Nietzsche versus the machine world

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

The following excerpts are taken from his book Human, all too human II, from 1878 (The traveller and his shadow) with the exception of the last quotation, which comes from the The genealogy of morality. There are numerous examples of such a rejection of industrial development in his work.

218. The teaching of the machine.

The machine teaches by its example how to mesh troops of men together, in operations where each has only one thing to do; it provides the model for the organization of parties and the conduct of war. What it does not teach, on the other hand, is sovereign self-determination; it makes a large number of beings a single machine, and of each individual the instrument of a unique end. The most general effect it achieves is to teach the usefulness of concentration.

220. Reaction against the civilization of the machine.

The machine, itself a product of the highest intellectual faculty, almost only uses inferior energies, without thought, in the people who serve it. In doing so, it unleashes a prodigious quantity of energy that would otherwise remain asleep, it is true; but it does not give the impulse to rise higher, to do better, to become an artist. She renders asset and uniform, — but in the long run this provokes a reaction, a desperate boredom of the soul, which learns by itself to aspire to the entertainments of laziness.

278. Premise of the Age of Machines.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises from which no one has yet dared to draw conclusions for a thousand years.

288. To what extent the machine humbles.

The machine is impersonal, it removes, from the piece worked, its pride, this quality And these imperfections individuals who are inseparable from all non-mechanical work, — therefore their lack of humanity. In the past, any purchase made from artisans was a way of Distinguish between people, brands with which we surrounded ourselves; furniture and clothing thus became symbols of mutual esteem and personal affinity, while we now seem to live only among a society of slaves, anonymous and impersonal. — We should not pay too much for the relief of work.

The genealogy of morality (Part III — Section 9)

“Our whole modern way of being [...] gives the effect of being onlyHybris and impiety [...]. east Hybris today all our attitude towards nature, all the violence we do to nature with the help of machines and the unscrupulous inventiveness of our technicians and engineers [...].”

Friedrich Nietzsche