Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” […] What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also being good for the individual, and as proof of this, here is something new and shiny. […] For a bribe to be accepted it needs to promise something truly enticing, and Mumford, in his essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” acknowledged that “the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.” The danger, however, was that “once one opts for the system no further choice remains.”
Real life mag, Zachary Loeb: The Magnificent Bribe
I hadn’t heard of Mumford previously, and the themes that Loeb presents in his Real Life Mag (RIP 2022) essay are fascinating. There’s a convergence between the arguments presented and the Adam Curtis Hypernormality: human agency has receeded in favour of the an ever-more inhuman capitalist system – in Mumfords work embodied in the megamachine – and we can’t reason our way out of it.
This is the kind of stuff which is playing at the back of my mind when I’m reading about the design world. The hypernormality which Curtis speaks about is alive and well online – but instead of being manifested in a Soviet society, it’s the stories we tell ourselves on our Linkedin or Instagram feeds. The story being this: My opinion of the world matters, your opinion matters, and we are all the skippers of our ship of destiny.
I reached out to Zachary Loeb and he recommended two other essays on Mumford that he wrote (as well as the suggestion that I start with Mumfords Art and Technics as being the more accessible book):
In the twenty-first century, after the digital turn, it is easy to find examples of entities that fit the bill of the megamachine. It may, in fact, be easier to do this today than it was during Mumford’s lifetime. For one no longer needs to engage in speculative thinking to find examples of technologies that ensure that “no action” goes unnoticed. The handful of massive tech conglomerates that dominate the digital world today—companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon—seem almost scarily apt manifestations of the megamachine. […] And as these companies compete for data they work to ensure that nothing is missed by their “relentless eye[s].” Furthermore, though these companies may be technology firms they are like the classic megamachines insofar as they bring together the “political and economic, military, bureaucratic and royal.” Granted, today’s “royal” are not those who have inherited their thrones but those who owe their thrones to the tech empires at the heads of which they sit. […] And yet, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are not the megamachine, but rather examples of megatechnics; the megamachine is the broader system of which all of those companies are merely parts.
b2o, Zachary Loeb: From Megatechnic Bribe to Megatechnic Blackmail: Mumford’s ‘Megamachine’ After the Digital Turn
And all of this comes back to me studying UX. Because what much of the UX Design is focused on is making (digital) systems easier to use.