and society.” Ellul uses the French word technique

in a way which overlaps with the use of “technics” and “technology” in

this essay, and which he defines as “the totality of methods rationally

arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of

development) in every field of human activity.”

Whereas previously limited, diversified, local technics bore the stamp

of the culture and the individuals from which they emerged, technology

now changes all local and individual conditions to its own image. It is

gradually creating a single, vast, homogenous technological civilization

which smashes down “every Chinese wall,” and generating a dispossessed,

atomized and de-skilled human subject more and more identical from

Greenland to Taiwan.

A world of means

The wide diversity of primal and archaic societies is evidence that

though these societies can be said to share a basic level or repertoire

of techniques and tools (containers, horticultural and gathering

techniques, food preparation, weaving, etc.), each manifestation is

unique, independent, culture-bound, kinship bound. Neither technique in

general nor specific technical activities or objects entirely determines

how these societies live.

“Because we judge in modern terms,” argues Ellul, “we believe that

production and consumption coincided with the whole of life.” But in

traditional societies “technique was applied only in certain narrow,

limited areas … Even in activities we consider technical, it was not

always that aspect which was uppermost. In the achievement of a small

economic goal, for example, the technical effort became secondary to the

pleasure of gathering together … The activity of sustaining social

relations and human contacts predominated over the technical scheme of

things and the obligation to work, which were secondary causes.”

Technical activity played a role in these societies, he argues, “but it

had none of the characteristics of instrumental technique. Everything

varied from man to man according to his gifts, whereas technique in the

modern sense seeks to eliminate such variability.”

As society changed, the notion of applied science emerged as a central

motivating value, along with an unquestioning allegiance to

quantification, time-keeping, progressive mechanization and ever

increasing, ever accelerating production—reflecting not simply a change

in technical means but an entire new world of meaning and means. The

accompanying religious impulse—the worship of technical prowess, the

fascination with technical magic linked to the crude, materialist

pragmatism of efficiency of means—tended to conceal the meaning of

technology as a system. Ellul: “The techniques which result from applied

science date from the eighteenth century and characterize our own

civilization. The new factor is that the multiplicity of these

techniques has caused them literally to change their character.

Certainly, they derive from old principles and appear to be the fruit of

normal and logical evolution. However, they no longer represent the same

phenomenon. In fact technique has taken substance, has become a reality

in itself. It is no longer merely a means and an intermediary. It is an

object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon.”

According to the official religion, technology, rooted in a universal

and innate human identity, is paradoxically somehow no more than a

simple tool or technique like all previous tools and techniques, a

static object which we can manipulate like a hammer. But society has

become more and more the sum of its own technical organization

(notwithstanding the dysfunctional imbalances which are the residues of

the collapse of archaic societies and of uneven development). People

have lost their traditional techniques and become dependent upon an

apparatus: mass production produces masses. Technology is not a tool but

an environment—a totality of means enclosing us in its automatism of

need, production and exponential development.

As Langdon Winner argues, “Shielded by the conviction that technology is

neutral and tool-like, a whole new order is built piecemeal, step by

step, with the parts and pieces linked together in novel ways—without

the slightest public awareness or opportunity to dispute the character

of the changes underway.” What results is a form of social

organization—an interconnection and stratification of tasks and

authoritarian command necessitated by the enormity and complexity of the

modern technological system in all of its activities. Winner observes,

“The direction of governance flows from the technical conditions to

people and their social arrangements, not the other way around. What we

find, then, is not a tool waiting passively to be used but a technical

ensemble that demands routinized behavior.”

No single machine, no specific aspect of technology is solely

responsible for this transformation. Rather, as Ellul puts it, it is the

“convergence … of a plurality, not of techniques, but of systems or

complexes of techniques. The result is an operational totalitarianism;

no longer is any part of man free and independent of these techniques.”

A process of synergism, a “necessary linking together of techniques,”

eventually encompasses the whole system. One realm of technology

combines with another to create whole new systems at a rapid rate. The

many previously unanticipated “spin-off” developments, for example in

fields like cybernetics and genetics, make this description of synergy

clear.

A depopulated world of matter and motion

Technology has replaced the natural landscape with the dead, suffocating

surfaces of a modern technopolis, a cemetery of “bounded horizons and

reduced dimensions.” Space has undergone an “inverse revolution.” Time,

too, since the rise in the use of the weight-driven clock, is bounded

and quantified. “The clock, not the steam engine,” writes Lewis Mumford

in Technics and Civilization, “is the key machine of the modern

industrial age.” With the clock, “Time took on the character of an

enclosed space.”

The quantification of knowledge and experience takes place on several

levels—in the rise of standardized weights and measures, which

accompanies the rise of the centralized state; in the spread of clocks

and time-keeping; in the “romanticism of numbers,” which accompanies the

rise of the money economy and its abstract symbols of wealth; in the new

scientific methods foreseen by Galileo, confining the physical sciences

to the so-called “primary qualities” of size, shape, quantity and

motion; and in the methods of capitalist book-keeping and the reduction

of everything to exchange value. “The power that was science and the

power that was money,” writes Mumford, “were, in the final analysis, the

same kind of power: the power of abstraction, measurement,

quantification.”

“But the first effect of this advance in clarity and sobriety of

thought,” he continues, “was to devaluate every department of experience

except that which lent itself to mathematical investigation … With this

gain in accuracy went a deformation of experience as a whole. The

instruments of science were helpless in the realm of qualities. The

qualitative was reduced to the subjective: the subjective was dismissed

as unreal, and the unseen and unmeasurable non-existent … What was left

was the bare, depopulated world of matter and motion: a wasteland.”

Did new technologies and time-keeping spur early capitalist

mercantilism, or was the reverse the case? In fact, technical growth and

capitalism went hand in hand, bringing about the technological

civilization of today. This system expands both by the impulse of

economic accumulation and by the mechanization and “rationalization” of

all life according to normative, technical criteria. Both processes

reduce a complex of human activities to a series of quantifiable

procedures. Neither formal, juridical ownership of the apparatus, nor

the characteristics of specific machinery or particular materials used

in production, is determinative. Rather, modern urban-industrial

civilization is a socially regimented network of people and machines—an

industrialized production-commodity culture which tends toward the

absolute destruction of local communities and technics, and the

penetration of the megatechnic system into every aspect of life.

Ellul writes, “When André Leroi-Gourhan tabulates the efficiency of Zulu

swords and arrows in term of the most up-to-date knowledge of weaponry,

he is doing work that is obviously different from that of the swordsmith

of Bechuanaland who created the form of the sword. The swordsmith’s

choice of form was unconscious and spontaneous; although it can now be

justified by numerical calculations, such calculations had no place

whatsoever in the technical operation he performed.” Technology

transforms swordmaking into a more efficient, more rationalized

industrial process (or dispenses with it altogether for more “advanced”

modes), and all the swordsmiths into factory hands.

In the factory we see the process of mechanization at its height.

