Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition

All our economic and social arrangements—how we feel about what we do, which is all that culture is—are founded upon the way our industrial energy is organized.

Since one of the distorting by-products of technology is the collapse of human time, we could find ways to retard tempos to permit normal responses and accommodations.

That is why the bureaucracy develops in any social system—to collect, retain, and supply this information in an orderly way.

Man is, not only because he thinks but because he feels, and it is the interaction between these two impressive energies that establishes what people today love to call the human condition.

But I suggest that recently we’ve spent a good deal of time on improving the machine and that for a while we ought to concentrate on the other end. The problem is not primarily engineering or scientific in character. It’s simply human.

But our mechanical triumph may have produced a mechanical atmosphere we can’t stand. So we may have reached a point where the design of our technology must take into greater account our interior needs.

Societies have not been very successful in reforming themselves, accommodating to change, without pain and conflict.

But, beginning with the nineteenth century, the situation had change. “His capacity is no longer so limited; man has now learned to manufacture power and with the manufacture of power a new epoch began.”

So the first part of the problem appears to be whether we can now in fact discover the means to close the gap between the changes that destroy the old, which was not bad but is not, in the new dispensation, good and useful, and the developments which are to take the place of the old, but which do not take place fast enough. Put another way, can we