??Primitive??n??Easy to to let technology enslave? It has taken ca. 8000 years for the megamachine to gain the ground it has today - and if you talk to people, it still has not managed anything like com plete dominance. Indeed, we seem to normalise that with whih grow up, but more and more of u are waking up from the dream of Gerontion
The importance of this evaluation and observation can not be valued or appreciated highly enough. It needs to be considered a universal warning to mankind.
I am a technophobe and avoid it like the plague, but even in the one communication app I have to keep in touch with my spread out family, I am not safe. Meta interjects with messages I didn’t allow and can’t find where to delete.
If I delete the app I cut myself off from my world.
"But the point is that science dominates our society, and that if our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise."
From a Foreign Affairs (Council on Foreign Relations) article in January, 1941, as the world was at war but the US hadn't officially entered it yet. Instructive. Selected excerpts below.
"Back of the ideologies of the dictators, back of the professional pliancy, is something more than political expediency, something more than blind obedience. Long before the world ever heard of Mussolini and Stalin and Hitler it was in a state of social unrest. The revolutions that overthrew the Romanoffs and the Hohenzollerns, the upheavals that gave British labor new rights and privileges, were expressions of dissatisfaction with the social structure. To say that the dictators emerged because science and technology had taken possession of society and stamped it with a pattern utterly different from that which the égalitarians of the eighteenth century knew is an over-simplification. There are psychic factors that cannot be ignored -- inner drives, national traditions, habits of life. Yet if the dictators are to be overthrown, if democracy is to be preserved, the part that science and technology played in the rise of democracy cannot be ignored. Research produces not only change within science itself but social change. The democratic method is to adapt social change to technological change. The dictators are trying to do the contrary.
In considering the relation of science to the dictators we must bear in mind that the human mind is intrinsically no better than it was 10,000 years ago. It simply has acquired new interests under social tension. In the Middle Ages social tension expressed itself so strongly in religion that there were 110 holy days in the year; a new ecclesiastical architecture was evolved; all Europe rose to the spiritual need of wresting Jerusalem from the "infidel." Today, however, it means more to our society to discover how the atom is constituted than that a new ecclesiastical architecture is developed, more that the mechanism of heredity is revealed than that savages in Africa are converted to Christianity. Perhaps its pragmatic attitude has led science to ignore essential ethical values. But the point is that science dominates our society, and that if our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise."
...
"Why was it that invention lagged before the liberal movement of the eighteenth century? Because it involved experimentation, work with the hands, dirty work. Also it was useful -- and anything that was useful or commercial was held in contempt by the nobility. When the business man and the inventor were freed from this aristocratic fetishism, machine after machine appeared, and with the machines came mass production and mass consumption of identical goods. Without standardization mass production is impossible. To have cheap, good clothes we must all dress more or less alike. To bring automobiles within the reach of millions we must have the assembly line. To live inexpensively in cities we must eat packaged foods, dwell in more or less standardized homes, bathe in standardized bath tubs, and draw water and gas from common reservoirs. Mass production has brought it about that the average life in New York is hardly different from the average life in Wichita. The same motion pictures brighten the screen, the same voices and music well out of loud-speakers in every town, identical cans of tomatoes and packages of cereals are to be found on all grocers' shelves, identical electric toasters brown identical slices of bread everywhere, identical refrigerators freeze identical ice cubes in a million kitchens. If gunpowder made all men the same height, in Carlyle's classic phrase, mass production has standardized behavior, pleasures, tastes, comforts, life itself.
Mass production and labor-saving devices have created a social crisis. We cannot have mass production and mechanization without planning. Engineers and their financial backers are planners. Dictators are planners. Whether they know it or not, most corporation executives and engineers are necessary totalitarians in practice. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin clearly have the instincts of engineers. Their states are designed social structures.