Siegfried Giedion comments in Mechanization Takes Command,

“Mechanization could not become a reality in the age of guilds. But

social institutions change as soon as the orientation changes. The

guilds became obsolete as soon as the rationalistic view became dominant

and moved continually toward utilitarian goals. This was the predestined

hour for mechanization.” Similarly, Murray Bookchin argues in Toward an

Ecological Society, “Of the technical changes that separate our own era

form past ones, no single ‘device’ was more important than … the simple

process of rationalizing labor into an industrial engine for the

production of commodities. Machinery, in the conventional sense of the

term, heightened this process greatly, but the systematic

rationalization of labor in ever-specialized tasks totally demolished

the technical structure of self-managed societies and ultimately of

workmanship, the self-hood of the economic realm … The distinction

between artisan and worker hardly requires elucidation. But two

significant facts stand out that turn the transformation from craft to

factory into a social and characterological disaster. The first fact is

the dehumanization of the worker into a mass being; the second is the

worker’s reduction into a hierarchical being.” (The process was hardly

“simple,” but Bookchin’s description of the emerging factory suggests

the possibility of critiquing technology without opposing tools or

technics altogether.)

Technology is not “neutral”

The common notion of technology’s “neutrality” does not recognize that

all tools have powerful symbolic content, are suggestive models for

thought and action which affect their users. More importantly, the idea

of neutrality fails to see that massification and accelerated,

synergistic integration of technology would engender corresponding human

structures and modes of thought and experience. Culture and technology

interact dynamically, each spurring transformations in the other.

Technology is not neutral because it brings with it its own rationality

and method of being used. A network of computers or a steel mill cannot

be used variously like a simple tool; one must use them as they are

designed, and in coordinated combination with a network of complex

support processes without which their operation is impossible. But

design and interrelated dependencies bring manifold unforeseen results;

every development in technology, even technical development which seeks

to curb deleterious technological effects, brings with it other

unpredictable, sometimes even more disastrous effects. The automobile,

for example, was seen as simply a replacement for the horse and

carriage, but mass production techniques combined with Ford’s new

conception of mass distribution gave the automobile a significance no

one could foresee. Ford’s revolution actually came at the end of a long

period of technical preparation. Mass assembly line production and

interchangeability of parts dated back to the end of the eighteenth

century; by the end of the nineteenth century the process of

mechanization was relatively stabilized, and produced a rise in

expectations (reflected in the popularity of the great international

expositions on industry) which created the terrain for the automobile’s

enthusiastic reception as an object of mass consumption. The expanding

role of the state was also critical, since it was only the state which

would have the means to create a national automobile transportation

system.

The automobile is thus hardly a tool; it is the totality of the system

(and culture) of production and consumption which it implies: a way of

life. Its use alone makes its own demands apart from the necessities

inherent in production. Nor could a highway system be considered a

neutral instrument; it is a form of technical giantism and

massification. Considering the automobile, who can deny that technology

creates its own inertia, its own direction, its own cultural milieu?

Think how this one invention transformed our world, our thoughts,

images, dreams, forms of association in just a few generations. It has

uprooted communities, undermined farmlands, contributed to vast changes

in our dietary habits, shifted our values, contaminated our sexual

lives, polluted our air both in its manufacture and use, and created a

generalized ritual of sacrifice on the assembly line and on the road.

But the automobile is only one invention, if a key one, of thousands.

Who would have thought that within just a few decades of the invention

of television millions of human beings would spend more time in from of

the cathode ray tube than in almost any other waking activity, deriving

their very sense of reality from it? Who would have thought that the

world would become a radioactive nightmare “wired for destruction”

within a few years of the Manhattan Project? And who can say what

emergent technologies have in store for us?

In this light, it is much more important to analyze the distinctions

between, say a spear and a missile, than to concentrate on their common

traits. It is important to ask what kind of society they reflect—and

help to bring about. In the first case we see a hand tool made locally

with a specific, unique and limited technique, and that technique

embedded in a culture. Each tool is unique and reflects the

individuality of its user or maker. In the latter case we see an entire

social hierarchy, with an extremely complex division of labor. In such

an alienated, compartmentalized, instrumental system, each functioning

member is isolated by complex social and procedural opacity, and thus

blind to the overall process and its results.

In the first case the creator works directly with the materials, which

is to say, in nature. In the second case, the worker is alienated from

the materials of nature. Nature is not only depleted and destroyed by

exploitation and objectification, by the inevitable destruction to be

unleashed by the instrument, but, as Ellul observes, “by the very

establishment of technology as man’s milieu.” In the case of the spear,

human limits are implied (though human beings could choose to organize

themselves as a machine to do greater destruction, as they did in the

ancient state military machines). In the case of the missile, however,

the organization of human beings as a machine, as a network of

production and destruction, is fundamental to what is produced, and the

only limit implied is that attained with the ultimate annihilation of

the human race by its technology. If there is an underlying perversity

in all instruments of violence or war, whether primitive or

technological, we can see that in the former the kind of war which takes

places is a limited, personal, sporadic activity, which, along with

peace-making, gift exchange and intermarriage, is a moment in a network

of reciprocity tending toward the resolution of conflicts. The missile

production—which begins at the point where community dissolves and the

military phalanx is first organized—is an unlimited, depersonalized,

institutional system which now magnifies human destructiveness to the

point of omnicide.

The convergence of social hierarchies and their ever more powerful and

all-encompassing tools renders the distinction between capital and

technology at least problematic. Both terms are metaphors—partial

descriptions which represent the modern organization of life. The state

is an apparatus of administrative technique which cannot be separated

from the corporate organizations of centralized, technological

hierarchy. Economic planning and the market are submerged in technique,

technique in both bureaucratic planning and the chaos of the market.

Technological automatism and remote control, standardization and mass

propaganda are leaving classical bourgeois society behind; it has

therefore become crucial to look at the nature of the mass society which

only mass technics could have generated.

The myth of a technology separate from its use assumes that means are

simply instruments—factories, supertankers, computer networks, mass

agrosystems—and not that universe of means: the daily activities of the

people who participate in these systems. It fails to understand that

such ubiquitous means themselves eventually become ends, requiring their

inevitable characterological internalization in human beings—in other

words, that human beings must obey and thus become the slaves of their

mechanical slaves. As Lewis Mumford warned in The Pentagon of Power, “It

is the system itself that, once set up, gives orders.” This

“self-inflicted impotence” is “the other side of ‘total control.’”

Technology—systematized, “rationalized” mass technics—is more than the

sum of its parts; this totality undermines human independence, community

and freedom, creating mass beings who are creatures of the universal

apparatus, standardized subjects who derive their meaning from the

gigantic networks of “mass communication”: a one-way barrage of

mystification and control. Even those ostensibly directing the machines

are themselves its creatures, each one isolated in a compartment of the

giant, opaque hive, so such “control” is ambiguous. The conspiratorial

notion of “technocracy” is inadequate, if not entirely outmoded. The

blind, centrifugal complexity of the system defies conscious control,

coming more and more to resemble a locomotive with no throttle hurtling

toward an abyss.

