On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part 2, Chapter 2

 

Summary of Part 2, Chapter 2: The Regulative Function of Culture in the Relation between Man and the World of Technical Objects. Current Problems.

In this chapter Simondon makes his case for mechanology as a corrective to the historical and cultural failure to properly make sense of the relationship between humans and machines. He starts back again with the Encyclopedists: they did not understand machines as fully automata; instead, they still thought of them as assemblages of devices, in other words, at the level of the element. This led to a false sense of, and belief in, continuous progress (because it is possible to see such continuous progress in the saturation/concretization of elements; if they had been thinking at the level of individuals or ensembles (I think he would say), progress would not only appear “serrated” in S’s terminology, it would also not be misunderstood as some mystical process that happens by itself).

In any event, it is the way change happens at the level of the element in the 18^th century, which characterizes that period’s mix of euphoria and anxiety regarding technology. Euphoria arises from the experience of continuous improvement ongoing during that time; anxiety in this period regards “those transformations that provoke a break within the rhythms of everyday life, making the old habitual gestures useless” (130). S delineates an interesting distinction between tools and instruments, “if by tool one understands the technical object enabling one to prolong and arm the body in order to accomplish a gesture, and by instrument the technical object that enables one to prolong and adapt the body in order to achieve better perception.” He gives an interesting discussion on how many tools will be both tool and instrument, for instance a hammer also gives feedback to the user on the resistance and movement of the nail being driven; his point is though that in this case the hammer is still primarily a tool, since its quality as an instrument is subordinate to its use as a tool; he holds that this is still the case even when a mason uses a hammer to tap a wall to get a sense of its composition. In contrast, telescopes, microscopes, etc. are instruments, pure and simple.

With the advent of “complete technical individuals” in the 19^th century, the previous anxiety with technological change becomes much more acute, as there are now machines which replace humans.

It is not necessarily through its size that the factory distinguishes itself from the craftsman’s workshop, but through the change in relation between the technical object and the human being: the factory is a technical ensemble that is comprised of auto­matic machines, whose activity is parallel to that of human activity; the factory uses true technical individuals, whereas, in the workshop, it is man who lends his individuality to the accomplishment of technical actions. (131)

The progress of the nineteenth century can no longer be experienced by the individual, because it is no longer centralized with the individual as the center of command and perception in the adapted action. (132)

The notion of progress thus “splits in two,” as humans lose their earlier “kinesthetic” contact with technology, and alongside the sense of progress exists a growing anxiety due to the disconnection with technology and its growing incomprehensibility of scale.

Progress is henceforth thought of as cosmic, at the level of its overall results. It is thought abstractly, intellectually, in a doctrinal manner. Progress is no longer thought by craftsmen, but by mathematicians, who conceive of progress as man taking possession of nature.

“The individual who thinks progress is not the same individual as the one who works,” S argues – note that, in contrast to, e.g., Braverman, or Bookchin, who made the same historical observation, S attributes this differentiation between the thinker and the worker to the effects of the societal experience of this stage of technological development (viz., of the technical individual), rather than to the social or economic order per se. For all S’s disavowal of having any dialectic going on in his account of history, his model does feel like it has the somewhat dissociated clockwork effect of an idealist dialectic, in which stages just somehow follow each other (his invocation of context, experience, etc. being too a priori to be properly termed materialist, imho).

S in fact goes on to argue that his account provides a deeper understanding of alienation than that of the Marxist concept, which is, in S’s view, superficial, merely “juridical and economic”:

Beneath this juridical and economic relation exists an even more profound relation, that of the continuity between the human individual and the technical individual, or of the discontinuity between these two beings. … The alienation of man in relation to the machine does not only have a socio-economic sense; it also has a physio-psychological sense; the machine no longer prolongs the corporeal schema, neither for workers, nor for those who possess the machines. (133)

He goes on to state that bankers, etc., are just as alienated as anyone else, despite not being exploited for their labor – and quickly dismisses Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as an explanation for this – his ultimate point being, basically, that everyone is alienated and has only a partial understanding of contemporary technology and its relation to the human. It could be quite easily demonstrated that Simondon is not accurately representing or engaging with the full elaboration of the process of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (and the first kind, alienation from nature, would pretty much cover the “machinic alienation” or whatever you might call it, that he is trying to outline; he could also be said to be describing what Marx would see as the role of automation as an aspect of real subsumption). But his agenda is actually, once again, to explain away any given subject-position within society as partial and alienated, thus showing the need for a new mechanological perspective.

The perspectives of both labor and capital are “late” (presumably meaning “outdated”) with regard to the modern technical individual; and the “dialogue” or struggle between the two is “false because it is of the past” (134). [To the extent that there is a validity to the stages of technical development and awareness that S elaborates, his error is the presentist one, in supposing that each stage completely displaces or supplants the previous stages, instead of layering over and interacting with the previous stages complexly]. [And this is an aspect of how his account reads like an old-fashioned, simplistic idealist dialectic (like, say, Stirner’s (sorry, Max!)) instead of, say, more nuanced Bakhtinian dialogism).]

S concludes this discussion with a much clearer exposition of his concept of finality (which I confess I was a bit confused by in the previous chapter). It is, basically, instrumentalism, and it shapes and limits the perspectives of both the worker and the capitalist. They understand machines, thus, in terms of the purpose for which they are put to work; this [external condition?] prevents them from understanding the “internal coherence” of the machine, and thus its true nature. The development of which understanding will, of course, be the goal of the mechanologist.

He goes on to discuss the ideal form of coupling between human and machine as equals, in other words with the human “not merely as a being who directs or utilizes it through the incorporation of ensembles, or as a being who serves it by supplying matter and elements. … There is an inter-individual coupling between man and machine when the same self-regulating functions are better and more subtly accomplished by the man-machine couple than by man or machine alone” (135).

To illustrate this, he posits a difference between how the memories of machines and humans work, and how they can work together combining their distinct strengths. Machines can only record; their memory does not even strictly speaking contain forms (because this would require an awareness of these forms), “but merely a translation of forms, by means of an encoding in a spatial or temporal distribution” (136). Humans are required to perceive the forms recorded in machine memory. This indifference to form is a strength of machine memory, in that it allows it to record “elements without order;” human memory, in contrast, requires a sense of order in order to remember. Also, though machine memory has a certain plasticity, this is the plasticity of being able to be written and erased. Human memory, less reliably “monomorphic” and reliable than machine memory, nevertheless also has the ability to infer and interpret, aka the “plasticity of integration” (137), and thus is able to draw on experience and memory to make predictions and fill in gaps in its knowledge. Thus, the proper context for the “coupling” of human and machine memory is those complex procedures in which both are needed.

This leads to a reiteration of S’s insistence that “Despite appearances, it is, on the contrary, the truly automatic machine that least replaces man” (139); this is still true a priori, because (in previous chapters) he has defined automata as lacking any “margin of indeterminacy” or openness (and machines which do have such a margin of indeterminacy are not “automata”); human interlocutors are thus necessary in any operation more complex than pushing a button to start and end an automatic process.

It becomes a reasonable question as to whether the development of machine learning has led this aspect of Simondon’s thought to become outdated, with potential consequences for his entire model of ideal human-machine interaction. Surely, Simondon is aware that automata can involve sensors and actuators, and thus be open to outside information; it is just that they are limited in their ability to respond. Thus, an air-conditioner can turn on and off in response to ambient temperatures, but it cannot turn itself off because the water-drain line is backing up – unless such a capacity has been built into the machine. A human observer, in contrast, needs no previous specific programming to go “oh shit, the water is backing up” and take some action in response. [Though it still seems to me, that the difference between closed/automatic system and open/ad hoc system should be a continuum, not a binary as S treats it.]