Often enough we hear it said that mechanical invention has outstripped social invention -- that new social forms must be devised if we are to forestall the economic crises that are brought about by what is called the "impact of science" on society. Communism and Fascism are social inventions, intended among other things to solve the economic problems created by technological change under the influence of capitalism. They attempt to answer a question: Are the technical experts and their financial backers to shape the course of society unrestrained, and even to rule nations directly and indirectly, as they did in France, and as they do in part in Great Britain and the United States? The totalitarians say that a capitalistic democratic government cannot control the experts, the inventors, the creators of this evolving mechanical culture. They therefore have decided to take control of thinking, above all scientific thinking, out of which flow the manufacturing processes and the machines which change life."
...
"It does not follow that under the Nazi or the Marx-Lenin dispensation there can be no science. What is likely to happen to science if totalitarianism prevails is revealed by the course of Egyptian art. In its earliest phases that art was fairly free; hence there was much experimenting, much striving for realistic modes of expression. When the priests took control of Egyptian life a dramatic change occurred. The ways of portraying the human being became stylized. For centuries the style hardly changed. Art had been frozen. And so must it be with research. There can be science and engineering under dictation; but it will be stylized science, engineering which does not progress."
I have been following Academy of Ideas for a while now. When I would bike an hour to soccer practice at night there and back, I constantly on repeat had your videos on repeat on the ride. It gave me a sense of great peace and knowledge. Thank you for what you all have created, it is powerful! All the things you put out is truly inspiring, keep it going
Bureaucratic systems, machines can never capture the whole.
To paraphrase David Bohm, The technological society is an abstraction. Technique has this problem in it that, implicitly, it’s trying to say that it’s seeking the ideal of not being an abstraction, but just being another copy of what is. It is not leaving out anything. I think you can see that there’s always more, and we could say, therefore, by means of technique we could not capture the whole. That’s what I’m suggesting. We can always get more. There’s no limit to technological society which you can set, because people will always want more. Scientists could discover more and more and more. But still, it’s always limited. It’s limited because it doesn’t get all, right?”
Hannah Arendt wrote of what she called ‘the future man’ that he seemed possessed by ‘a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself’.
Why do we want to exchange reality for something artificially created?
What is most difficult, writes Arendt, is to love the world as it is. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection, but the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
“The machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do.”
—Norbert Wiener
“The devil does not come dressed in red cape and pointy horns.
i've been watching you since the beginning . great job. Ellul is a bit short sighted about ww3. Technique is being used to slowly lower the globe into perpetual warfare which will lead towards a combination of factors that slide the world into full scale world war 3, WITHOUT mutual and total destruction to the systems that produce technique. some setbacks? perhaps, but mass starvation for 2 billion people and the slow down of birthrates for 10 years in the lesser developed world doesnt' affect technique but is a goal of technique. the real question is how much technique is both a) pulled forwards by militarist research and development and b) how much technnique development of other kinds is stymied and set back or shelved while militarist technique is developed. Developments in destructive technology and logisticaly 'efficience' tech will be favored by research during wartime and productive 'growth' based technology will be disfavorerd. for example. curing cancer will not be advanced greatly during war, but other forms of triage medicine for soldiers and enhancing the capabilies of soldiers and even high iq propagandists strategists and programmers will be accelerated. research into healing the sick old and babies, will be upset. during war, there is assymetric shift in what technique is advanced and what left behind. not all technique is the same.
Wow. Accurate descriptions and good explanations. Thank you. I work to explain the danger to others and must always combat knee-jerk reactions to the words I use. Technology/technique is a tool so that we humans can pursue our individual potentials and collectively improve and evolve. That is the gift given to us. Great article; will pass on the concepts.
Disgusting Propaganda... You should be ashamed of yourself.
P R O P A G A N D A
You call yourself "Academy of Ideas" FU
Here is my proposition.
We create an NGO: Project Revolution
We create a society built on Agriculture Education Research and open communication.
We take over the land and grow the best possible Food that is.