A fundamental mutation has occurred

It is now a familiar truism that modern technologies diversify

experience. But mechanization has in many ways narrowed our horizons by

standardizing our cultures into a global techno-monoculture. This is

evident in the mechanization of agriculture, one example being the

cultivation of fruit trees. As Giedion points out, “The influence of

mechanization … leads to standardization of the fruit into new varieties

… We have seen an orchard of 42,000 Macintosh trees; and the apples were

so uniform that they might have been stamped out by machine.”

Such standardization was not always the case. Giedion mentions a noted

landscape architect of the first half of the nineteenth century who

lists 186 varieties of apple and 233 varieties of pear for planting by

arborists, and who for the keeper of a small orchard recommends thirty

different kinds of apple “to ripen in succession.” He adds, “the large

red apple, which attracts the customer’s eye, is especially favored, and

bred less for bouquet than for a resistant skin and stamina in transit.

The flavor is neutralized, deliberately, it would seem.” Giedion’s

example seems quaint today as transnational corporations maneuver to

take control of world seed and genetic material, and a multitude of

localized varieties are replaced by agricultural monoculture.

With modern communications technology, another fundamental mutation has

occurred or is occurring. The media have usurped reality itself. After

Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Baudrillard takes as his metaphor for this state

of affairs the fable of a map “so detailed that it ends up covering the

territory.” Whereas with the decline of the Empire comes the

deterioration of the map, tattered but still discernible in some remote

places, “this fable has come full circle for us,” writes Baudrillard,

“and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory

whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not

the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are

no longer those of the Empire, but our own.” (Simulations)

Since the emergence of mechanization, with the invention of the

telegraph perhaps as a representative point of departure, communication

has been degraded from a multifaceted, ambivalent, contextually unique

and reciprocal relationship between human beings to an abstract,

repetitive and homogenized “message” passing between a unilateral

transmitter and a passive receiver. It is this one-dimensional

transmission which is the starting point of the mass media and

computers. The simulated, ostensibly “interactive” response that such

technology allows has little or nothing in common with genuine human

communication.

But the discourse has shifted—reality has come to resemble this model.

As Ellul remarks in The Technological System, “It is the technological

coherence that now makes up the social coherence.” Previously the forces

of domination were never able to gain hegemony over all of society;

people maintained forms of solidarity and communal discourse which

resisted and excluded power (village, religious and neighborhood

communities, proletarian culture, bohemianism, for example, which

continue to exist in pockets only in extremely attenuated form). The

preeminence of technology, particularly meaning-creating “communication”

technology, changes this, and all of human intercourse tends to be

restructured along the lines of this petrified information and its

communication. Seven hundred and fifty million people now watch the same

televised sporting event one evening and spend the next day talking

about it.

According to the disciplines of mechanization, the exponentially

expanding volume of artistic, intellectual, and scientific production—of

films, recordings, books, magazines, gadgets, scientific discoveries,

art, web sites, all of it—implies that subtle human values and a

plenitude of meaning and well-being are accumulating at a tremendous

rate, that we can now experience life more rapidly, in greater depth,

and at a greater range. As a journalist comments, “If the average person

can have access to information that would fill the Library of Congress

or can control as much computing power as a university has today, why

should he be shallower than before?” (Paul Delany, “Socrates, Foust,

Univac,” New York Times Book Review, March 18, 1984) Electronic

communications are even said to enhance human values based on family,

community and culture. Writes Marshall McLuhan in The Medium is the

Message: “Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We

have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

Of course, such computer power is not available in any significant way

to most people. But this is secondary. More importantly, two

realities—human meaning and mediatization, the territory and the map—are

incommensurable, and cannot long coexist. The media undermine and

destroy meaning by simulating it. We are no longer merely victims of a

powerful, centralized media; we are that and more. We are in a sense

becoming the media. Baudrillard writes in Simulations that we are

“doomed not to invasion, to pressure, to violence and to blackmail by

the media and the models, but to their induction, to their infiltration,

to their illegible violence.” In such a world, choice is not much

different from switching tv channels. The formative experience of using

information will tend to be the same everywhere.

A person participates in this structure by parroting the code. Only the

Machine, the Master’s Voice, actually speaks. The parasite must finally

consume its host, the model be imposed once and for all. When computer

enthusiasts brag that communications technology has increased the

density of human contact, they turn the world on its head, describing an

artificial world in which human contact has no density at all.

Individuality itself becomes a commodity or function, manufactured and

programmed by the system. One participates in mass society the way a

computer relay participates in the machine; the option remains to

malfunction, but even rebellion tends to be shaped by the forms

technology imposes. This is the individuality toward which computerized

life drifts: a narcissistic, privatized, passive-aggressive, alienated

rage, engaging in a sado-masochistic play far removed from the

consequences of its unfocused, destructive impulses.

Meaning has been reshaped

Information, now emerging as a new form of capital and wealth, is

central to the new “hyperreality.” While the demand for information, the

“democratic” distribution of “facts” is the battle cry of those

outsiders who struggle to recapture the machinery of media from the

centralized institutions of power, it is at least in part the nature of

the fact—and finally of masses of facts transmitted on a mass scale as

information—which lies behind the problem of the media.

Not that facts have no reality at all, but they have no intrinsic

relation to anything: they are weightless. The fact is a selection,

hence an exclusion. Its simplification mutilates a subtle reality which

refuses to be efficiently packaged. One set of facts confronts another,

orchestrated as propaganda and advertising. The fact achieves its

ultimate manifestation in trivia and in statistics, to which society is

now addicted. Ellul writes in Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s

Attitudes, “Excessive data do not enlighten the reader or listener, they

drown him.” People are “caught in a web of facts.” Whatever specific

message is transmitted by the media, the central code is affirmed:

meaning must be designed and delivered. “Everywhere,” writes Ellul in

language evocative of Orwell or Wilhelm Reich, “we find men who

pronounce as highly personal truths what they have read in the papers

only an hour before… .” The result is an amputated being—“nothing except

what propaganda has taught him.”

The information in which industrial capitalism trades is not neutral;

meaning itself has been reshaped. The scope of thought is bounded by the

computer and its clarity can only be of a certain kind—what a

fluorescent lamp is, say, to the entire light spectrum. Rather than

increasing choices, the technology imposes its own limited range of

choice, and with it the diminishing capacity to recognize the

difference. (Thus a person staring at a computer screen is thought to be

engaged in an activity as valuable as, even perhaps superior to, walking

in the woods or gardening. Both are thought to be gathering or making

use of “information.”)

Equally naive is the idea that the “information field” is a contested

terrain. The field itself is in reality a web of abstract,

instrumentalized social relations in which information expands through

alienated human activity, just as the system of value reproduces itself

through the false reciprocity of commodity exchange. It therefore

constitutes subtle relations of domination. Be they critics or

promoters, most writers on technology see this information field as an

emerging environment of human discourse.

Even the desire to transform society through “democratic” access and

“rational” selection tends to be colonized as a media message, one

competing set of facts among many. In a world dominated by loudspeakers,

where political action is reduced to the pulling of lever A or lever B,

nuance is lost. In the media, what moves the receiver is not so much

truth, or nuance, or ambivalence, but technique. And technique is the

domain of power, gravitating naturally toward established ideology—the

domain of simulated meaning. Real meaning—irreducible to a

broadcast—disintegrates under such an onslaught. As Nazi leader Goebbels

remarked, “We do not talk to say something, but to obtain a certain

effect.” People predisposed to accept such counterfeit as reality will

follow the lead of the organization with the biggest and best

loudspeakers, or succumb, resigned, to the suspicion that nothing can be

knowable, and nothing can be done.