Briefly reviewing a few recent articles which discuss machine learning in a theoretical context informed by Simondon, we can see Rantala and Muilu (2023: 8) asserting that machine learning does have a “margin of indeterminacy” but that learning machines are still limited by their programming in terms of their ability to respond. Haworth (2020), discussing the “possibility of independently creative machines,” argues that the very idea of these machines as “independently creative” is based on the “fantasy of absolute autonomy” whereby we imagine ourselves as sovereign subjects instead of as parts of complex human-machine ensembles (and then, in a nightmarish vision, transfer this autonomy to the uncanny action of machines, instead of recognizing that they, as well, are more accurately understood as also embedded in such ensembles). Haworth thus seems to follow the Simondonian line of dismissing “the Robot” as a nonsensical figment, instead of addressing the question directly as to whether machine learning can or could render learning machines independent of any need for human interaction.

In any case, machines need humans as servants, technicians, or organizers; the self-regulation of automata is not enough for the machine to comprehend “the whole of the milieu,” for which both human and machine are required (139-40).

S criticizes the “autocratic philosophy” of the technocrats, who seek to use machines as slaves; the human should be at the same level as the machine, not an inferior, nor a superior. He embarks on a discussion of the limitations of 19^th century understanding of machines; “The nineteenth century could produce only a technological techno­cratic philosophy because it discovered engines and not regulations” (i.e., feedback/information theory). He discusses examples of 19^th century technology in which there is no distinction between the energy channel, and the information channel; understanding the different needs of these, and developing distinct channels, is the key aspect of progress in 20^th century technics; this changes even the concept of efficiency, which is different for the flow of information than it is for energy used in production, motive force, etc.

This leads him into an interesting discussion of information, which requires that its channel of transmisson be capable of variability – consistent order, always the same, cannot transmit new information. Thus, information bears a resemblance to chance, yet it must, ultimately, be distinguishable from both order/form and pure chance, as a sort of intermediate entity (150). The distinction between form and information is linked to that between the machine and the human:

There is, in effect, an important gap between the living thing and the machine, and consequently between man and machine, which comes from the fact that the living thing needs information, while the machine essentially uses forms, and is so to speak con­stituted with forms. …

The human individual thus appears as having to convert the forms deposited into machines into information; the operating of machines does not give rise to information, but is simply an assemblage and a modification of forms; the functioning of a machine has no sense, and cannot give rise to true information signals for another machine; a living being is required as mediator in order to interpret a given functioning in terms of information, and in order to convert it into the forms for another machine.

[Returning us again to the question as to whether this stark opposition is still valid, and/or whether this is a useful way to define “automata.”]

He goes now into reiterating the difference between his view and that of the cyberneticians, based on the progress of his discussion to this point. “The machine is a deposited fixed human gesture that has become a stereotypy and the power to restart” (151). The cyberneticists overemphasize the analogy between machines and living organisms, but the truth is that the former “neither nourishes itself , nor perceives, nor rests,” like an actual living organism. He continues for several pages with a discussion of the distinction (from Bergson with some amendments) between open and closed machines, the former allowing for some margin of indeterminacy, and the latter are true automata, per his definition.

He returns to the key concept of transduction, with the example of a continuous relay that converts (transduces) potential into actual energy; information is also linked to this moment of transduction: “It is during the course of this passage from potential to actual that information comes into play; information is the condition of actualization” (155). The concept of transducer is expanded to “a regulative function in all machines having a certain margin of localized indeterminacy in their func­tioning;” in turn, humans, and all living creatures, are also transducers, as convertors/modulators of potential into actual energy. This capacity as transducer is part of what ensures a particular role for humans in the human/machine assemblage:

It is in fact very easy to construct machines that ensure a much greater accumulation of energy compared to that which man can accumulate in his body; it is equally possible to use artificial systems that constitute effectors that are supe­rior to those of the human body. But it is very difficult to construct transducers comparable to the living thing. (156)

In fact the “transducers” found in machines are not actually fully “transducers,” according to Simondon’s definition [arguably, this is a result of his practice of constructing definitions from presumed essences; cf. my earlier criticisms of his definition of “automata”], because of the role of information; machines must be given information, while living things can give themselves information [this seems to be relevant to the example I gave above with the air conditioner]. Machines can only approach problems according to the way they have been programmed; they cannot “solve” problems because this involves that extra, human, step of inference/transduction:

To solve a problem is to be able to step over it, to be capable of recasting the forms that are given within the problem and in which it consists. The solution of real problems is a vital function presupposing a recurrent mode of action that cannot exist in the machine: the recurrence of the future with respect to the present, of the virtual with respect to the actual. There is no true virtuality in a machine; the machine cannot reform its forms in order to solve a problem.

Machines can generate information but they cannot understand it unless it is presented or “given” to them, and this requires the human as a “witness,” transducing this information and representing the machines to each other (157). S concludes this section with a discussion of culture’s current inability to think correctly about the human-machine relation; “culture is unjust toward the machine” (158), and this is illustrated by comparison to cultural stereotypes of foreigners, etc., which are the product of limited familiarity and experience; with greater familiarity and experience these stereotypes can be unlearned, and a better understanding achieved.

Finally S turns to his main point, which is the conditions giving rise to an improved cultural understanding of the relationship between humans and machines, a la mechanology:

The advent of the conditions allowing man to see the technical relation functioning in an objective way is the prime condition for the incorporation of the knowledge of technical reality and of the values implied by its existence into culture. Now, these conditions are realized in the technical ensembles employing machines that have a sufficient degree of indeterminacy. For man, the action of having to inter­vene as a mediator in this relation between machines grants him a situation of independence in which he can acquire a cultural vision of technical realities. … Only a situation in which there is a concrete link with machines and a responsibility toward them, but which is liberated vis-à-vis each one taken individually, can provide this serenity of having technical awareness. (159)

This perspective will not be achieved from a practical use of machines (governed by an instrumental “finality”), nor from the partial perspectives from below (viz., the workers) or above (owners, overseers, etc.):

It is rather difficult for a worker to know technicity through the aspects and modalities of his daily work on a machine. It is also difficult for a man who is the owner of machines and who considers them productive capital to know their essential technicity. It is the mediator of the rela­tion between machines alone who can discover this particular form of wisdom. (160)

However, there is not yet a “social place” or role corresponding to this mediating perspective; it would be that of the production planning engineer, except that this role is also, like those of the owners and workers, governed by the limitations of “finality.” So what is needed is—surprise!--a “psychologist” or “sociologist” of machines, “what we might call a mechanologist.”

He ends with a discussion of the relation of this mechanology to its precursor, cybernetics. Cybernetics is clearly a first step, full of promise, but hampered by several limitations, which is why it needs to be transcended. In passing, S criticizes Wiener’s simplistic opposition of information to noise [S having, in this chapter, identified information as being, rather, intermediate between form and chance] and for his faith in homeostasis [as opposed to S’s serrated evolution]. More importantly, S takes issue with Wiener’s pessimism, as W has mistakenly, and unsuccessfully, been trying to get cybernetic understanding into the minds of the powerful. S sagely advises:

For it is difficult to make philosophers kings and kings philosophers. It often hap­pens that philosophers who have become kings cease to be philosophers. The true mediation between technics and power cannot be individual. It can be realized only through the mediation of culture. For there is something that allows man to govern: the culture he has received; it is this culture that gives him significations and values; it is culture that governs man, even if this man in turn governs other men and machines. (161)

The power of culture comes from the “great mass” of the governed; power in this model flows upward, not downward from the elites. [This may sound at first like an almost anarchist or democratic sentiment, but it is rather that of the enlightened elite, who recognize the source of their power; cf. Ruskin.]

In a time when the development of technics was poor, the elaboration of culture by governed men was enough for the government to think the problems of the group as a whole: because it went from human group to human group via the government, the recurrence of causality and information was complete and accom­plished. But this is no longer true: the basis of culture is still exclusively human; it is elaborated by the group of men; however, having gone through government, it returns and applies itself to the human group on the one hand and to machines on the other: machines are ruled by a culture that has not been elaborated according to them, and from which they are absent; this culture is inadequate for them and does not represent them. (162)

So culture, as the source of power and of understanding, fails to prepare us for the technical reality of our age because it has not caught up. Machines have yet to be properly “represented” in culture the way humans are (e.g., in literature, as S discusses). Thus, the task of the mechanologist is to transform culture by means of this more accurate representation, and to do this they need to understand the essence of technicity, not via “inductive study” [which led the cyberneticists astray] but by “a direct examination of technicity according to a genetic method that must be attempted, by employing a philosophical method” (163).

