“The natural slope of the machine is to make authentic human life impossible” (George Orwell)

Excerpt from Confronting Technology (2020), a book by the philosopher David Skrbina that lists various writings on technology throughout history.

The following excerpts are taken from the masterful Chapter XII of Wigan wharf, which focuses on an investigation of the concrete situation of English workers in the 20th century, which is both critical and rational in terms of industrial and mechanical development.

The function of the machine is to save us labor. In a fully mechanized world, all the thankless and tedious tasks would be left to the machine, leaving us free to devote ourselves to more interesting occupations. Viewed from this perspective, the project is admirable. It is disheartening to see half a dozen men sweating blood and water to dig a trench for a water pipe when a fairly simple machine would stir up the same amount of soil in two or three minutes. Why not let the machine do the work, and allow men to take care of other things? But immediately the question arises: what else? In theory, these men are freed from “work” in order to be able to engage in occupations that are not “work.” But what is work and what is not? Is work that mowing the ground, sawing wood, planting trees, planting trees, felling trees, riding horses, hunting, fishing, feeding the barnyard, playing the piano, taking photographs, building a house, building a house, cooking, cooking, sowing, planting hats, repairing motorcycles? These are all activities that are work for some and a source of relaxation for others. In fact, there are very few activities that cannot be classified in either category depending on how you look at them. The peasant who has been exempted from working the land may want to use all or part of his leisure time playing the piano, while the international concert artist will jump at the opportunity offered to him to go and hoe a potato patch.

Hence the falsity of the antithesis between work conceived as a set of overwhelming chores and non-work seen as a desirable activity. The truth is that when a human being is not eating, drinking, sleeping, sleeping, making love, playing a game, or simply lounging around carefully—and none of these things can fill a lifetime—he feels the need to work. He is looking for work, even if that is not the name he gives it. As soon as you pass the village idiot stage, you discover that life must be lived to a very large extent in terms of effort. Because man is not; as vulgar hedonists seem to believe, a kind of stomach mounted on legs. He also has one hand, one eye, and one brain. Give up the use of your hands and you will suddenly have lost a large part of what makes up your personality. Now take over the half-dozen men busy digging a trench for the water pipe. A machine has exempted them from moving the earth, they will distract themselves by doing another occupation — carpentry, for example. But no matter where they turn, they discover that another machine has been set up to do the work for them. Because, in a completely mechanized world, there would be no more need for carpenters, cooks, or motorcycle repairers than there would be a need for diggers to dig trenches. There is virtually no work, whether it's spearing a whale or carving a cherry stone, that a machine can't do. The machine could even encroach on activities that we categorize as “art”; in fact, it already does so with cinema and radio. Mechanize the world excessively, and wherever you go, you will encounter a machine that will prevent you from working — that is, living.

At first glance, this may not seem like a big deal. What would prevent you from devoting yourself to your “creative” work without worrying about the machines that would do it for you? But the case is not as simple as it seems. Here I am, spending eight hours a day in an office working for an insurance company; at my leisure time, I want to engage in a “creative” occupation, and that is why I choose to transform myself into a second-hand carpenter, to make a table for myself, for example. Note that there is something artificial in all of this from the start, because specialized houses can deliver me a much better table than the one that will come out of my hands. But even if I get to work, it is impossible for me to do it in the same state of mind as the cabinetmaker of the last century, let alone Robinson on his island. Because even before we start, most of the work has already been done by machines. The tools I use require only a minimum of skill. For example, I can have tools capable of executing any molding on order, whereas the cabinetmaker of the last century would have had to do the work with chisels and gouges, tools whose use requires real training of the hand and the eye. The boards I buy are already planed, the legs turned mechanically. I can even buy the table in spare parts, which all that's left to do is assemble them. My work is then limited to driving in a few pegs and passing a piece of sandpaper. And if this is the case right now, it can only get worse in the mechanized future. With the materials and tools that we will then have at our disposal, there will no longer be the slightest possibility of error, and therefore no more room for manual skill. Making a table will be even easier and even more boring than peeling a potato. In such conditions, it is absurd to speak of “creative work.” Be that as it may, the arts of the hand (which are transmitted through learning) will have long since disappeared. Some of them are already dead, killed by the competition of the machine. Go to any country cemetery and try to find a properly cut headstone that's from after 1820. Art, or rather the profession of stone cutter, has been lost so well that it would take centuries to bring it back to life.