The media: capital’s global village

The alienated being who is the target of Goebbels’ machinery can now

most of all be found in front of a television set—that reality-conjuring

apparatus which is the centerpiece of every modern household, the emblem

of and key to universality from Shanghai to Brooklyn. Everywhere people

now receive television’s simulated meaning, which everywhere duplicates

and undermines, and finally colonizes what was formerly human meaning in

all its culture-bound manifestations.

People and events captured by communications media, and especially by

television, lose what Walter Benjamin called their aura, their internal,

intersubjective vitality, the specificity and autonomous significance of

the experience—in a sense, their spirit. Only the external aspects of

the event can be conveyed by communications media, not meaning or

experiential context. In his useful book, Four Arguments for the

Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander describes how nature is rendered

boring and two-dimensional by television, how subtle expressions of

emotions become incoherent—for example, how the ceremonies of a group of

tribal people, or their subtle motives for protecting a sacred place,

are lost when captured by the camera and embedded in a context of

televised images.

Although television, through its illusion if immediacy and transparency,

seems to represent the most glaringly destructive example of the media,

the same can be said of all other forms. The cinema, for example,

generates social meaning through the so-called content of the film (as

manipulation) and through the act of film-going itself (as alienation)—a

spectacularized social interaction mediated by technology. In a movie

theater, modern isolation is transposed by the passive reception of

images into the false collectivity of the theater audience (which can

also be said of modern mass sporting events). As in modern social life

itself, like all media, film-going is “a social relation mediated by

images,” as Guy Debord described modern spectacular society in The

Society of the Spectacle. (Nowadays the sheer quantity of films, the act

of frequent film-viewing, either on videos or in movie theaters, also

has its troubling effect on human sensibilities.)

But it is no longer a question of the loss of aura in art and drama.

Modes of being are expanded and imploded by their constant surveillance.

Today one can experience emotions and drama every day for the price of a

ticket. But how can these emotions and human values resist

trivialization and ironic inversion when they are not grounded in

anything but the mechanical transmission of images exchanged as a

commodity? When hundreds of media outlets provide any image, any

titillation, any pseudo-experience to the point of utter boredom? We

surveil ourselves, luridly, as on a screen.

And isn’t it also obvious that electronic media works best at

duplicating high contrast, rapid, superficial and fragmentary

images—which is precisely why the new cultural milieu is overwhelmingly

dominated by rapid channel-switching, frenetic computer games, the speed

of machines, violence and weapons, and the hard-edged, indifferent

nihilism of a degraded, artificial environment? The technofascist style

prevalent today, with its fascination with machines, force and speed,

works well in the media, until there is no separation between

brutalization by power and an internalized, “self-managed”

brutalization.

A sky reminds us of a film; witnessing the death of a human being finds

meaning in a media episode, replete with musical score. An irreal

experience becomes our measure of the real: the circle is completed. The

formation of subjectivity, once the result of complex interaction

between human beings participating in a symbolic order, has been

replaced by media. Some argue that this makes us free to create our own

reality—a naive surrender to the solipsism of a mirrored cage. Rather,

we are becoming machine-like, more and more determined by technological

necessities beyond our control. We now make our covenant with

commodities, demand miracles of computers, see our world through a

manufactured lens rather than the mind’s eye. One eye blinds the

other—they are incommensurable. I think of a photograph I saw once of a

New Guinea tribesman in traditional dress, taking a photograph with an

instamatic camera. What is he becoming, if not another cloned copy of

what we are all becoming?

The fact that everyone may someday get “access” to media, that we have

all to some degree or another become carriers of media, could be the

final logic of centralization spinning out of orbit—the final reduction

of the prisoners to the realization that, yes, they truly do love Big

Brother. Or the realization that nature does not exist but is only what

we arbitrarily decide to organize, or that we do not experience a place

until we have the photograph. The age of the genuine imitation. The

paleolithic cave walls are redone to protect the originals which

themselves are shut forever—these imitations are “authentic,” of course,

but the spirit of the cave has fled. Even the copies will inevitably

become historical artifacts to be preserved; this is “art,” do you have

your ticket, sir? There is no aura. For an aboriginal tribal person, the

mountain speaks, and a communication is established. For the tourist, it

is domesticated, desiccated—a dead image for the photo album.

Though print media are being eclipsed by television and computers, they

now function similarly, with their spurious claim to “objectivity,”

their mutilating process of selection and editing, their automatic

reinforcement of the status quo, their absolute accumulation. The

greater the scope, the more frequent the publication, the more

newspapers and magazines in particular impose their model of fragmented,

ideologized reality. While the corporate (and in some places the state)

press functions as part of a Big Lie apparatus, it distorts the

information it transmits both in the content and in the context in which

it presents it. Newspaper-reading and addiction to news in general have

become another version of the imperial circus, a kind of illiteracy

which makes people as much the creatures of rumor and manipulation

(through advertising and public relations) as they were prior to

modernization and the rise of a public education system which was

supposed to make informed citizens of them. In fact, as the techniques

and scope of media have expanded, people have tended to become more

manipulated than ever.

Ellul writes, “Let us not say: ‘If one gave them good things to read …

if these people received a better education …’ Such an argument has no

validity because things just are not that way. Let us not say, either:

‘This is only the first stage’; in France, the first stage was reached

half a century ago, and we still are very far from attaining the second

… Actually, the most obvious result of primary education in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to make the individual

susceptible to propaganda.”

But how do people confront centralized power, with its machinery of

deceit, without resorting to media? Even those who oppose

totalitarianism need to marshal information to spread their ideas, win

and inform their allies. Yet people’s capacity to resist the structures

of domination is undermined by the overall effect of media. Can we

possibly defeat the empire in a penny-ante game of facts when a single

pronouncement by that media image called a “President”—say, this week’s

enemy nation is “terrorist” and must be destroyed—drowns out the truth?

If people can be moved to resist domination only by means of mass media,

if they can only be directed to resist as they are now to obey, what can

this portend for human freedom? The “global village” is capital’s

village; it is antithetical to any genuine village, community or

communication.

A revolution in human response

Technology transmutes our experience—won’t it also result in undermining

our very organism, rather than continually improving upon it, as it

promises? In a wisecracking, hucksterish tone, one celebratory

popularization of the new technologies, The Techno/Peasant Survival

Manual, describes an electrode helmet hooked up to a microcomputer

capable of analyzing and measuring the activity of the human brain,

“studying its electrical output in units of 500 milliseconds … With this

ability to quantify human thought, the technocrats are not only learning

how we think, they are in the process of challenging our very

definitions of intelligence.”

Of course, computers say little or nothing about how people think,

because human thought is not quantifiable or reducible to computer

operations. What is happening is that fundamental attitudes are

changing, and with them, a definition of something the technocratic

structure cannot really comprehend without transmuting its very nature.