No AI.
No GMO.
No State Authority.
Energy from Water.
My proposition is simple:
Education first.
So the first step is to build an educational platform based on simple proposition of energy from water and ZEN...
We need ZEN because it is the only Religion that is not a Religion... it is Atheism with superior Morality... stopping the bickering and focusing on the essence.
It also is based on Yin and Yang the female and male forces of the Universe so it protects from Gender Idiocracy.
And it counts as a Religion giving religious protective status.
We build a platform based on content ownership just like substack.
Content should be free and available and subject based.
And it should be ready for use for Homeschooling too.
To educate everyone everywhere at any given time...
Only thing is they must want to learn.
That is the first step under an NGO I call Project Revolution.
ESPECIALLY we must focus on LAW and HUMAN RIGHTS that will eliminate the dark forces.
Everyday is a day we can learn... and we should.
Life is a path of education from the first day to the last.
A day in which we don't learn is a wasted day.
Do this and we create a Revolution that cannot be stopped.
To usher in change we must change... we have to change... it is imperative...
Because if we don't change nothing will change.
And that is an Idea YOU ARE NOT CAPABLE OF BECAUSE ALL YOU ARE IS PROPAGANDA
Mumford's surmise is that the megamachine or machines in general were first in the form of human individuals organised into machine-like groups such as bureacracies armies or large workforces. Physical machines in fact are modelled on armies.
The title turns the reader away from the real problem: Why are we so easy to let technology enslave and dehumanize us?
Maybe it's because we're still primitive? We might be too easy to "hack" as a species at this point in our evolution.
Maybe because we don’t really care about our youngest and we do not update our upbringing methods to take into account new technological developments?
We are so comfortable making our adult life a gaming adventure (and earning bucks on the way) that it is enough for us, it seems.
Our school curricula are archaic and nobody cares to adapt them to the needs of modern life...
And AI adds a whole new dimension to these serious concerns.
https://peterpetrosino.substack.com/p/like-moths-to-ais-flame
??Primitive??n??Easy to to let technology enslave? It has taken ca. 8000 years for the megamachine to gain the ground it has today - and if you talk to people, it still has not managed anything like com plete dominance. Indeed, we seem to normalise that with whih grow up, but more and more of u are waking up from the dream of Gerontion
The importance of this evaluation and observation can not be valued or appreciated highly enough. It needs to be considered a universal warning to mankind.
I am a technophobe and avoid it like the plague, but even in the one communication app I have to keep in touch with my spread out family, I am not safe. Meta interjects with messages I didn’t allow and can’t find where to delete.
If I delete the app I cut myself off from my world.
I am one of the flies trapped in Satan’s bottle!
"But the point is that science dominates our society, and that if our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise."
From a Foreign Affairs (Council on Foreign Relations) article in January, 1941, as the world was at war but the US hadn't officially entered it yet. Instructive. Selected excerpts below.
Science in the Totalitarian State
Foreign Affairs, January, 1941
https://web.archive.org/web/20181125112623/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1941-01-01/science-totalitarian-state
"Back of the ideologies of the dictators, back of the professional pliancy, is something more than political expediency, something more than blind obedience. Long before the world ever heard of Mussolini and Stalin and Hitler it was in a state of social unrest. The revolutions that overthrew the Romanoffs and the Hohenzollerns, the upheavals that gave British labor new rights and privileges, were expressions of dissatisfaction with the social structure. To say that the dictators emerged because science and technology had taken possession of society and stamped it with a pattern utterly different from that which the égalitarians of the eighteenth century knew is an over-simplification. There are psychic factors that cannot be ignored -- inner drives, national traditions, habits of life. Yet if the dictators are to be overthrown, if democracy is to be preserved, the part that science and technology played in the rise of democracy cannot be ignored. Research produces not only change within science itself but social change. The democratic method is to adapt social change to technological change. The dictators are trying to do the contrary.
