In 1934, Technics and Civilization published its engrossing history of the machine and critical examination of its consequences on civilization—long before television, the personal computer, or the Internet were even on the horizon.
Lewis Mumford examined the origins of the machine era and tracked its social consequences, suggesting that the emergence of modern technology had its roots in the Middle Ages rather than the Industrial Revolution, drawing on art, science, philosophy, and cultural history.
Mumford wisely contended that our then industrially driven economy was governed by our moral, economic, and political decisions, not by the equipment we utilized. Technics and Civilization was the first thorough attempt in English to illustrate the rise of the machine era over the previous thousand years—and to forecast the attraction the technical still exerts over us now. It was equal parts strong history and scathing critique.
Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created. We effectively became “time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers” with the invention of the clock.
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