New communications environments socialize people in ways far different

from age-old customs and modes in which they once learned to think, feel

and behave like human beings; thus, technological structures are

“revolutionizing” human response by forcing life to conform to the

parameters of the machines. This quantification will reshape thought,

which is potentially mutable; it will become “true” by force, as the

railroad became more true than the buffalo, and the sheep enclosure more

true than the commons.

Even the shape of the child’s developing brain is said to be changing.

Children were formerly socialized through conversation in an intimate

milieu; now, in the typical family living room with its television

shrine, the areas of the child’s brain once stimulated by conversation

are increasingly developed by passively consuming the visually exciting

(but kinesthetically debilitating or distorting) images of tv and video

games. No one can say exactly what this means, though at a minimum,

increased hyper-activity and decreased attention span may be two

consequences. (Instead of urging caution, the education philosopher I

heard relate this disturbing story went on to propose more computer- and

video-based “interactive” technology in schools to teach this changing

child.)

What can conform to the computer, what can be transmitted by the

technology, will remain; what cannot will vanish. That which remains

will also be transformed by its isolation from that which is eliminated,

and we will be changed irrevocably in the process. As language is

reshaped, language will reshape everyday life. Certain modes of thinking

will simply atrophy and disappear, like rare, specialized species of

birds. Later generations will not miss what they never had; the domain

of language and meaning will be the domain of the screen. History will

be the history on the screens; any subtlety, any memory which does not

fit will be undecipherable, incoherent.

Our total dependence on technology parallels our dependence on the

political state. New technologies, “interfaced” with the

technical-bureaucratic, nuclear-cybernetic police state, are creating a

qualitatively new form of domination. We are only a step away from the

universal computerized identification system. Technology is already

preparing the ground for more pervasive forms of control than simple

data files on individuals. As forms of control such as total

computerization, polygraph tests, psychological conditioning, subliminal

suggestion, and electronic and video eavesdropping become part of the

given environment, they will be perceived as natural as superhighways

and shopping malls are today.

But while there is reason for concern about computerized threats to

privacy, a deepening privatization, with a computerized television in

every room as its apotheosis, makes police almost superfluous.

Eventually computer technology may have no need of the methods it

employs today. According to Lewis M. Branscomb, Vice President and Chief

Scientist of IBM, the “ultimate computer” will be biological, patterned

on DNA and cultivated in a petri dish. “If such a computer could be

integrated with memory of comparable speed and compactness, implanted

inside the skull and interfaced with the brain,” the Diagram Group

authors of The Techno/Peasant Survival Manual enthuse, “human beings

would have more computing power than exists in the world today.” Genetic

engineering, cloning, integrating the human brain into cybernetic

systems—is there any doubt that these developments will render human

beings obsolete just as industrial technology undermined earlier human

communities? There may be no longer any need to monitor an anarchic,

unruly mass, since all the controls will be built in from the start. The

“irrational” aspects of culture, of love, of death will be suppressed.

Mechanization penetrates every province

If technology is effective in creating, directly or indirectly, ever

more powerful modes of domination in its wake, it is not nearly as

successful when used to curb its own development and the conflicts,

devastations and crises which ensue. It suppresses “irrationality,”

which then takes its revenge in the greater irrationalities of mass

technics. (One can only imagine what manner of disaster would follow an

absurd attempt to “interface” a computer with a human brain.) According

to the technocrats, technology can be curbed and made to serve human

needs through “technology assessment.” “Futurist” Alvin Toffler

(futurist being a euphemism for high-paid consulting huckster) argues,

for example, that it is “sometimes possible to test new technology in

limited areas, among limited groups, studying its secondary impacts

before releasing it for diffusion.”

Toffler’s reification of technology into a simple system used in an

isolated area, at the discretion of experts and managers, fails to

understand how technology transforms the environment, and most

importantly, how it is already trapped within its own procedural

inertia. Clearly, the new technologies appearing everywhere

simultaneously cannot be isolated to study their effects—the effects of

the whole system must be taken into account, not the laboratory effects

of an isolated component. Laboratory experiments on a given geographical

area or social group performed by a powerful bureaucratic hierarchy of

technicians and managers are themselves technology and carry its social

implications within them.

Discussing the mechanization of bread baking, Giedeon shows how

technology, becoming trapped within its own instrumentality and centered

on the hyperrationality of procedure, not only shifts an activity beyond

the control of individuals, but ultimately undermines the very ends it

started out to accomplish. He asks, how did bread, which was

successfully produced locally and on a small scale, succumb to large

mechanization? More importantly, how was it that public taste was

altered regarding the nature of the “stuff of life,” which had changed

little over the course of centuries, and which “among foodstuffs … has

always held a status bordering on the symbolic”?

Mechanization began to penetrate every province of life after 1900,

including agriculture and food. Since technology demands increasing

outlays and sophisticated machinery, new modes of distribution and

consumption are devised which eclipse the local baker. Massification

demands uniformity, but uniformity undermines bread. “The complicated

machinery of full mechanization has altered its structure and converted

it into a body that is neither bread nor cake, but something half-way

between the two. Whatever new enrichments can be devised, nothing can

really help as long as this sweetish softness continues to haunt its

structure.”

How taste was adulterated, how “ancient instincts were warped,” cannot

be easily explained. Again, what is important is not a specific moment

in the transformation of techniques, nor that specific forms of

technology were employed, but the overall process of massification by

which simple, organic activities are wrested from the community and the

household and appropriated by the megamachine. Bread is the product of a

large cycle beginning with the planting of wheat. Mechanization invades

every sector of the organic and undermines it, forever altering the

structure of agriculture, of the farmer, of food. Not only is bread

undermined by mechanization; the farmer is driven from the land.

Giedeion asks, “Does the changing farmer reflect, but more

conspicuously, a process that is everywhere at work? … Does the

transformation into wandering unemployed of people who for centuries had

tilled the soil correspond to what is happening in each of us?”

The Diagram Group gushes, “Technology … will change the quality, if not

the nature, of everything. Your job and your worklife will not be the

same. Your home will not be the same. Your thoughts will not be the same

… We are talking about an increase in the rate of innovation

unprecedented in human history, what some scientists are now calling

spiral evolution.” Says Robert Jastrow, Director of NASA’s Goddard Space

Institute: “In another 15 years or so we will see the computer as an

emergent form of life.”

Over a hundred years ago, Samuel Butler expressed the same idea as

satire in his ironical utopian novel Erewhon, lampooning the positivist

popularization of Darwinism and the widespread belief that mechanization

would usher in paradise, and suggesting that the theory of evolution was

also applicable to machines. “It appears to us that we are creating our

own successors,” he wrote. “We are daily adding to the beauty and

delicacy of their physical organization; we are daily giving them

greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that

self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect

has been to the human race.” No longer does Butler’s humor seem so

humorous or far-fetched. What begins as farce ends in tragedy. Perhaps

humanity will find itself even further reduced from being a mere

appendage to the machine to a hindrance.