In considering the relation of science to the dictators we must bear in mind that the human mind is intrinsically no better than it was 10,000 years ago. It simply has acquired new interests under social tension. In the Middle Ages social tension expressed itself so strongly in religion that there were 110 holy days in the year; a new ecclesiastical architecture was evolved; all Europe rose to the spiritual need of wresting Jerusalem from the "infidel." Today, however, it means more to our society to discover how the atom is constituted than that a new ecclesiastical architecture is developed, more that the mechanism of heredity is revealed than that savages in Africa are converted to Christianity. Perhaps its pragmatic attitude has led science to ignore essential ethical values. But the point is that science dominates our society, and that if our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise."
...
"Why was it that invention lagged before the liberal movement of the eighteenth century? Because it involved experimentation, work with the hands, dirty work. Also it was useful -- and anything that was useful or commercial was held in contempt by the nobility. When the business man and the inventor were freed from this aristocratic fetishism, machine after machine appeared, and with the machines came mass production and mass consumption of identical goods. Without standardization mass production is impossible. To have cheap, good clothes we must all dress more or less alike. To bring automobiles within the reach of millions we must have the assembly line. To live inexpensively in cities we must eat packaged foods, dwell in more or less standardized homes, bathe in standardized bath tubs, and draw water and gas from common reservoirs. Mass production has brought it about that the average life in New York is hardly different from the average life in Wichita. The same motion pictures brighten the screen, the same voices and music well out of loud-speakers in every town, identical cans of tomatoes and packages of cereals are to be found on all grocers' shelves, identical electric toasters brown identical slices of bread everywhere, identical refrigerators freeze identical ice cubes in a million kitchens. If gunpowder made all men the same height, in Carlyle's classic phrase, mass production has standardized behavior, pleasures, tastes, comforts, life itself.
Mass production and labor-saving devices have created a social crisis. We cannot have mass production and mechanization without planning. Engineers and their financial backers are planners. Dictators are planners. Whether they know it or not, most corporation executives and engineers are necessary totalitarians in practice. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin clearly have the instincts of engineers. Their states are designed social structures.
Often enough we hear it said that mechanical invention has outstripped social invention -- that new social forms must be devised if we are to forestall the economic crises that are brought about by what is called the "impact of science" on society. Communism and Fascism are social inventions, intended among other things to solve the economic problems created by technological change under the influence of capitalism. They attempt to answer a question: Are the technical experts and their financial backers to shape the course of society unrestrained, and even to rule nations directly and indirectly, as they did in France, and as they do in part in Great Britain and the United States? The totalitarians say that a capitalistic democratic government cannot control the experts, the inventors, the creators of this evolving mechanical culture. They therefore have decided to take control of thinking, above all scientific thinking, out of which flow the manufacturing processes and the machines which change life."
...
"It does not follow that under the Nazi or the Marx-Lenin dispensation there can be no science. What is likely to happen to science if totalitarianism prevails is revealed by the course of Egyptian art. In its earliest phases that art was fairly free; hence there was much experimenting, much striving for realistic modes of expression. When the priests took control of Egyptian life a dramatic change occurred. The ways of portraying the human being became stylized. For centuries the style hardly changed. Art had been frozen. And so must it be with research. There can be science and engineering under dictation; but it will be stylized science, engineering which does not progress."
I have been following Academy of Ideas for a while now. When I would bike an hour to soccer practice at night there and back, I constantly on repeat had your videos on repeat on the ride. It gave me a sense of great peace and knowledge. Thank you for what you all have created, it is powerful! All the things you put out is truly inspiring, keep it going
Bureaucratic systems, machines can never capture the whole.
