Mumford - Chap. Nine - The Megamachine

In this chapter Mumford introduces a key concept of the book, that of the megamachine. The first aspect of the megamachine is the invisible machine which means the ability to organized mass amounts of labor. The invisible machine is made up of people who have been assigned specialized roles in the creation of large works. The results of this machine are visible, as are the tools and remains of workers, the invisible part is the organizing structure. This is what an art history teacher of mine was trying to get us to see when showing us slides of Stonehenge, the pyramids and ziggurats. These monuments tell us that whoever built them had the ability to coordinate and enforce a rigorous long term work project.

The invisible machine is founded on the ability of kings to coerce conformity to their authority. This ability, as we have seen, is based on an alliance between the military force of the kings and their armies, and the supernatural sanction lent by the priestly class. The order born from this alliance was fragile and those who lead through fear of earthly and heavenly harm were paranoid of losing there ability to intimidate. "Without submissive faith and unqualified obedience to the royal will, transmitted by governors, generals, bureaucrats, taskmasters, the machine would never have been workable. When these attitudes could not be sustained, the megamachine collapsed." (Mumford, 191)

If the ability to coerce conformity exists in sufficient amounts, the next problem is how to use it to unify individuals into a mechanized group that blindly followed orders. This requires a commander with exact knowledge of the end product and the means for reaching it, and with the means to transmit and reproduce these ends and means through the chain of command. The solution to this problem came from the organizational methods of the army, and the technology of written language. This tech allows for exact message transmission and accountability in the dual sense of knowing who didn't follow orders and know how much of what the collective has. This represents a further centralization of intelligence, the ability to report to headquarters.