Haworth, Michael, (2020) “Automating Art: Gilbert Simondon and the Possibility of Independently Creative Machines.” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 7:1, 17-32.

Rantala, Juho; and Mirka Muilu, (2023) “Simondon, Control, and the Digital Domain.” Theory, Culture & Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02632764231201337

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Chapter 1

Summary of Chapter One: Genesis of the technical object: the process of concretization

From previous experience with Simondon I expected him to be very dense and hard to follow, but at least in this chapter he was not. He comes straight at you with his precise and distinct terminology (“concretization,” “individualization,” etc.) but always provides definitions for his terms, often multiple times. Much of the chapter is taken up with detailed description of diodes, tetrodes, and so on, which the reader can either 1) follow, if they understand it, or 2) ahem, sort of glaze over it, and wait for him to get around to saying, “and the moral is...,” which he reliably does. The chapter is also handily divided into four sections, each of which makes its own basic argument.

I. – The abstract technical object and the concrete technical object. Concretization is the process of change from the abstract technical object to the concrete (or more concrete) one. Abstraction corresponds at the same time to the representation of an engine (for example) on a blackboard as it is explained to students (27), and to the “primitive” stage of technology in the system of artisanal production. Each of the elements of the engine, in the abstract stage, performs one particular function, and there is no cohesion as a whole:

In the old engine each element intervenes at a certain moment in the cycle, and then is expected no longer to act upon the other elements; the pieces of the engine are like people who work together, each in their own turn, but who do not know each other.

The abstract machine, with these separately acting parts, is inefficient in that certain possibilities are unexplored, and also because the different parts cause various kinds of interference, etc. so that they have to develop “defense structures” to protect their own zone against the action of the other parts. In contrast, the concrete machine is illustrated by cooling fins, which originally had performed the sole purpose of cooling, but have evolved to also add strength to the cylinder head, allowing for a lighter, thinner construction; “this unique structure is not a compromise, but a concomitance and a convergence” (28). The elements of the concrete machine thus play multiple functions as part of the same machine, interacting with other parts in unison or cooperation, instead of each playing their own separate functions.

In outlining the process of concretization, as machines become more concrete, S is opposing the idea of simply categorizing them according to species and genera, and also to taking some given object, frozen in time, as the form in itself.

The gasoline engine is not this or that engine given in time and space, but the fact that there is a succession, a continuity that runs through the first engines to those we currently know and which are still evolving. (26)

To understand machines, then, we need to understand them as moments of this process of concretization.

II. – Conditions of technical evolution. “Technical evolution” and concretization are about fulfilling potentials that are already existent in the technical object or technology; thus, “it is not the production-line that produces standardization, but rather the intrinsic standardization that allows for the production-line to exist” (29). There are two points being made here. First, S is distinguishing between “extrinsic” causes and internal causes, as factors shaping the evolution of objects; his point is that “internal necessity” is the more important. Secondly, he is arguing that concretization tends to reveal or approach the essence of the object, which is that underlying, “intrinsic standardization” which replaces the “made-to-measure” variation of the artisanal era. Hence, the development from artisanal production to industrial production is driven by concretization, and a better understanding of a more evolved and “coherent” technical object (or system of technical objects). He gives the example of a customized automobile; this will, in its essence, be the same as any other automobile as far as the important parts are concerned, all that will be different are unimportant, superficial aspects: “what can be made to measure are inessential aspects, because they are contingent” (30). Too much of this frivolity can even hurt the car and make it less functional: “The made-to-measure aspect is not only inessential, it goes against the essence of the technical being, it is like a dead weight being attached from the outside.” This again ties back to the contrast between extrinsic causes (adding dead weight) and intrinsic functioning (which which the development of the machine approaches its essence).

Not unlike Wiener, Simondon seems to view capitalism, not as a key factor in modern industrial production, but as a somewhat unfortunate delusion or add-on, which complicates things frivolously, interfering with the serious work of engineers and scientists. He contrasts “economic constraints” (extrinsic) and “technical requirements” (intrinsic) in the development of technology, and notes that “it is mostly within the domains where technical constraints prevail over economic constraints (aviation, military equipment), that become the most active sites for progress” (31). [Yet somehow the presence of war, and of the State as a funding agent (removing in wartime, as in the cold war development of the computer, etc. the issue of “economic constraints” so that “technical constraints” can be explored) is not itself to be considered as an “extrinsic” factor? What would Virilio interject here?] “Economic causes are not pure, they interfere with a diffuse network of motivations and preferences that attenuate or even reverse them (a taste for luxury, … taste for very apparent novelty, commercial propaganda)” to the extent that “the technical object is known through social myths or fads in public opinion.” This results in irrational (and non-concretizing) design decisions influenced by marketers and the need to always project an image of novelty. His example is the elimination of a hand-crank as a backup way to start a car; this elimination actually involves making the engine more complicated, and is thus an unnecessary complication, not an improvement; yet the lack of a crank is presented as new, and a “nuance of ridicule is thus projected onto other cars” which continue to have cranks. “The automobile, a technical object charged with psychic and social inferences, is not suitable for technical progress” (32); the auto becomes a kind of technological leech, borrowing developments from less fettered domains, instead of being the site of development itself.

S outlines his arguably [saltationist] view of technological evolution, wherein concretization is not a continuous process, but proceeds through “successive systems of coherence,” “due to the progressive perfection of details resulting from experience and use”:

the play of limits, whose overcoming constitutes progress, resides in the incompatabilities that arise from the progressive saturation of the system of sub-ensembles… (32, emphasis in original)

“Saturation” will be discussed later in the chapter, but it seems to basically mean the filling out of the potentials of the technical object. The primitive technical object is non-saturated, because its possible lines of development and improvement remain abstract, unfulfilled. Saturation is thus part of the process of concretization but not identical with it, as it also leads to “incompatibilities” within each “system of coherence,” which need to be resolved by evolution to a new stage.

It is important that these difficulties get resolved rather than merely avoided (33), the latter of which involves the insertion of new palliative elements in a misguided attempt, a reversal to abstract thinking. “Genuine progress” involves stabilizing functioning without adding new structures: “The adjunction of a supplementary structure only constitutes genuine progress for the technical object if this structure incorporates itself concretely into the totality [ensemble] of dynamical schemas of functioning” (35).

The term axiomatic is used: “the dynamic system closes in on itself just as an axiomatic saturates” (36). According to Barthélémy’s glossary, “In Simondon, this notion does not designate a formal system as in the case of logico-mathematical axiomatics, but simply a set of principles, or first propositions, that enable the linking of fundamental concepts” (Barthélémy, 2012: 208). The axiomatic thus relates to what will be called later the “essence” of the technical object, and its working-out through concretization. The distinction between abstract and concrete is revisited, with a clear articulation:

in the abstract technical object, [each structure] only fulfills one essential and positive function, integrated into the functioning of the ensemble; in the concrete technical object, all the functions fulfilled by the structure are positive, essential, and integrated into the functioning of the whole; the marginal consequences of the functioning, eliminated or attenuated in the abstract technical object by corrective measures, become stages or positive aspects in the concrete object... (39)

S turns to the subject of “universal scientific knowledge,” which appears to be the sum total of scientific understanding at a given point in history (?). “The difference between the technical object and the physico-chemical system studied as an object only resides within the imperfection of the sciences,” a presaging of a later point he will make at the end of the chapter, regarding mechanology as a science that studies technical objects, the way physics, etc., study natural objects. The imperfection of scientific knowledge is linked to the unfinalizability of the process of concretization: “the technical object is never fully known; for this reason it is never fully concrete;” basically, concretization does not come to a conclusion, it simply continues endlessly (“unless it happens through a rare chance occurrence”).

There could have been a nice little debate between Braverman and Simondon over the role of science in the development of technology: S states that concretization is a “narrowing of the interval that separates the sciences and technology” (40), with the primitive artisanal stage showing a wide gap, and the industrial stage a narrower one. “The construction of a determinate technical object can only become industrial when this object has become concrete,” linking back to the earlier argument that the production line is made possible by “intrinsic standardization,” not standardization by the production line.