To paraphrase David Bohm, The technological society is an abstraction. Technique has this problem in it that, implicitly, it’s trying to say that it’s seeking the ideal of not being an abstraction, but just being another copy of what is. It is not leaving out anything. I think you can see that there’s always more, and we could say, therefore, by means of technique we could not capture the whole. That’s what I’m suggesting. We can always get more. There’s no limit to technological society which you can set, because people will always want more. Scientists could discover more and more and more. But still, it’s always limited. It’s limited because it doesn’t get all, right?”
Hannah Arendt wrote of what she called ‘the future man’ that he seemed possessed by ‘a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself’.
Why do we want to exchange reality for something artificially created?
What is most difficult, writes Arendt, is to love the world as it is. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection, but the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
“The machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do.”
—Norbert Wiener
“The devil does not come dressed in red cape and pointy horns.
He comes as everything you ever wished for.”
i've been watching you since the beginning . great job. Ellul is a bit short sighted about ww3. Technique is being used to slowly lower the globe into perpetual warfare which will lead towards a combination of factors that slide the world into full scale world war 3, WITHOUT mutual and total destruction to the systems that produce technique. some setbacks? perhaps, but mass starvation for 2 billion people and the slow down of birthrates for 10 years in the lesser developed world doesnt' affect technique but is a goal of technique. the real question is how much technique is both a) pulled forwards by militarist research and development and b) how much technnique development of other kinds is stymied and set back or shelved while militarist technique is developed. Developments in destructive technology and logisticaly 'efficience' tech will be favored by research during wartime and productive 'growth' based technology will be disfavorerd. for example. curing cancer will not be advanced greatly during war, but other forms of triage medicine for soldiers and enhancing the capabilies of soldiers and even high iq propagandists strategists and programmers will be accelerated. research into healing the sick old and babies, will be upset. during war, there is assymetric shift in what technique is advanced and what left behind. not all technique is the same.
https://expressiveegg.substack.com/p/the-technological-system
Wow. Accurate descriptions and good explanations. Thank you. I work to explain the danger to others and must always combat knee-jerk reactions to the words I use. Technology/technique is a tool so that we humans can pursue our individual potentials and collectively improve and evolve. That is the gift given to us. Great article; will pass on the concepts.
@Gregory Moran fascinating watch
Disgusting Propaganda... You should be ashamed of yourself.
P R O P A G A N D A
You call yourself "Academy of Ideas" FU
Here is my proposition.
We create an NGO: Project Revolution
We create a society built on Agriculture Education Research and open communication.
We take over the land and grow the best possible Food that is.
No AI.
No GMO.
No State Authority.
Energy from Water.
My proposition is simple:
Education first.
So the first step is to build an educational platform based on simple proposition of energy from water and ZEN...
We need ZEN because it is the only Religion that is not a Religion... it is Atheism with superior Morality... stopping the bickering and focusing on the essence.
It also is based on Yin and Yang the female and male forces of the Universe so it protects from Gender Idiocracy.
And it counts as a Religion giving religious protective status.
We build a platform based on content ownership just like substack.
Content should be free and available and subject based.
And it should be ready for use for Homeschooling too.
To educate everyone everywhere at any given time...
Only thing is they must want to learn.
That is the first step under an NGO I call Project Revolution.
ESPECIALLY we must focus on LAW and HUMAN RIGHTS that will eliminate the dark forces.
Everyday is a day we can learn... and we should.
Life is a path of education from the first day to the last.
A day in which we don't learn is a wasted day.
Do this and we create a Revolution that cannot be stopped.
To usher in change we must change... we have to change... it is imperative...
Because if we don't change nothing will change.
And that is an Idea YOU ARE NOT CAPABLE OF BECAUSE ALL YOU ARE IS PROPAGANDA
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/the-invention-the-illuminati-does
I believe that a balance can be achieved with the awareness of this issue being front and center.
If this is what we face now, what would the future generations face?
Mumford's surmise is that the megamachine or machines in general were first in the form of human individuals organised into machine-like groups such as bureacracies armies or large workforces. Physical machines in fact are modelled on armies.