But, one might say, why not keep the machine and the creative work? Why not cultivate anachronism in the form of time-wasting entertainment? Many people have cherished this idea, which, in their opinion, is likely to provide a simple and elegant solution to the problems posed by the machine. Returning from his two hours of daily work during which he pressed a joystick at his tomato box factory, the citizen of Utopia, we are told, will deliberately turn to a more primitive way of life and give free rein to his creative instincts by making a bit of pottery or hand weaving. Why is this picture absurd? In accordance with a principle that, although still valid, is not always clearly perceived: namely that as long as the machine is there, you are forced to use it. Nobody is going to draw water from the well when all you have to do is turn on a faucet. Travel illustrates this principle quite well. Anyone who has moved by primitive means in a poorly developed country knows that there is as much difference between this type of trip and modern travel by train, car, etc., as much difference as between life and death. The nomad who moves on foot or on the back of an animal, with his luggage loaded on a camel or an ox car, may experience all sorts of inconveniences, but at least he will live during this time. Whereas anyone who rides on an express train or sails on board a luxury liner in fact only experiences an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet, as long as railways exist, you have to travel by train, or plane, or car. Suppose I am 60 kilometers from London. If I want to reach the capital, what is stopping me from loading my luggage on a mule and making the trip on foot, at the cost of two days of travel? Quite simply the fact that Green Line buses, passing by me every ten minutes close to my ears, would turn my equipment into a tedious chore. To appreciate primitive means of travel, there must be no other means available. No being in the world seeks difficulty for the sake of difficulty, especially when boredom is also present. Hence the ridiculousness of this image of the citizens of Utopia saving their souls by carving on wood. In a world where everything could be done by machines, everything would be done by machines. To deliberately return to primitive methods, to use archaic tools, to deliberately sow stupid little difficulties in your path, this would be pure dilettantism, carefully worked out trick, and cute affectionate. It would be like sitting solemnly at the dining table with stone-cut cutlery in your hand. Returning to “handmade” in an age dominated by machines would be like going back to Maître Pierre's Hostellerie or to the Tudor-style villa with its fake wood paneling on the walls.

Mechanical progress thus tends to leave unsatisfied the need for effort and creation present in man.

It makes the activity of the eye and hand useless, if not impossible. The apostle of progress will sometimes tell you that this is not very important, but it is usually quite easy to silence him by taking the consequences of this way of looking at things to the extreme. So why continue to use your hands to blow your nose, for example, or to sharpen a pencil? It would certainly be possible to adapt a rubber and steel device on your shoulders, even if it meant letting your arms turn into stumps where only skin and bones would remain. And continue on this path for each organ and each faculty. There is really no compelling reason for a human being to do anything other than eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and procreate; everything else could be done by machines that would act in their place. This is why the logical outcome of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something that would be like a brain locked in a jar. This is the goal we are already working towards, even if, of course, we have no intention of achieving it: just as a man who drinks a bottle of whiskey daily does not do it with the strong intention of winning liver cirrhosis. The implicit end of progress may not be quite the brain in the bucket, but it is certainly a terrible chasm where man — the subhuman — would sink into weakness and powerlessness. And the unfortunate thing is that today the words “progress” and “socialism” are inextricably linked in the minds of most people. It can be taken for certain that the determined opponent of machinery is also a determined opponent of socialism. Socialists only have the words mechanization, rationalization, modernization in their mouths — or at least he believes in his duty to make himself the fervent apostle of them. So, just recently, a leading figure in the Independent Labour Party confessed to me, with a kind of melancholic restraint — as if there was something vaguely indecent — that he had “a passion for horses.” Because you see, the horse belongs to a bygone earth past and nostalgia is still tainted by a vague scent of heresy. For my part, I do not think that this is justified, but it is a fact. This fact alone is enough to explain the distance honest people take from socialism. [...]

This perspective is worrisome, considering that we have already lost control of the mechanization process. And this is for the simple reason that humanity has taken the plunge. A chemist develops a new process for manufacturing synthetic rubber, an engineer designs a new type of piston pin: why? Not for a clearly defined purpose, but simply by virtue of a force, which has now become instinctive, that pushes this chemist or engineer to invent and perfect. Put a pacifist to work in a factory where bombs are made, and within two months you will find him developing a new device. This explains such diabolical inventions as asphyxiating gases, whose authors certainly do not expect them to prove beneficial to humanity. [...] But, living in a scientific and mechanical era, our minds are perverted to the point of believing that “progress” must continue and that science must continue to move forward, no matter what the cost. In words, we will be ready to agree that the machine is made for man and not man for the machine; in practice, any effort to control the development of the machine seems to us to be an attack on science, that is, as a kind of blasphemy. And even if all of humanity suddenly rose up against the machine and spoke out for a return to a simpler way of life, the trend would not be so easy to reverse. It would not be enough to break, as in theErewhon by Butler, all machines invented after a certain date; we would still have to break the mindset that would push us, almost unwillingly, to invent new machines as soon as the old ones destroyed. And this mental disposition is present, even if only in a latent state, in each of us. In every country in the world, the great army of scientists and technicians, followed as best they can by a whole panting of humanity, is moving forward on the road of “progress” with the blind determination of a column of ants. There are relatively few people who want us to get there, we find many who wish with all their might that we never get there, and yet this future is already here. The process of mechanization has itself become a machine, a monstrous nickel-plated vehicle that takes us at full speed to a destination that is still little known, but in all probability to a Wells padded world, to the world of the brain in the jar. [...]

As I said before, the machine is holding us and us well, and it will be extremely difficult to get away from it. Nevertheless, this answer is an escape, in that it evades the question of what we really mean by “wanting” this or that. I am a decadent semi-intellectual in the modern world, and I would die if I didn't have my morning tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Obviously, I don't want to go back to a simpler, harder, ruder, and probably land-based lifestyle. In the same sense, I don't “want” to limit myself to drinking, to pay my debts, to exercise more, to be faithful to my wife, etc. But in another, more fundamental sense, I want all of this, and perhaps at the same time I want a civilization where “progress” is not defined by the creation of a cozy world for the use of little fat men. [...]

George Orwell