III. – The rhythm of technical progress; continuous and minor improvements; discontinuous and major improvements. The point of this section is to distinguish between major improvements, which “modify the distribution of functions, increasing the synergy of functioning in an essential way,” and minor improvements, which “without modifying this distribution, diminish the nocuous consequences of residual antagonisms” (42). The former constitute true progress towards concretization, but the latter “obstruct major improvements, because they mask the technical object’s true imperfections” with incomplete and temporary solutions which will need to be swept away for the next stage of coherence to be reached. “The path of minor improvements is one of detours” (43); they “hide behind a pile of complex palliatives” and “entertain a false consciousness of continuous progress” which is demanded by the “false novelty” of commerce and the market, not by the actual, discontinuous progress of actual concretization. The latter only occurs in “leaps,” in the form of “mutations.”

IV. – Absolute origin of the technical lineage. Simondon now raises the question as to whether an origin can be determined, as to when the progress of any technical object actually began. To be honest, I assumed the answer would be a resounding no, because of the antipathy of later scholars influenced by Simondon (viz., Deleuze and Guattari) to the idea of origins. However, Simondon is quite happy to talk about origins, and of essences to boot. So, the answer is yes, and he gives the example of the invention of the first diode as the “absolute beginning” that contained the technical essence of all the later inventions which would develop on, yet share the “technical essence” of, the diode (the technical essence of which is “assymetrical conductance” (45)). S reiterates a point he had made back at the beginning of the chapter, that it is not the context of use that determines the essence of the technical object, because often an object with a completely different history of development could be substituted, or an object can be adopted to a new use. Instead, it is the lineage of objects sharing this “pure schema of functioning” which form the technical object over time, as an object of mechanological study. The non-saturation of the initial invention gives it “fecundity,” meaning a large progeny or posterity of inventions that will proceed down the path of greater saturation. He defines technical essence:

A technical essence can be recognized by the fact that it remains stable across the evolving lineage, and not only stable, but also productive of structures and functions through internal development and progressive saturation ….” (46)

There is a lot of use of language I can’t help but think of as mystifying/fetishizing, after the manner of Marx’s wooden table that creates itself instead of being created by human labor: “the technical object alters and changes its structure,” it “evolves by generating a family.” He is of course trying to emphasize how this path of development is not due (or not due solely) to the chance whims or insights of human inventors and tinkerers (as could perhaps have been said for the artisanal era), but unfolds according to its own intrinsic causality, or essence. But when he calls this “natural technical evolution,” this sounds a lot like one of those schemes of cultural evolution which, though modeled on the status and model of the theory of evolution by natural selection, share one major difference from it, which is that the latter is completely non-teleological. For all Simondon’s numerous disagreements with Aristotle, it is interesting that he here seems to clearly adopt a concept like that of telos, to the extent that the technical object develops, in accordance with its intrinsic essence, from abstract to concrete, in much the same way as Aristotle’s acorn becomes an oak tree.

He concludes the chapter by showing how the previous discussion is meant to ground the proposed science of mechanology, and improve upon the insights of the cyberneticists. “Concretization gives the technical object an intermediate place between the natural object and the scientific representation,” (49), i.e., between the natural world and abstract knowledge. Natural objects have an inherent coherence; concretized technical objects also have a coherence, although this has been developed over time, yet this means the concretized technical object “comes closer to the mode of existence of natural objects” than does the primitive object or scientific abstraction. He tangents into an interesting discussion of artificiality, how, for example, a greenhouse plant that has been modified to produce flowers but no fruit counts as an artificial, not a natural object, in a path of development which is the opposite of that of concretization: “Artificialization is a process of abstraction within the artificial object.”

In any event, “By existing, [concretized technical objects] prove the viability and stability of a certain structure that has the same status as a natural structure,” because obviously made possible by natural laws, even if they had to be brought into existence through human invention instead of being found in nature (50). This is what makes them fitting objects of mechanology. However, it is important to understand that these technical objects are still distinct from natural objects, and particularly from living beings. This is the heart of his disagreement with Wiener and the cyberneticists, who reasoned by analogy from automata to posit that machines and living creatures are all simply types of self-regulating systems. (Simondon is also against this kind of reasoning by “external” analogy). Cybernetics is “partially inefficient as an inter-scientific study” due to its “initial postulate concerning the identity between living beings and self-regulating technical objects” (51). However, this is to confuse natural objects, which “are concrete to begin with,” with technical objects which only become so through the process of concretization, and the study of this process itself (rather than jumping to the end and treating them like natural objects) needs to be part of their study.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Introduction

Gilbert Simondon (2017 [1958]), On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Summary of Introduction (and other prefatory matter)

Simondon lays out his agenda, which is “introducing a knowledge into culture that is adequate to technical objects” (xv). S sees culture largely in terms of a regulatory function:

a culture establishes regulatory communication among those who share that culture; arising from the life of the group, culture animates the gestures of those who ensure the command functions, by providing norms and schemas. (19)

The problem is that our cultural vision of technical objects is outdated, and needs to be brought up to date. However, certain illusions or prejudices prevent this from happening. “Culture is unbalanced” because while some objects (viz. aesthetic objects) are privileged, others, in particular technical objects, are seen as only having a “utility function.” A false opposition is set up between “man and machine” (15), which results in two somewhat diametrically opposed misconceptions. The first is misoneism, or fear of the new; S asserts this is really a rejection of the foreignness which the machine is mistaken as; in reality, the machine is “the stranger in which something human is locked up, misunderstood, materialized, enslaved, and yet which nevertheless remains human all the same” (16).

The opposite error is technofetishism, which, failing to find a proper way to understand the technical object, comes to treat it as a sacred object. S has some choice words for this “idolatry of the machine,” and its associated “technocratic aspiration to unconditioned power”:

The man who wants to dominate his peers calls the android machine into being. He thus abdicates before it and delegates his humanity to it. He seeks to construct a thinking machine, dreams of being able to build a volition machine, a living machine, in order to retreat behind it without anxiety, freed of all danger, exempt from all feelings of weakness, and triumphant through the mediation of what he invented.

However, this machine-as-substitute for the human, which Simondon terms the robot, is a myth, a mere illusion: “the robot does not exist.” Both those who celebrate it and keep trying to bring it to life, and those who fear it and its presumed “hostile intentions toward man” (17) are mistaken based on their respective misunderstandings of the mode of existence of technical objects.

S bases this argument in part on a distinction between automatism and the margin of indeterminacy. Automatism he sees as a closed system, in which a machine completes a predesignated task without any further input. Such a closed system “must sacrifice a number of possibilities of operation as well as numerous possible usages.” In contrast, the margin of indeterminacy is the openness of the machine to outside information. Part of his point is thus that automation limits, rather than fully enabling, the productive and progressive capacities of machines. There is presumably a continuum between relative automatism and relative openness; otherwise S’s terminology would have a hard time accounting for modern machine learning, etc. In any event the openness or margin of indeterminacy of machines are what makes machines amenable to interconnection or communication between machines, which S calls an ensemble; he imagines humans as necessarily involved in the management and operation of these by humans, as the “permanent organizer” (17) and “interpreter” (18). Simondon appears to take for granted that there will necessarily always be a ["human in the loop."]

S goes through several subject positions, arguing why each is incapable of coming up with a new and more accurate “awareness of technical reality,” to disseminate into the culture: workers who work with machines, managers who oversee them, and technically-oriented scientists are all dismissed. What is needed is a social scientist, someone who will be like “a sociologist or psychologist of machines” (19). Simondon thus proposes the new science of mechanology, the goals of which will be to remove the man-machine divide as a source of alienation, and restore the regulatory function of culture in regard to machines. This will be done through an exploration of the three “levels” of technical objects: element, individual, and ensemble (20). An understanding of these three levels corresponds to stages in the historical development of modern technology:

1. The level of element does not cause anxiety; it corresponds to the “climate of eighteenth century optimism, and the idea of constant progress or technical improvement.” Tools apparently fall under this category; “man had centralized technical individuality within himself at a time when only tools existed” (21).

