Lewis Mumford

... you know, in which everyone is surrounded by two tons of metal, uh, and a, and a ton of space, are really a super inefficient way to get around and, in fact, are, are really anti-city.

Uh, Lewis Mumford, writing back in the middle of the 20th century, said, uh, "The right to, uh, bring a motor car to any address in a city is the right to destroy a city," and we've seen that happen.

Wow.

And in cities all over Europe now they have what's called a congestion fee, and unless you live there or have a special license for your car, if you'd go past that line into the center, you, you have a bill to pay.

Uh, all right.

Well, I'm gonna give you guys a quote here to think about as we move into our conversation today, and this is a quote from an American historian and a cultural critic named Lewis Mumford.

All right? This quote comes from his book that was published in two volumes between 1967 and 1970, so that's been a while ago.

This quote comes from his book called The Myth of the Machine.

Yeah.

So, this, this was, um, again, digging more into what is the machine.

I, I do think that going off of this quote that we just read from Mumford, where, um, he mentions the dominant minority, we identified them as, as elites, and then he talks about the individuals who become cogs in the wheel of the machine.

Um, but then he goes on to talk about depersonalized collective organizations.

One of the authors I've used quite a lot in the book is...

It's Lewis Mumford, because Lewis Mumford, the great philosopher and critic of technology, wrote an enormous pair of books about the machine called The Myth of the Machine in the 1960s.

And he talks about the machine as being, and I find this quite convincing, a tendency within humanity.

So he traces the machine back to, for example, ancient Egypt, which he identifies as the first machine culture.

And then there's the mechanical clock.

Lewis Mumford, the historian, he argued it was maybe the machine that made the industrial age.

How so? The clock.

Well, it's standardized time.

And this is where, and this is why I'm on this podcast, not as an expert in science, but as somebody who can ramble on about philosophy.

There is an American philosopher of technology named Lewis Mumford, and the Cold War turned into something that Mumford would have referred to as a mega machine.

So what a mega machine is, it's a human-caused situation, often an undesirable one, often an absurd one.

which starts to build momentum and inertia and develop an internal logic that justifies its continued existence and structure because of the industry that builds around it, because of the momentum that builds around it, that basically defends and justifies and even demands its continued existence.

Burdick died in 1965, but his concerns about an automated state were bubbling up all over the place.

In 1966, in The Myth of the Machine, the American critic Lewis Mumford lamented the rise of cybernetic intelligence, warning that under its automatic operation, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man's role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalized collective organizations.

Mumford described technological determinism, the idea that machines determine the course of history and represent a march of progress as a radical misinterpretation of the whole course of human development.

This mistaken belief, he wrote in The New Yorker the next year, had to be abandoned if we are to get an adequate grip on our mechanized culture before we lose both our consciousness of human purpose and our confidence in being able to control our own creations.

And I was like, that might be a bit much because as you said, there's some use cases like in public, if this was relegated to public institutions and research organizations where it's being used for potentially productive and benign purposes, you know, you could see some, there are like those handful of projects that get continually referred to, you know, preserving a language or doing this and that, which are some genuinely good stuff.

But right now they function from where I'm sitting primarily as what, you know, Lewis Mumford would call a mega-technic bribe, right? It's like, oh, see, here's this one thing that they do that's so great.

Like everything, meanwhile, the bulk of what they're actually doing.

And there's no questions

It's a 1930s Art Deco project, which was quite iconic.

The historian Lewis Mumford called it America's best example of misplaced monumentality.

What they did is they added an addition, which is kind of threaded into the old frame and then lifted above it.

And there's this kind of folded geometry, very apparent.

Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible set to balanced, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it arises out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.

Lewis Mumford.

In recovery, we walk one foot in front of the other.

We live one day at a time.