Authoritarian and Democratic Technics

tags

Techne Automation

Notes

NOTER_PAGE: 9

The best life possible-and here I am consciously treading on contested ground- is one that calls for an ever greater degree of self-direction, self-expression, and self-realization. In this sense, personality, once the exclusive attribute of kings, belongs on democratic theory to every man. Life itself in its fullness and wholeness cannot be delegated.

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What I would call democratic technics is the small scale method of production, resting mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman

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Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has as last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometime actively disobedient servo-mechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.

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there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike Job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied.

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Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.

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Once one opts for the system no further choice remains.

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I repeat: life cannot be delegated.

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