2. The individual level, however, “becomes for a certain time the adversary of man, his competitor” (21). Unlike the tool, the machine replaces the human worker. This goes along with a [dominant ideology] with a ‘dramatic and impassioned notion of progress, which turns into the rape of nature, the conquest of the world, and the exploitation of energies.” With this last, White’s Law or the Kardashev scale spring to mind, though S goes on to locate this ideology in “the technophile and technocratic excesses of the thermodynamic era,” and it is not clear from his usage here if that refers to the 19^th century industrial revolution only, or refers to that as a sort of foundational era on which the present is premised. [Because surely this “rape of nature” is still ongoing!].

3. Ensembles come into existence in the 20^th century, and the supplanting of the “thermodynamic energeticism” of the previous level is replaced by information theory [and cybernetics]; it seems that the proper mode of understanding of this level is yet to come, through the success of mechanology, and the spread of its insights through the education system.

So to provisionally summarize, we as a culture understand the first level, but are stuck there; we misunderstand the second level, resulting in all kinds of alienation, anxiety, and environmental destruction; finally, we have not yet (as of S’s writing, in 1958) grasped or adequately imagined the final level of the ensemble. The point of mechanology is to get us there:

The machine, as an element of the technical ensemble, becomes that which increases the quantity of information, increases negentropy, and opposes the degradation of energy; the machine, being a work of organization and information, is like life itself and together with life, that which is opposed to disorder, to the leveling of all things tending to deprive the universe of the power of change. The machine is that through which man fights against the death of the universe; it slows down the degradation of energy, as life does, and becomes a stabilizer of the world.

Reputedly this book is in part a rejoinder to Wiener’s writings, and we can see here the same theme of life as order, opposed to death as disorder. There is also the same anxiety regarding this whole “death of the universe;" ironically, given that S’s critique of technofetishism evoked a certain anxiety of the alienated technophile to create a robot to hide behind. The difference appears to be not that the anxiety has been resolved, but that it has become collective (“man” and “universe” as opposed to selfish individual subjects), and that it is based on an accurate understanding of the three levels. So far, many of the concerns and issues which S promises to address are strikingly relevant to the current day, and now and then it is easy to forget that this book was written in the 1950s.

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 11

Summary of Chapter 11: Language, Confusion, and Jam

This concluding chapter starts off with a promising idea: Wiener states that he will explore the “philosophical assumptions” underlying the work of Benoit Mandelbrot and Roman Jakobson. However, he ends up making no more than passing reference to these two, namely that:

They consider communication to be a game played in partnership by the speaker and the listener against the forces of confusion, represented by the ordinary difficulties of communication and by some supposed individuals attempting to jam the communication. (187)

[Another thing: Based on the title of the chapter I was really hoping W was going to use the word “jam” in some jazzy/beatnik-derived sense, which would have been adorable and also refreshing. “Jam” in that sense could have been an opening for a positive sense of entropy and/or disorder as something creative, which W is lacking.]

This is based on Von Neumann’s game theory, in which one team tries to communicate a message, and the other tries to “jam” it. He then makes the point that, strictly speaking, in Von Neumann’s theory of games, both sides are pursuing rationally optimal strategies; they will not “bluff” to confuse each other, but are being in a sense perfectly honest and open, despite being opposed. He relates this to a quote from Einstein: “God may be subtle, but he isn't plain mean.” (188)

The point being that, unlike humans, nature is not deceitful. This means that scientists, used to studying nature, are naïve out of necessity. Scientists are not like detectives, a kind of thinking which has its role in other fields, e.g., “official and military science.” This kind of thinking is counterproductive in actual science, as it is a waste of time:

I have not the slightest doubt that the present detective-mindedness of the lords of scientific administration is one of the chief reasons for the barrenness of so much present scientific work. (189)

[whatever “barrenness” means]

Thus, a position of being overly “suspicious” like a detective makes you no good at science, because scientists have to trust that nature is honest, not deceitful. [He does not address this, but his odd anthropomorphizing stance must break down when it comes to the social sciences, which study humans, who can be deceitful.]Another kind of position that is bad for science is the “religious soldier,” who is a follower of propaganda of either the right or the left (he singles out “the soldier of the Cross, or of the Hammer and Sickle” (190)).

He ties this back to his earlier distinction between Augustinian and Manichaean perceptions of the devil: the first is just a force of nature, in the service of God (and thus equivalent to entropy in his worldview). The second is willfully malicious and in fact has some chance or belief in the chance that it can prevail (like Milton’s Satan). Scientists need to maintain an Augustinian view, but this is difficult because

The Augustinian position has always been difficult to maintain. It tends under the slightest perturbation to break down into a covert Manichaeanism. (191)

This is because Manichaeanism has more emotional and dramatic attraction; and also because Manichaeanists of the right and left create political conditions which they force upon scientists.

In this present day when almost every ruling force, whether on the right or on the left, asks the scientist for conformity rather than openness of mind, it is easy to understand how science has already suffered, and what further debasements and frustrations of science are to be expected in the future. (190)

A Manichaean suspects the world of being dishonest, and so adopts dishonest strategies in turn; this is obviously not good for science and the search for truth. There is an irony that the world created by these Manichaean faiths undermines the possibility of faith, which requires the existence of free choice. Science requires its own form of faith:

I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the accept­ance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. (193)

The needs of science, and of a free and democratic society, necessarily dovetail:

Sci­ence is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith. A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a com­munity which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthily growing science imposes upon it.

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 10

Summary of Chapter 10: Some Communication Machines and Their Future

Whereas the last chapter was about automata replacing workers, this one will address “a variety of problems concerning automata,” more specifically, automata of three categories: 1) some which “serve either to illustrate and throw light on the possibilities of communicative mechanisms in gen­eral,” 2) a few which serve as “the prosthesis and replacement of human functions which have been lost or weakened in certain unfortunate individuals,” and finally 3) those with a more sinister potential (163).

He discusses his tropism machine, called alternately the Moth or the Bedbug depending on whether it has been programmed to seek or avoid light; this has been developed to illustrate the role of competing types of feedback in the tremors of people with Parkinson’s. [There is a website with photos and discussion.]

Such machines may appear to be “exercises in virtuosity” (167) but they have been actually useful to a degree; there is another class of machines which provide more direct health benefits: better prostheses, readers for the blind, etc. He discusses his idea for a machine to communicate language using touch, as better than visible speech; (the so-called “hearing glove” which was apparently later tried with Helen Keller, but did not meet with much success).

Wiener gives a cybernetic three-stage description of “language,” by which he means speech (168-9; cf. Chapter 4). He notes that “deaf-mutes” can easily learn lip reading, but speak harshly and this is “inefficient.”

The difficulties lie in the fact that for these people the act of conversation has been broken into two entirely separate parts. (170)

He discusses this in relation to the “sidetone” feedback of hearing one’s own voice in telephony, and also to the Vocoder speech synthesizer by Bell, which greatly reduces the information in human speech but is still understandable and recognizable, leading to a distinction between “used and unused information in speech:”

When we distinguish between used and unused in­formation in speech, we distinguish between the maximum coding capacity of speech as received by the ear, and the maximum capacity that penetrates through the cascade network of successive stages con­sisting of the ear followed by the brain. (172)

The reduction of information in the message is necessary to be able to transfer the information from the medium of speech through “an inferior sense like touch.”

From this point on, the chief direction of investigation must be that of the more thorough training of deaf-mutes in the recogni­tion and the reproduction of sounds. (173)

[In other words, his focus is on getting “deaf-mutes” to be able to speak more clearly; basically to invent a device to assimilate them to the speaking population, rather than using sign language (which he has not mentioned as a fascinating alternative medium, which loses certain capacities of speech but opens up many more).]

He gives the example of an artificial lung which uses “the nor­mal feedback in the medulla and brain stem of the healthy person will be used even in the paralytic to supply the control of his breathing. Thus it is hoped, that the so-called iron lung may no longer be a prison in which the patient forgets how to breathe, but will be an exerciser for keeping his residual faculties of breathing active, and even possibly of building them up to a point where he can breathe for himself and emerge from the machinery enclosing him.” (174)

He now turns to more sinister machines, beginning with his own idea for a chess machine, and discusses the limited possibilities of chess machines in his day: one that could plan two steps ahead was thought of as optimal, the idea of creating an actually perfect or good player was “hopeless.”

