🛑 Here’s how it all went wrong. Let's not repeat the mistake

Populism’s war on the 'Mega-Machine' again threatens American prosperity

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Here’s how it all went wrong.

In the 1960s, as America basked in post-war Up Wing prosperity and technological triumph, a chorus of dissent emerged. Social critics such as Lewis Mumford began to question whether progress had come at too steep a price. Mumford warned that our increasingly complex, techno-industrial society was being run by a sprawling, soulless technocracy: an authoritarian "Mega-Machine," as he ominously termed it, of government, corporations, and elite institutions working in lockstep to centralize control and strip individuals of agency.

Wait, there’s more: Ordinary people had become mere cogs in a vast, inhuman system that prioritized power, efficiency, and material production over human well-being, ecological balance, and cultural richness. Modern technology was leading to dehumanization, standardization, and a loss of vital human purpose.

As Mumford said in a 1966 speech at Harvard University:

According to Mumford, the spread of science and technology is creating a "universal, but inadequate society," what he terms the "Mega-Machine." Unlike previous systems of oppression, the Mega-Machine is not based upon a principle of punishment, but on the contrary idea of reward. "The Mega-Machine," Mumford explained in his deep, articulate rumble, "offers endless material abundance for all abundance beyond even the dreams of the Ford Foundation. This "totalitarian system," will free men from the compulsion to work — automation and cybernetics will take care of production — only to replace it with the compulsion to consume."

The flavor of this view of the global Mega-Machine was perhaps best captured in a monologue written by Paddy Chayefsky for the 1976 dark comedy film Network:

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

This intellectual backlash soon found political expression, helping derail the postwar boom.