Week 5

Thomas Hughes attempts to curate a debate as response to technology as machine through a critique of intellectual positions from noteworthy industrial thinkers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. What is clear within the reading is the divide between European (specifically German) and American approaches, this leads to a right-centric debate between fascism and capitalism highlighting the devoid of natural principals within industrialisation. Through Leon Trotsky, Hughes establishes the displacement of divinity within the realm of industrial engineering, “in the 19th century Americans had created a human-built world, believing that the creative act depended upon a God-given spark and that they were completing god’s creation. In the 20^th century, god was no longer needed.” Fresh out of the war and deeply rooted within the boom of the second industrial revolution it is viewed that cities were now dictated by man and the ability to mass produce standardised forms of technology. This lead to standardised mechanic designs, that were abundant and cheap to manufacture, resulting in a rigid puzzle of mechanisation.

By extension, Werner Sombart believed in a fascist implementation of a global machine as alternative to capitalism. By means of cheap labour from developing countries and management structures of Eurocentric corporations, he believed that the machine empowered humans to break free of their natural limitations.

By contrast, Charles Beard rediscovered the beauty of the natural and warned of the ignorance towards nature through the furtherance of the machine. He notes that Americans only find solace in the quantitative not the qualitative, by extension they have become the machines, focused on the numerical data as determination for success. This notion is surprisingly echoed by Oswald Spengler as he notes the “cultural sea of change, occurred when humans began using technology to exploit nature”.