The number of combinations increases roughly in geometrical pro­gression. Thus the difference between playing out all possibilities for two moves and for three moves is enor­mous. To play out a game—something like fifty moves— is hopeless in any reasonable time. (175)

The problem is the slowness; Shannon has an idea to take the game further than two moves, but it would probably get slower and slower (and not make the time limits in the rules). Its play would be “stiff and uninteresting” but possibly good, and chance could be introduced to prevent humans from beating it methodically.

Though we have seen that machines can be built to learn, the technique of building and employing these machines is still very imperfect. (177)

He makes a comment that now seems prescient in regard to various recent chat AIs which turned racist, etc.:

A chess-playing machine which learns might show a great range of performance, dependent on the quality of the players against whom it had been pitted. The best way to make a master machine would probably be to pit it against a wide variety of good chess players. On the other hand, a well-contrived machine might be more or less ruined by the injudicious choice of its opponents. A horse is also ruined if the wrong riders are allowed to spoil it. (177)

[Though on stating this it occurs to me that I am treating racism the same way as I have accused Wiener of doing, as an irrational anomaly rather than as a central part of the functioning of social inequality.]

He notes two kinds of learning machines, those characterized by preference (“a statistical preference for a certain sort of behavior, which nevertheless admits the possibility of other behavior”) or by constraint (“certain features of its behavior may be rigidly and unalterably deter­mined”). [And the chess playing machine he mentions would be a hybrid of these, with the rules programmed in as constraints, but still learning “tactics and policies” through preference.]

Shannon has already pointed out the potential military applications of such learning machines, as has a Dominican priest Dubarle, in a review of Wiener’s Cybernetics. Wiener quotes Dubarle at length regarding the possible misuse of a machine à gouverner. Dubarle makes a point that machines can only understand human behavior through probability:

At all events, human realities do not admit a sharp and certain determination, as numerical data of computa­tion do. They only admit the determination of their prob­able values. A machine to treat these processes, and the problems which they put, must therefore undertake the sort of probabilistic, rather than deterministic thought, such as is exhibited for example in modern computing machines. (179)

The machines à gouv­erner will define the State as the best-informed player at each particular level; and the State is the only su­preme co-ordinator of all partial decisions. These are enormous privileges; if they are acquired scientifically, they will permit the State under all circumstances to beat every player of a human game other than itself by offering this dilemma : either immediate ruin, or planned co-operation.

[This is] the adventure of our century: hesitation between an indefinite turbulence of human affairs and the rise of a prodigious Leviathan. In comparison with this, Hobbes’ Leviathan was nothing but a pleasant joke. We are run­ning the risk nowadays of a great World State, where deliberate and conscious primitive injustice may be the only possible condition for the statistical happiness of the masses: a world worse than hell for every clear mind. (180)

Dubarle’s somewhat weak proposal in response:

Perhaps it would not be a bad idea for the teams at present creating cybernetics to add to their cadre of technicians, who have come from all horizons of science, some serious anthropologists, and perhaps a philosopher who has some curiosity as to world matters.

Wiener notes that the machine itself would not be all-powerful (because “too crude and imperfect”) but would enable those who control it to become so:

or that political leaders may attempt to control their populations by means not of machines themselves but through political techniques as narrow and in­different to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically. (181)

[or as it turns out so far, corporations focused only on manipulating partial identities for profit.]

The great weakness of the machine—the weakness that saves us so far from being dominated by it—is that it cannot yet take into account the vast range of probability that character­izes the human situation. The dominance of the ma­chine presupposes a society in the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and where the statistical differences among individuals are nil. Fortunately we have not yet reached such a state.

He provides an interesting reflection on how this sort of philosophical possibility becomes the foundation of a non-technological (per se) way of thinking in the context of the cold war:

A sort of machine à gouverner is thus now essentially in operation on both sides of the world con­flict, although it does not consist in either case of a single machine which makes policy, but rather of a mechanistic technique which is adapted to the exigen­cies of a machine-like group of men devoted to the formation of policy. (182)

Wiener echoes Dubarle’s call for getting some kinder, gentler experts in on the decision-making:

In order to avoid the manifold dangers of this, both external and internal, he is quite right in his emphasis on the need for the anthropologist and the philosopher. In other words, we must know as scientists what man’s nature is and what his built-in purposes are, even when we must wield this knowledge as soldiers and as statesmen; and we must know why we wish to control him.

[And so, the Macy conferences. But isn’t it this very, Dewey-esque or Kerr-esque view of the university/scholarly world that is currently dissolving, the idea that somehow the humanists and social scientists (and Dubarle perhaps hoped, the theologians) would temper the excesses of the technocrats?]

He emphasizes that “the machine’s danger to society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it,” and distinguishes between “know-how” and “know-what:”

Our papers have been making a great deal of Amer­ican “know-how” ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb. There is one quality more important than “know-how” and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is “know­-what” by which we determine not only how to accom­plish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be. (183)

Again, the problem is not actual exploitation or capitalism or anything like that per se, but a lack of sense of direction in where we want to develop technology, or thoughts on how it will actually affect the world (and this appears today in the “Oops, our bad” discourse on the accidental side effects of ChatGPT, art generators, etc.). Wiener turns to the lessons of fairy tales (e.g., you find a bottle with a genie in it, leave the genie in the bottle and don’t make wishes) as illustrations of “the tragic view of life which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess” and which Americans need to learn (183-4). The myth of Prometheus serves as an example of the ambivalent attitude of the ancient Greeks toward technology, which we moderns could learn from.

The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment. It is a dangerous world, in which there is no security, save the somewhat negative one of humility and restrained ambitions. (184)

If a man with this tragic sense approaches, not fire, but another manifestation of original power, like the splitting of the atom, he will do so with fear and trembling. He will not leap in where angels fear to tread, unless he is prepared to accept the punishment of the fallen angels. Neither will he calmly transfer to the machine made in his own image the responsi­bility for his choice of good and evil, without con­tinuing to accept a full responsibility for that choice.

Modern Americans, lacking a sense of “know-what,” continually get trapped by their blind faith in technology. He compares intelligent machines to two kinds of fairy-tale device, the magical monkey’s paw (which is always very literal-minded), and the genie in the bottle (which is mercurial and disinterested in human happiness). The former is the more constrained and thus literal device; the latter the kind which learns through preference. “For the man who is not aware of this, to throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine, whether it can learn or not, is to cast his responsibility to the winds, and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind” (185).

Moving beyond literal machines, he returns to the point he had made earlier about the dangerous rise of machine-like organization and thinking in the Twentieth Century:

When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human be­ings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to ma­chines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right an­swers to our questions unless we ask the right questions. (185-6)

He ends with another reference to evil, perhaps meant to help accustom American readers to a “tragic” mindset:

The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door. (186)

 

Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Chapter 3

 

Summary of Chapter 3: Towards a Liberatory Technology

In this third chapter he lays out the third part of his overall platform, detailing the way that technology will be embraced, but used differently, in a revolutionary post-scarcity society. Despite various criticisms that could be made of Bookchin’s romanticism, naturalization, etc., it seems likely that any actually successful, sustainable, egalitarian society of the future will bear a good deal of resemblance to his vision.

According to Bookchin, people used to fetishize technological progress, but now there is a "schizoid" mentality: people fear it on the one hand (apocalyptically) but at the same time desire its benefits with a “a yearning for material abundance, leisure and security” (107). There is also a schizoid aspect to technology, producing both helpful and disastrous technologies and inventions: “The bomb is pitted against the power reactor.” Bookchin says the fear side is winning out: “technology is viewed as a demon, imbued with a sinister life of its own, that is likely to mechanize man if it fails to exterminate him” (108). This is dangerous:

There is a very real danger that we will lose our perspective toward technology, that we will neglect its liberatory tendencies, and, worse, submit fatalistically to its use for destructive ends.

