21st Century Megamachines

AI, Centralization, and the Return of the Human Cog

Hi everyone, and welcome to Chapter Three of the book I’m writing using ChatGPT-4 for editorial advice, research support, and other sundry tasks as we humans do what we’ve always done: write what we believe and what we love. After the chapter, I’ll report back with any noteworthy insights about using ChatGPT—what works, what doesn’t, and the how and why behind it.

Chapter Three draws on one of my favorite techniques: importing historical concepts into the present to show how certain challenges echo through time. Some problems don’t disappear; they just return in new form. Lewis Mumford’s mid-20th-century reflections on the “megamachine” are a perfect example.

Let’s dig in.

The Rise of the Megamachine

In the late 1960s, architecture critic, urban planner, and historian Lewis Mumford described the concept of a “mega machine” in his two-volume series The Myth of the Machine. Ancient Egyptians built pyramids with megamachines. The Third Reich built a megamachine intended to take over the world, and the Allied powers constructed megamachines to stop it. Megamachines can be technologically simple, but they coordinate and organize human actions to achieve large and even awe-inspiring results. Importantly, the architecture of the entire machine is largely invisible, “composed of living, but rigid, human parts.”