The machine organization gives nothing – it organizes need

Why does the contemplation of machines give us such pleasure? Because they manifest the fundamental form of man's intelligence, because before our very eyes this constructive and combining intelligence masters and amasses power, because they win a ceaseless triumph over the elements which they beat down, squeeze, and forge. Let us enter the workshop, then, to see what goes on.

The impression we gain as we observe technical processes of any sort is not at all one of abundance. The sight of abundance and plenty give us joy:

they are the signs of a fruitfulness which we revere as a life-giving force.

Rooting, sprouting, budding, blooming, ripening, and fruition – the exuberance of the motions and forms of life – strengthen and refresh us. The human body and the human mind possess this power of bestowing strength.

Both man and woman have it. But the machine organization gives nothing – it organizes need. The prospect of vineyard, orchard, or a blossoming landscape cheers us, not because these things yield profits, but because of the sensation of fertility, abundance, and gratuitous riches. The industrial scene, however, has lost its fruitfulness; it has become the scene of mechanical production. It conveys, above all, a sense of hungriness, particularly in the industrial cities which, in the metaphorical language of technological progress, are the homes of a flourishing industry. The machine gives a hungry impression. And this sensation of a growing, gnawing hunger, a hunger that becomes unbearable, emanates from everything in our entire technical arsenal.

When we enter a factory, be it a cotton mill, a foundry, a saw mill, or a powerhouse, everywhere we get the same impression. The consuming, devouring, gluttonous motion racing through time restlessly and insatiably, reveals the never stilled and never to be stilled hunger of the machine. So obvious is this hunger that even the impression of concentrated power which we receive in the centers of heavy industry cannot overcome it. In fact, it is strongest in these centers, because precisely here we find the greatest greed for power. And the rational mind which stands behind the machine and keeps watch over its automatic, mechanical motion – it too is hungry, and hunger follows it everywhere. It cannot shake off hunger; it cannot free itself from it; it cannot be stilled, however hard it may try. And how, indeed, could that be possible! This mind itself is consuming, gluttonous, and it has no access to riches; it cannot conjure up abundance. No effort of ingenuity, not all the inventive power that is brought to bear here can do it. For rationalization only sharpens hunger and actually increases consumption. This growing consumption is a sign not of abundance but of poverty; it is bound up with worry, want, and toil.

It is precisely the methodical, disciplined effort leading to the perfection of the technical processes which destroys the basis for the hopes that certain groups place in this perfection. Progress in its present rapid advance creates an optical illusion, deceiving the observer into seeing things which are not there. Technology can be expected to solve all problems which can be mastered by technical means, but we must expect nothing from it which lies beyond technical possibilities. Since even the smallest mechanical process consumes more energy than it produces, how could the sum of all these processes create abundance?2 There can be no talk of riches produced by technology. What really happens is rather a steady, forever growing consumption. It is a ruthless destruction, the like of which the earth has never before seen. A more and more ruthless destruction of resources is the characteristic of our technology. Only by this destruction can it exist and spread. All theories which overlook this fact are lopsided because they disregard the basic conditions which in the modern world govern production and economics.

In every healthy economy the substance with which it works is preserved and used sparingly, so that consumption and destruction do not overstep the limit beyond which the substance itself would be endangered or destroyed.

Since technology presupposes destruction, since its development depends upon destruction, it cannot be fitted into any healthy economic system; one cannot look at it from an economic point of view. The radical consumption of oil, coal, and ore cannot be called economy, however rational the methods of drilling and mining. Underlying strict rationality of technical working methods, we find a way of thinking which cares nothing for the preservation and saving of the substance.

What is euphemistically called production is really consumption. The gigantic technical apparatus, that masterpiece of human ingenuity, could not reach perfection if technological thought were to be contained within an economic scheme, if the destructive power of technical progress were to be arrested. But this progress becomes all the more impetuous, the larger the resources at its disposal, and the more energetically it devours them. This is shown by the concentration of men and machines in the great mining centers where the mechanization of work and the organization of man are most advanced. The rationality of technology, so impressively displayed here, becomes intelligible only when one has understood the conditions on which it depends. Its concomitant is waste and contempt for all rationality in the exploitation of the resources on whose existence technology depends, as the lungs depend on air.

Where wastage begins, there begins desolation, and scenes of such desolation can be found even in the early days of our technology, in the era of the steam engine. These scenes are startling by the extraordinary ugliness and the Cyclopean power which are characteristic of them. The machine invades the landscape with destruction and transformation; it grows factories and whole manufacturing cities overnight, cities grotesquely hideous, where human misery is glaringly revealed; cities which, like Manchester, represent an entire stage of technology and which have become synonymous with hopeless dreariness. Technology darkens the air with smoke, poisons the water, destroys the plants and animals. It brings about a state in which nature has to be "preserved" from rationalized thinking, in which large tracts of land have to be set apart, fenced off, and placed under a taboo, like museum pieces. What all museum-like institutions make evident is that preservation is needed. The extension of protected areas, therefore, is an indication that destructive processes are at work.

Mining centers, in particular, are the focal points of organized pillage, where the riches in the earth are exploited and consumed. Human pauperization begins with the proletarization of the masses, who are indoctrinated to factory work and kept on a low level of existence. The exploitation of the factory worker (about which socialism is indignant only so long as it is in the opposition) is an inevitable symptom of the universal exploitation to which technology subjects the whole earth from end to end.

Man no less than ore deposits belongs to the resources subject to consumption by technology. The ways in which the worker tries to evade this exploitation – associations, labor unions, political parties – are the very methods which tie him forever closer to the progress of technology, mechanical work, and technical organization.

The obverse side of technology is a pillage which becomes constantly better organized; this must not be overlooked when one speaks of technical progress. True, we have made a technical advance if by means of artificial fertilizers we succeed in squeezing uninterrupted crops out of our overburdened plough and pasture land. But this advance itself is at the same time the consequence of a calamitous deficiency, for if we did not have the fertilizer we should no longer be able to feed ourselves at all. Technical progress has deprived us of the free choice of nutriment which our ancestors possessed. A machine which trebles the output of a previous model constitutes a technical advance, for it is the result of a more rational design.

But for this very reason it also possesses a more intense consuming and devouring power. Its hunger is sharper, and it consumes correspondingly more. In this way, the whole realm of the machine is full of a restless, devouring power that cannot be satisfied.

(...)

 If two thousand years hence there should still be archaeologists – which is rather unlikely – who were to undertake excavations, say, in Manchester, Essen, or Pittsburgh, they would find but little. They would discover nothing as enduring as Egyptian burial chambers and classical temples. For the stuff with which the factory system works is not aere perennius (“more lasting than bronze” – Horace). These archaeologists might even be surprised at the paltriness of their discoveries. The earth-spanning power of technology is of an ephemeral kind – a fact easily overlooked by those engrossed in it.

Everywhere it is threatened by decay, given over to decay, and decay follows upon its heels all the more insistently and closely, the faster it marches on towards new triumphs.

The machine does not create new riches. It consumes existing riches through pillage, that is, in a manner which lacks all rationality even though it quickly employs rational methods of work. As technology progresses, it devours the resources on which it depends. It contributes to a constant drain, and thereby again and again comes to a point where it is forced to improve its inventory and to rationalize anew its methods of work. Those who deny this, claiming that it is the wealth of new inventions which made the existing apparatus obsolete, are confusing cause and effect.

from Friedrich Georg Jünger's The Failure of Technology