Technopoly Read Online Free PDF

invented, and someone figured out that, when horses are hitched, one behind the other, their pulling power is enormously amplified. Corn mills, paper mills, and fulling mills were part of medieval culture, as were bridges, castles, and cathedrals. The famous spire of Strasbourg Cathedral, built in the thirteenth century, rose to a height of 466 feet, the equivalent of a forty-story skyscraper. And, to go further back in time, one must not fail to mention the remarkable engineering achievements of Stonehenge and the Pyramids (whose construction,Lewis Mumford insisted, signifies the first example of a megamachine in action).
    Given the facts, we must conclude that tool-using cultures are not necessarily impoverished technologically, and may even be surprisingly sophisticated. Of course, some tool-using cultures were (and still are) technologically primitive, and some have even displayed a contempt for crafts and machinery. The Golden Age of Greece, for example, produced no important technical inventions and could not even devise ways of using horsepower efficiently. Both Plato and Aristotle scorned the “base mechanic arts,” probably in the belief that nobility of mind was not enhanced by efforts to increase efficiency or productivity. Efficiency and productivity were problems for slaves, not philosophers. We find a somewhat similar view in the Bible, which is the longest and most detailed account of an ancient tool-using culture we have. In Deuteronomy, no less an authority than God Himself says, “Cursed be the man who makes a graven or molten image, an abomination to the Lord, a thing made by the hands of a craftsman, and sets it up in secret.”
    Tool-using cultures, then, may have many tools or few, may be enthusiastic about tools or contemptuous. The name “tool-using culture” derives from the relationship in a given culture between tools and the belief system or ideology. The tools are not intruders. They are integrated into the culture in ways that do not pose significant contradictions to its world-view. If we take the European Middle Ages as an example of a tool-using culture, we find a very high degree of integration between its tools and its world-view. Medieval theologians developed an elaborate and systematic description of the relation of man to God, man to nature, man to man, and man to his tools. Their theology took as a first and last principle that all knowledge and goodness come from God, and that therefore all human enterprisemust be directed toward the service of God. Theology, not technology, provided people with authorization for what to do or think. Perhaps this is why Leonardo da Vinci kept his design of a submarine secret, believing that it was too harmful a tool to unleash, that it would not gain favor in God’s eyes.
    In any case, theological assumptions served as a controlling ideology, and whatever tools were invented had, ultimately, to fit within that ideology. We may say, further, that all tool-using cultures—from the technologically most primitive to the most sophisticated—are theocratic or, if not that, unified by some metaphysical theory. Such a theology or metaphysics provides order and meaning to existence, making it almost impossible for technics to subordinate people to its own needs.
    The “almost” is important. It leads to my second qualification. As the spirit of Thamus reminds us, tools have a way of intruding on even the most unified set of cultural beliefs. There are limits to the power of both theology and metaphysics, and technology has business to do which sometimes cannot be stayed by any force. Perhaps the most interesting example of a drastic technological disruption of a tool-using culture is in the eighth-century use of the stirrup by the Franks under the leadership of Charles Martel. Until this time, the principal use of horses in combat was to transport warriors to the scene of the battle, whereupon they dismounted to meet the foe. The stirrup made it