A balance must be struck:

The purpose of this article is to explore three questions. What is the liberatory potential of modern technology, both materially and spiritually? What tendencies, if any, are reshaping the machine for use in an organic, human-oriented society? And finally, how can the new technology and resources be used in an ecological manner—that is, to promote the balance of nature, the full development of natural regions, and the creation of organic, humanistic communities?

He argues against deterministic views, which cast technology as inherently liberatory, or as inherently dehumanizing (citing Juenger and Ellul on the second point). 

An organic mode of life deprived of its technological component would be as nonfunctional as a man deprived of his skeleton. Technology must be viewed as the basic structural support of a society; it is literally the framework of an economy and of many social institutions. (109)

He notes 1848 as a key year with the Communist Manifesto as a statement of revolutionary theory, the workers' uprising, and being at about the “culmination” of steam technology that had started a century and a half earlier; both the potential, and the limitations of 19th century technology had an influence on 19th century revolutionary thought, as evidenced by M&E's manifesto. One inherent shortcoming of this is that said technology had not yet reached the potential for post-scarcity, that, according to Bookchin, is the real precondition for revolution:

However glowing and lofty were the revolutionary ideals of the past, the vast majority of the people, burdened by material want, had to leave the stage of history after the revolution, return to work, and deliver the management of society to a new leisured class of exploiters. Indeed, any attempt to equalize the wealth of society at a low level of technological development would not have eliminated want, but would have merely made it into a general feature of society as a whole, thereby recreating all the conditions for a new struggle over the material things of life, for new forms of property, and eventually for a new system of class domination.  (111)

[He cites M&E to the same effect just below this. I'm not sure the argument (regarding the conditions of want becoming “a general feature of society” after a revolution with industrial-era technology) has merit. But he is basically talking about why and how M&E differ from his own analysis, because of the different technological development of their day: enough to deliver some promise, but not enough to deliver the truly revolutionary promise of the post-scarcity society].

The fact that men would have to devote a substantial portion of their time to toil, for which they would get scant returns, formed a major premise of all socialist ideology—authoritarian and libertarian, Utopian and scientific, Marxist and anarchist.

The problem of dealing with want and work—an age-old problem perpetuated by the early Industrial Revolution- produced the great divergence in revolutionary ideas between socialism and anarchism. (112)

Marx pursued the compromise of a worker-run state; Bakunin and Kropotkin argued for tradition, social pressure, or moral instinct to mutual aid as their hope for a state free society. According to Bookchin, the former compromise made Marxism by the 20th century no better than mainstream capitalist doctrines, while the anarchists back in the time of scarcity had been admirable idealists, but ultimately mere impractical idealists, all the same [he will argue that post-scarcity changes the equation: anarchism is now practical rather than merely idealistic.]

Bookchin discusses how the USSR promoted the ideal of workers and full employment, everyone working hard. Bookchin, in contrast, sees the importance of distinguishing between “pleasurable work” and “onerous toil” (114) and wants to get rid of the toil aspect. By Bookchin’s time of writing (1965), the possibility of a world without toil has become obvious. He notes, and dismisses, contemporary calls for an annual guaranteed income, as being stuck in the quantitative thinking of a scarcity society, instead of being open to the qualitative thinking of a post-scarcity society. In an important footnote, he delineates a distinction between “justice” (quantitative, scarcity-era thinking) and “freedom” (qualitative, post-scarcity thinking):

An exclusively quantitative approach to the new technology, I may add, is not only economically archaic, but morally regressive. This approach partakes of the old principle of justice, as distinguished from the new principle of freedom. Historically, justice is derived from the world of material necessity and toil; it implies relatively scarce resources which are apportioned by a moral principle which is either “just” or “unjust.” Justice, even “equal” justice, is a concept of limitation, involving the denial of goods and the sacrifice of time and energy to production. Once we transcend the concept of justice—indeed, once we pass from the quantitative to the qualitative potentialities of modern technology—we enter the unexplored domain of freedom, based on spontaneous organization and full access to the means of life. (116)

[The links between justice and scarcity, and freedom and post-scarcity, are worthy of being further explored. On the one hand this is a poignant critique of the current fervor for “social justice” which often relies on appeals to a redistributive state. On the other hand, we currently do still live in a situation of scarcity, not just of material wealth but in which political power is unevenly distributed (and thus scarce for the many). To argue in this context for a politics of freedom rather than justice may be equivalent to taking the position of the abstract (privileged, white, male, etc.) subject, not recognizing that the conditions for this freedom and equality have yet to be achieved for most people.]

Bookchin lists the new questions he wants to pose about technology:

Is this technology staking out a new dimension in human freedom, in the liberation of man? Can it not only liberate man from want and work, but also lead him to a free, harmonious, balanced human community—an ecocommunity that would promote the unrestricted development of his potentialities? Finally, can it carry man beyond the realm of freedom into the realm of life and desire? (116-7)

For the first time in history, technology has reached an open end. The potential for technological development, for providing machines as substitutes for labor is virtually unlimited. Technology has finally passed from the realm of invention to that of design—in other words, from fortuitous discoveries to systematic innovations.

Because the problem is no longer dealing with scarcity, technology has “reached an open end” with new unlimited potential; the realm of “invention” has been replaced by the realm of “design,” by which he means that we have gone “from fortuitous discoveries to systematic innovation” building off an existing system. He quotes Vannevar Bush on this [which is funny because I was just reading Wiener talking about how he gave Bush ideas for computers, etc. Interestingly Bush’s illustration of such “systematic design” is about how to design a car that would follow a white line down a road, and the answer is basically a "breadboard model" with sensors and actuators, basically an arduino!] Bush's point is that there is a host of reliable gadgets to be called upon, and of "men who understand fully all their queer ways" (118). Nothing would really have to be invented, just assembled, because we have achieved a platform or system for easy and quick innovation in the future [also presumably better directed than under the capitalist system, which subordinates technological progress to the demands of profit.]

Bookchin pulls two points out of Bush's story: "the two most important features of the new, so-called "second," industrial revolution," [again echoing Wiener]:

[1] the enormous potentialities of modern technology and

[2] the cost-oriented, nonhuman limitations that are imposed upon it.

The second is the profit motive under capitalism, and is a constraint upon innovation.

Perhaps the most obvious development leading to the new technology has been the increasing interpenetration of scientific abstraction, mathematics and analytic methods with the concrete, pragmatic and rather mundane tasks of industry. This order of relationships is relatively new. Traditionally, speculation, generalization and rational activity were sharply divorced from technology. This chasm reflected the sharp split between the leisured and working classes in ancient and medieval society. (118)

[This is interesting as both Wiener and Braverman have been making this point, but here Bookchin is much closer to Wiener’s analysis than to Braverman's, or at least so far]

In our own day this synthesis, once embodied by the work of a single, inspired genius, is the work of anonymous teams. Although these teams have obvious advantages, they often have all the traits of bureaucratic agencies—which leads to a mediocre, unimaginative treatment of problems. (119) 

Bookchin notes that a lot of industrial growth is not due to mechanization but to the "continual reorganization of the labor process," here sounding increasingly like Braverman:

Historically, it would be difficult to understand how mechanized mass manufacture emerged, how the machine increasingly displaced labor, without tracing the development of the work process from craftsmanship, where an independent, highly skilled worker engages in many diverse operations, through the purgatory of the factory, where these diverse tasks are parceled out among a multitude of unskilled or semiskilled employees, to the highly mechanized mill, where the tasks of many are largely taken over by machines manipulated by a few operatives, and finally to the automated and cybernated plant, where operatives are replaced by supervisory technicians and highly skilled maintenance men.

And then like Marx:

the machine has evolved from an extension of human muscles into an extension of the human nervous system. (119-20)

The mechanical devices and engines developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not replace human muscles but rather enlarged their effectiveness. Although the machines increased output enormously, the worker's muscles and brain were still required to operate them, even for fairly routine tasks. (120)

The development of fully automatic machines for complex mass-manufacturing operations requires the successful application of at least three technological principles: such machines must have a built-in ability to correct their own errors; they must have sensory devices for replacing the visual, auditory and tactile senses of the worker; and, finally, they must have devices that substitute for the worker's judgment, skill and memory.