Only the circuitry acts

Nowhere do we see this possibility more clearly than in the emerging

biotechnology, the latest frontier for capital, which reduces the

natural world to a single monolithic “logic”—capital’s logic of

accumulation and control. As Baudrillard puts it in Simulations, “that

delirious illusion of uniting the world under the aegis of a single

principle” unites totalitarianism and the “fascination of the biological

… From a capitalist-productivist society to a neo-capitalist cybernetic

order that aims now at total control. This is the mutation for which the

biological theorization of the code prepares to ground.”

“We must think of the media as if they were … a sort of genetic code

which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal,” writes

Baudrillard. The destruction of meaning in the media foreshadows the

cannibalization by capital of the sources of life itself. The

“operational configuration,” “the correct strategic model,” are the

same: life defined by information, information as “genetic code,” no

longer necessarily “centralized” but molecular, no longer exactly

imposed but implanted—a “genesis of simulacra,” as in photography, in

which the original, with its human aura, its peculiar irreducibility to

this technocratic-rationalist model, vanishes—or is vanquished.

In another context, Frederick Turner (not to be confused with the author

of Beyond Geography) writes in what can only be described as a

techno-spiritualist/fascist manifesto (“Technology and the Future of the

Imagination,” Harper’s, November 1984), that “our silicon photograph [or

circuit] doesn’t merely represent something; it does what it is a

photograph of—in a sense it is a miraculous picture, like that of Our

Lady of Guadalupe: it not only depicts, but does; it is not just a

representation, but reality; it is not just a piece of knowledge, but a

piece of being; it is not just epistemology but ontology.”

What the Great Chain of Being was for medieval society, and the

clock-like universe for the mechanical-industrial revolution, the

genetic code, the molecular cell, and the clone or simulacrum are for

the Brave New World looming today. The invasion by capital into the

fundamental structures of life can only result in dangerous

homogenization in the service of “total control,” and, inevitably, the

collapse of complex life systems on this planet. Once more the enemy

hides behind a “humane” cloak—this time not religious salvation, nor

simply progress or democracy, but the conquest of disease and famine. To

challenge this further manifestation of progress, according to the

ruling paradigm, is to oppose curing disease, to turn away from the

hungry. Once again only technology and its promise—a totally

administered world—can supposedly save us. And once more, it all makes

“perfect sense” because it corresponds to the operational configurations

of the culture as a whole.

If engineered genetic material corresponds to the silicon photograph, a

proper response might be learned from Crazy Horse, the Oglala mystic of

whom no photograph was ever taken, who answered requests to photograph

him by saying, “My friend, why should you wish to shorten my life by

taking from me my shadow?” Now all our shadows are in grave danger from

more ferocious “soul catchers,” sorcerers and golem-manufacturers, ready

to unleash a final paroxysm of plagues.

Or is the ultimate plague a nuclear war? Modern technological

development has always been embedded most deeply in expanding war and

competing war machines. As propagandists lull us to sleep with promises

of cybernetic technotopia, other technicians study readouts for their

attack scenarios. Ultimately, it makes no difference whether a final war

(or series of wars) is initiated by system errors or by the system’s

proper functioning; these two possible modalities of the machinery

represent its entire range. No computer warns of impending

annihilation—the life force is not, and cannot be programmed into them.

And just as human society is tending to be reduced to the circulation of

reified information, so is it falling under the sway of a bureaucratic

apparatus which has turned the “unthinkable”—nuclear megacide,

ecological collapse—into business-as-usual. No human considerations

influence its imperative or momentum; no dramatic descriptions of the

consequences of its unremarkable, everyday acts appear in the readouts.

No passion moves the technicians from their course. As the archetypical

nuclear bureaucrat Herman Kahn once wrote (in Thinking the Unthinkable),

“To mention such things [as nuclear holocaust] may be important. To

dwell on them is morbid, and gets in the way of the information.” Where

the discourse is curtailed to less than a shadow, so too are human

beings. Only the circuitry acts; human response is suffocated.

Technology refused

Skepticism toward progress is typically dismissed as dangerous,

atavistic and irrational. In The Existential Pleasures of Engineering,

one professional apologist for technology, Samuel C. Florman, writes,

“[F]rightened and dismayed by the unfolding of the human drama in our

time, yearning for simple solutions where there can be none, and

refusing to acknowledge that the true source or our problems is nothing

other than the irrepressible human will,” people who express luddite

worries “have deluded themselves with the doctrine of anti-technology.”

The increasing popularity of such views, he insists, “adds the dangers

inherent in self deception to all of the other dangers we already face.”

While indirectly acknowledging the significant dangers of mass technics,

Florman apparently feels that declining technological optimism is

responsible for technology’s ravages, rather than being a symptom or

consequence of them. The “other dangers we already face”—dangers which

of course are in no way to be blamed on technology—are simply the result

of “the type of creature man is.” Of course, the “type of creature man

is” has made this dangerous technology. Furthermore, Florman’s reasoning

coincides with the attitudes and interests of this society’s political,

corporate and military elites. “So fast do times change, because of

technology,” intones a United Technologies advertisement, “that some

people, disoriented by the pace, express yearning for simpler times.

They’d like to turn back the technological clock. But longing for the

primitive is utter folly. It is fantasy. Life was no simpler for early

people than it is for us. Actually, it was far crueler. Turning backward

would not expunge any of today’s problems. With technological

development curtailed, the problems would fester even as the means for

solving them were blunted. To curb technology would be to squelch

innovation, stifle imagination, and cap the human spirit.”

It doesn’t occur to these publicists that curbing technology might

itself be an innovative strategy of human imagination and spirit. But to

doubt the ideology of scientific progress does not necessarily signify

abandoning science altogether. Nor does a scientifically sophisticated

outlook automatically endorse technological development. As another

possibility, Ellul points to the ancient Greeks. Though they were

technically and scientifically sophisticated, the Greeks

were suspicious of technical activity because it represented an aspect

of brute force and implied a want of moderation … In Greece a conscious

effort was made to economize on means and to reduce the sphere of

influence of technique. No one sought to apply scientific thought

technically, because scientific thought corresponded to a conception of

life, to wisdom. The great preoccupation of the Greeks was balance,

harmony and moderation; hence, they fiercely resisted the unrestrained

force inherent in technique, and rejected it because of its

potentialities.

One could argue that the convenience of slavery explains the

anti-technological and anti-utilitarian attitudes of the Greeks. While

slavery as a system was certainly related—among a multitude of

factors—to the low regard in Greek culture for manual labor and the lack

of utilitarian values among its elites, to reduce a cultural outlook to

a single factor is absurd. One could just as easily claim that the

philosophical quest, the notion of tragedy, and other cultural aspects

were the results of slavery. But slavery has existed in many societies

and cultures, including the expanding industrial civilization of the

United States. That the Greeks could have a scientific outlook without a

technological-utilitarian basis proves, rather, that such a conception

of life is possible, and therefore a science without slavery and without

mass technics is also possible.

