Lewis Mumford

Technology is a form of social organization before it is a set of objects, and the first machine was built out of people.

The megamachine

The pyramids were built by a machine. It had no metal in it. It was made of human beings organized by authority into a single apparatus with a designer, a hierarchy of transmission, and interchangeable parts, and Mumford calls it the megamachine.

The point is not the metaphor. It is that the organizational form came first and the hardware came later, so the important distinction is not between simple and advanced technology but between authoritarian technics, which require centralized control and produce it in turn, and democratic technics, which small groups can operate and repair.

The clock

The decisive machine of the industrial age, he argued, was not the steam engine. It was the clock, and it was perfected by monks who needed to coordinate prayer.

Once time is divisible, countable and external to the task, work can be measured against it, sold by it and disciplined by it. The timetable in Foucault's barracks and the bell-timed school day in the education domain are the same device, and it arrived from the monastery rather than the factory.

Serious objections

• The two-camp division into authoritarian and democratic technics is cleaner than the history. Most real technologies are both, depending on who holds them and how they are arranged.
• The megamachine is an analogy doing the work of an argument in places, and it is applied across five thousand years with little attention to what changed.
• Mumford's later work reads the modern world as decline, which is a mood as much as a finding, and it makes the diagnosis harder to test.