Defenders of scientific rationality usually paint themselves in

Voltairian hues, but it is they who rely in outmoded formulas which no

longer (and perhaps never did) correspond to reality. The contemporary

scientism of the great majority, with its mantra that progress is

unstoppable and its weird mix of mastery and submission, is little more

than an accumulation of unsubstantiated platitudes—the general theory of

this world, its logic in a popular form, its moral sanction, its

universal ground for consolation and justification. As technological

optimism erodes, its defenders invoke a caricature of the Enlightenment

to ward off the evil spirits of unsanctioned “irrationality.”

Yet what modern ideology stigmatizes as irrational might be better

thought of as an alternative rationality or reason. In the eighteenth

century, a Delaware Indian who came to be known as the Delaware Prophet,

and whose influence on the Indians who fought with Pontiac during the

uprising in 1763 is documented in Howard Peckham’s Pontiac and the

Indian Uprising, “decried the baneful influence of all white men because

it had brought the Indians to their present unhappy plight. He was an

evangelist, a revivalist, preaching a new religion. He was trying to

change the personal habits of the Indians in order to free them from

imported vices and make them entirely self-dependent. He gave his

hearers faith and hope that they could live without the manufactures of

the white men.”

This critic of technology wasn’t worrying about possible future effects

of the manufactured products bestowed by traders on his people, he was

announcing the actual decline of native communal solidarity and

independence. Pontiac quoted the Delaware Prophet to his followers in

April 1763 as saying, “I know that those whom ye call the children of

your Great Father supply your needs, but if ye were not evil, as ye are,

ye could surely do without them. Ye could live as ye did live before

knowing them … Did ye not live by the bow and arrow? Ye had no need of

gun or powder, or anything else, and nevertheless ye caught animals to

live upon and to dress yourself with their skins. . . .”

“Primitive fears”

Such insights, and particularly any reference to them now, are usually

dismissed as romantic nostalgia. “It took time and experience,” writes

that well-known devotee of industrialism, Marx, “before the workpeople

learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital,

and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of

production, but against the mode in which they are used.” (Capital) But

despite the historical justifications of marxist and capitalist alike,

both the mode and the increasingly ubiquitous machinery managed in time

to domesticate the “workpeople” even further, transforming them as a

class into an integral component of industrialism.

Perhaps they should have been good marxists and gone willingly into the

satanic mills with the idea of developing these “means of production” to

inherit them later, but their own practical wisdom told them otherwise.

As E.P. Thompson writes in his classic study, The Making of the English

Working Class, “despite all the homilies … (then and subsequently) as to

the beneficial consequences” of industrialization—“arguments which, in

any case, the Luddites were intelligent enough to weigh in their minds

for themselves—the machine-breakers, and not the tract-writers, made the

most realistic assessment of the short-term effects … The later history

of the stockingers and cotton-weavers [two crafts destroyed by

industrialization] provides scarcely more evidence for the ‘progressive’

view of the advantages of the breakdown of custom and of restrictive

practices. . . .”

Thompson is correct in assessing the basic rational practicality of the

luddites, who resisted so fiercely because they had a clear

understanding of their immediate prospects. But it’s clearer now that

they also anticipated, as well as anyone could in their time and place,

the eventual, tragic demise not only of vernacular and village society

but of the classical workers movement itself, along with its urban

context—to be replaced by an atomized servitude completely subject to

the centrifugal logic and the pernicious whims of contemporary

urban-industrial, market-dominated, mass society. The romantic reaction

against mechanization and industrialism has also been maligned, and must

be reappraised and reaffirmed in light of what has come since. No one,

in any case, seriously argues a literal return to the life of ancient

Greeks or eighteenth century Indians. But the Greek emphasis on harmony,

balance and moderation, and the Indians’ stubborn desire to resist

dependence, are worthy models in elaborating our own response to these

fundamental questions. At a minimum, they make it reasonable for us to

challenge the next wave, and the next, and the next—something the

ideologies of scientism and progress have little prepared us to do.

If some tend to look to previous modes of life for insights into the

changes brought about by modern technology and possible alternatives to

it, others dismiss the insights of tribal and traditional societies

altogether by bringing up those societies’ injustices, conflicts and

practices incomprehensible to us. No society is perfect, and all have

conflicts. Yet modernization has in fact superseded few age-old

problems; for the most part it has suppressed without resolving them,

intensified them, or replaced them with even greater ones.

Traditional societies might have resolved their own injustices or done

so through interaction with others without causing vast harm to deeply

rooted subsistence patterns; after all, ancient injustices have social

and ethical bases and are not a function of the relative level of

technical development. But modernizing missionaries have for the most

part only succeeded in bursting traditional societies and laying the

basis for dependency on mass technics. In the end the natives are

“converted” to democracy, or to socialism, at the point of a gun. When

the process is completed—no democracy, no socialism, and no natives. The

impulse to dissect and improve small, idiosyncratic, subsistence

societies, to turn them into modern, secular, industrial

nation-states—be it from the optic of universal (western) reason, or the

dialectic, or “historical necessity”—results in monocultural conquest

and integration into global industrial capitalism.

The related dogma that “underdeveloped” societies were in any case

fatally flawed, and therefore poised to succumb not only derives its

strength from a pervasive sense of powerlessness to preserve former

modes of life and communities, no matter what their merits; it also

provides ongoing justification for the obliteration of small societies

still coming into contact with urban-industrial expansion. It is a

species of blaming the victim. But their demise is more readily

explained by the technical, economic and military might of the invading

civilization and its power to impose relations of dependence. As Francis

Jennings observes in The Invasion of America (to provide one example),

it was not the defects in indigenous North American societies that

caused them to be undermined by European mercantile civilization, but

(at least in part) their virtues. Their gift economy, Jennings writes,

made it impossible for them to understand or conform to European

business practices. Their culture allowed them to become traders, but

they could never become capitalists. “[I]n a sense one can say that the

Indians universally failed to acquire capital because they did not want

it.”

The indigenous refusal of economic relations—neither wholly rational nor

irrational, neither wholly conscious nor unconscious, but a dialectical

interaction between these polarities—parallels the ancient Greeks’

refusal of technology. Their notions of life were utterly foreign to the

economic-instrumental obsession by which modern civilization measures

all things. And in the case of the Indians, because of the overwhelming

power of the invaders, they succumbed—as societies, cultures, languages,

innumerable subsistence skills and subtle ecological relationships

continue to crumble. Thus in a sense the luddites remain the

contemporaries of ranchers in Minnesota who felled power line pylons

built across their land in the 1970s, and the anti-development,

anti-toxics and anti-nuclear movements that have flourished at the end

of the twentieth century. The Delaware Prophet is the contemporary of

the Waimiri Atroari people in Brazil, who consistently fought invasions

by missionaries, Indian agents, and road-building crews in the 1960s and

1970s, and of Indians in Quebec fighting the Canadian government for

their lands since the increase of oil and gas exploration there.

In Quebec, a Montagnais Indian, speaking for all, testified, “Our way of

life is being taken away from us.” The Montagnais had been “promised

that with houses and schools and clinics and welfare we could be happy.”

But the promise was not fulfilled. “Now we know it was all lies. We were

happier when we lived in tents.” No cheerful bromide about the ultimate

benefits of progress can respond adequately to this somber recognition.

Technology out of control

Devouring the otherness of the past has not saved modern civilization

from deepening crisis. The civilization that promised to abolish all

previous forms of irrationality has created a suicidal, trip-wire,

exterminist system. Technological runaway is evident; we do not know if

we will be destroyed altogether in some technologically induced

eco-spasm, or transmuted into an unrecognizable entity shaped by

genetic, cybernetic and pharmacological techniques. The managerial

notion of “technology assessment” by which technocrats try to

rationalize technological growth is comparable to attempting to stop a

car careening out of control by referring to the driver’s manual.

Technology’s efficiency is inefficient, its engineering obtuse and

myopic.

The highly divided, centrifugal nature of the technical-bureaucratic

apparatus undermines its own planning, making it chaotic. Each technical

sector pursues its own ends separate from the totality, while each

bureaucracy and corporate pyramid, each rival racket, pursues its own

narrow social interest. There is never enough information to make proper

decisions; the megamachine’s complicated, multiple inputs undermine its

own controls and methods. A computer coughs in some air-conditioned

sanctum, and thousands, perhaps millions, die. Knowledge is undermined

by its own over-rationalization, quantification and accumulation, just

as bread is negated by its own standardization. Who can truly say, for

example, that they are in control of nuclear technology? Meanwhile the

system speeds along at an ever faster pace.

Even defenders of technology admit that it tends to move beyond human

control. Most counter that technology is not the problem, but rather

humanity’s inability to “master” itself. But humanity has always

grappled with its darker side; how could complex techniques and

dependence on enormously complicated, dangerous technological systems

make the psychic and social challenge easier? Even the question of

“self-mastery” becomes problematic in the face of the changes wrought in

human character by technology. What will define humanity in a hundred

years if technology holds sway?

In The Conquest of Nature: Technology and Its Consequences, R.J. Forbes

argues that while “it is possible to see a tendency in the

political-technological combination to take on a gestalt of its own and

to follow its own ‘laws,’” we should rely on “the inner faith of the men

who make the basic inventions.” That scientific-technological

rationality must finally rely on an undemonstrated faith in its ability

to harness demons it wantonly unleashes—a faith in technicians already

completely enclosed in their organizations and practices—is an irony

lost on Forbes. We have relied on their “inner faith” for too long; even

their best intentions work against us.

“There are no easy answers,” announces an oil company advertisement.

“Without question, we must find more oil. And we must learn to use the

oil we have more efficiently. So where do we start?” Without

question—such propaganda promotes the anxiety that we are trapped in

technology, with no way out. Better to follow the program to the end. An

IBM ad says, “Most of us can’t help feeling nostalgic for an earlier,

simpler era when most of life’s dealings were face-to-face. But chaos

would surely result if we tried to conduct all of our dealings that way

today. There are just too many of us. We are too mobile. The things we

do are too complex—and the pace of life is too fast.”

A technological culture and its demands serve to justify the technology

which imposes them. Those who doubt are cranks, while the calm, reasoned

logic of military strategists, technical experts, bureaucrats and

scientists is passed off as wisdom. Thus, during the 1979 partial

meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg,

Pennsylvania, at the moment in which it was unclear what was going to

happen to the bubble in the reactor container, a typical headline read,

“Experts optimistic.” Aren’t they always? “Without question, we must

find more oil,” and create more energy, mine more minerals, cut more

trees, build more roads and factories, cultivate more land, computerize

more schools, accumulate more information … If we accept the premises,

we are stuck with the conclusions. In the end, technology is legitimated

by its search for solutions to the very destruction it has caused. What

is to be done with chemical and nuclear wastes, ruined soils and

contaminated seas? Here the technicians insist, “You need us.” But their

“solutions” not only naturalize and prolong the original causes of the

disaster, they tend to aggravate it further. To decline to join the

chorus is to seek “easy answers.”

True, there are no easy answers. But we can at least begin by

questioning the idea of technology as sacred and irrevocable, and start

looking at the world once more with human eyes and articulating its

promise in human terms. We must begin to envision the radical

deconstruction of mass society.

Toward an epistemological luddism

I recognize the contradictions in even publishing this essay. I am not

sure how to move beyond the code; in order to do so, with tremendous

ambivalence and doubt, I partake in it in a limited, awkward,

conditional way. It is an act of desperation. Perhaps to some degree it

is a question of orientation; I think it fair to distinguish between

using established technical means to communicate out of pragmatic

necessity, and volunteering to help construct the latest means. We need

the courage to explore a process of change in our thinking and

practice—to learn how we might become less dependent on machines, less

linked to “world communications,” not more.

Of course, one can’t wish mass society away; a simplistic, monolithic

response to the daunting technical problems confronting us, added to the

social crisis we are experiencing, would be pointless and impossible.

But it is the technological system which offers “easy answers”—starting

with unquestioning surrender to whatever sorcery it dishes up next. We

can respond without accepting its terms. We can swim against capital’s

current. Abolishing mass technics means learning to live in a different

way—something societies have done in the past, and which they can learn

to do again. We have to nurture trust, not in experts, but in our own

innate capacity to find our way.

In Autonomous Technology, Langdon Winner suggests that a possible way to

halt the decaying juggernaut would be to begin dismantling problematic

technological structures and to refuse to repair systems that are

breaking down. This would also imply rejecting newly devised

technological systems meant to fix or replace the old. “This I would

propose not as a solution in itself,” he writes, “but as a method of

inquiry.” In this way we could investigate dependency and the pathways

to autonomy and self-sufficiency. Such an “epistemological luddism,” to

use Winner’s term, could help us to break up the structures of daily

life, and to take meaning back from the meaning-manufacturing apparatus

of the mass media, renew a human discourse based on community,

solidarity and reciprocity, and destroy the universal deference to

machines, experts and information. Otherwise, we face either

machine-induced cataclysm or mutilation beyond recognition of the human

spirit. For human beings, the practical result will be the same.

For now, let us attend to first things first—by considering the

possibility of a conscious break with urban-industrial civilization, a

break which does not attempt to return to prior modes of refusal (which

would be impossible anyway), but which surpasses them by elaborating its

own, at the far limits of a modernity already in decay. We begin by

annunciating the possibility of such a decision—a very small step, but

we begin where we can. A new culture can arise from that small step,

from our first awkward acts of refusal to become mere instruments. Of

course, such a culture wouldn’t be entirely new, but would derive its

strength from an old yet contemporary wisdom, as ancient and as

contemporary as the Delaware prophet and the Chinese philosopher

Chuangtse, who said: “Whoever uses machines does all his work like a

machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a

machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses

his simplicity. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am

ashamed to use them.” When we begin listening to the heart, we will be

ashamed to use such things, or to be used by them.

(1981-1985/1997)

= = =

from David Watson, Against the Megamachine (Brooklyn: Autonomedia,

1997), pp 117-145.

RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE: The first, much shorter version of this article

originally appeared under the pen name “T. Fulano” in Fifth Estate #306

(vol. 15, #5), July 1981, pp 4–8. According to Watson, the revised

version (presented above) was reworked in 1997. He removed some parts

from the original version, and also added in selections from other

articles (published between 1981 to 1985) which he had written.