In other words, [feedback], sensors, and knowledge; this could be contrasted with Wieners account. Bookchin gives examples of feedback  mechanisms, distinguishing between “closed” (controlled by feedback) vs. “open” (manually controlled) systems; sensors can be used to turn open systems into closed ones, thus reducing the need for human labor (122). He brings up digital computers, and looks at the impact of automation in an automobile factory: there is a great increase in speed, along with a reduction in the number of needed workers; but even the current system is quickly out of date as new speeds are reached.

[So far a difference between Bookchin and Braverman is that Braverman has asked what the development of technology would be like in a worker-centric or controlled system – how this would lead to technological development that was not an attempt to control or limit workers’ power and knowledge, skill, etc. and thus would presumably not have led to the split between  managerial/technical knowhow and brute, repetitive labor. Bookchin, in contrast, takes this separation for granted, because he is not talking about what a system would look like that had been shaped all along by anti-authoritarianism, but rather how an anti-authoritarian or anarchist society could result now, only just now having been made possible, after the fact of having gone through this capitalist development (Bookchin is thus closer to Marx here).]

Among the many parallels in this chapter with the recent chapter of Wiener, labor in mines is given as a standard of the most grueling kind of work:

If it is true that the moral level of a society can be gauged by the way it treats women, its sensitivity to human suffering can be gauged by the working conditions it provides for people in raw materials industries, particularly in mines and quarries. (125)

He quotes Mumford on the mine as the first artificial environment, where work is divorced from the day and night cycle:

The abolition of mining as a sphere of human activity would symbolize, in its own way, the triumph of a liberatory technology. That we can point to this achievement already, even in a single case at this writing, presages the freedom from toil implicit in the technology of our time. (126)

[Bookchin here echoes Wiener's discussion or rather example of mining as a good kind of work to get rid of; however he seems not to be taking Mumford’s point about mining as the birthplace of a certain organization or way of thinking about and imposing work discipline.] 

His vision of small, local, distributed factories, produced with that plug-in breadboard-like “design not invention” principle of shared knowledge and tech: 

It is easy to foresee a time, by no means remote, when a rationally organized economy could automatically manufacture small "packaged" factories without human labor; parts could be produced with so little effort that most maintenance tasks would be reduced to the simple act of removing a defective unit from a machine and replacing it by another—a job no more difficult than pulling out and putting in a tray. Machines would make and repair most of the machines required to maintain such a highly industrialized economy. Such a technology, oriented entirely toward human needs and freed from all consideration of profit and loss, would eliminate the pain of want and toil—the penalty, inflicted in the form of denial, suffering and inhumanity, exacted by a society based on scarcity and labor.

He begins to discuss how technology might be reorganized after the revolution:

The current type of industrial organization—an extension, in effect, of the industrial forms created by the Industrial Revolution—fosters industrial centralization (although a system of workers’ management based on the individual factory and local community would go far toward eliminating this feature). (128)

He talks about the history of computers and the trend towards miniaturization, as developments that presage the desired local ecologically conscious system; in contrast, he gives the existing example of a top-of-the-line steel mill which needs vast amounts of material constantly to be at maximum effectiveness:

Even if it is totally automated, its operating and management needs far transcend the capabilities of a small, decentralized community. The type of administration it requires tends to foster centralized social forms. (130)

[The two examples set up an opposition between tech advances which enable “human scale” distributed organization, vs. those which favor centralized, top-down organization].

 He discusses several alternatives to centralized steel mills, which would allow for local-based steel production; smaller localized factories would also need fewer resources overall, and so could bring locally available sources, which had fallen out of production due to economies of scale on a global market, to be brought back into production, decreasing costs of transportation and resulting in a more ecologically responsible use of resources.

Since the smaller complex requires ore, fuel and reducing agents in relatively small quantities, many communities could rely on local resources for their raw materials, thereby conserving the more concentrated resources of centrally located sources of supply, strengthening the independence of the community itself vis-a-vis the traditional centralized economy, and reducing the expense of transportation. What would at first glance seem to be a costly, inefficient duplication of effort that could be avoided by building a few centralized steel complexes would prove, in the long run, to be more efficient as well as socially more desirable.32)

This goes along with the economics of a shift from single purpose (part of the expensive centralized system) to multipurpose machines (reusable when products change). He turns to “the ecological use of technology” (134ff); that is, the question of how to design a technological system which encouraged people to be more conscious of their environment and their impact on it, as opposed to the current system which divorces consumers from such awareness.

I have tried, thus far, to deal with the possibility of eliminating toil, material insecurity, and centralized economic control-issues which, if “utopian,” are at least tangible. In the present section I would like to deal with a problem that may seem highly subjective but which is nonetheless of compelling importance—the need to make man’s dependence upon the natural world a visible and living part of his culture. (134)

“Actually, this problem is peculiar only to a highly urbanized and industrialized society;” in all earlier cultures, the relationship to nature was much more obvious. The question is how to restore this sort of knowledge without giving up on the benefits of modern technology. [A good question, because the previous awareness was, after all, based in large part on the existential peril of scarcity].

He discusses Fourier and the early Utopians, and their advocacy of reintegrating town and country. But Bookchin does not want this to mean that people labor like peasants, somehow “for their own good.”

If we grant that the land and the community must be reintegrated physically, that the community must exist in an agricultural matrix which renders man's dependence upon nature explicit, the problem we face is how to achieve this transformation without imposing “painful toil” on the community. How, in short, can husbandry, ecological forms of food cultivation and farming on a human scale be practiced without sacrificing mechanization? (137)

He discusses various current (in 1965) technologies for automating and simplifying agricultural production. He sees a potential for mechanized agricultural which nevertheless keeps people in touch with the ecosystem and landscape:

Let us pause at this point to envision how our free community might be integrated with its natural environment. We suppose the community to have been established after a careful study has been made of its natural ecology—its air and water resources, its climate, its geological formations, its raw materials, its soils, and its natural flora and fauna. Land management by the community is guided entirely by ecological principles, so that an equilibrium is maintained between the environment and its human inhabitants. Industrially rounded, the community forms a distinct unit within a natural matrix; it is socially and aesthetically in balance with the area it occupies. (139)

There is much discussion of the way “town” and “country” are to “blend” in a way that preserves the positive features of both. Agriculture will become an enjoyable activity, engaged in not only for food but for the pleasure of the work:

I believe that a free community will regard agriculture as husbandry, an activity as expressive and enjoyable as crafts. Relieved of toil by agricultural machines, communitarians will approach food cultivation with the same playful and creative attitude that men so often bring to gardening. Agriculture will become a living part of human society, a source of pleasant physical activity and, by virtue of its ecological demands, an intellectual, scientific and artistic challenge. (140)

And thus, even though there is plenty of machinery and automation, people will regain that sense of connection to the land which had been lost with the industrial revolution:

They will regain the sense of one-ness with nature that existed in humans from primordial times. Nature and the organic modes of thought it always fosters will become an integral part of human culture; it will reappear with a fresh spirit in man's paintings, literature, philosophy, dances, architecture, domestic furnishings, and in his very gestures and day-to-day activities. (141)

There will be a locally-based mixture and diversity of technology and energy sources (including nuclear). Discussing ways that locally-based production could be achieved without dependence on some large centralized production process, he talks about how there are trace elements of useful minerals in even a handful of soil, and claims that tech is being developed, or will be, to extract this efficiently. [What happened to the idea of not seeing nature as a resource to be mined/extracted?]

As the chemist Jacob Rosin argues, if an element can be detected in the laboratory, there is reason to hope that it can be extracted on a sufficiently large scale to be used by industry. (143)

[Laboratory-centric reasoning? It seems to contradict the farming-experiencey thing].

The question of reliable local [and less polluting] energy sources arises; he talks about the promise of solar power, and lists examples of solar tech of the time, for several pages, along with tides, wind power, etc. According to Bookchin, these sources will only ever be good enough for small communities, they will not be able to support large cites like Paris, London, or New York. (151)

Limitation of scope, however, could represent a profound advantage from an ecological point of view. The sun, the wind and the earth are experiential realities to which men have responded sensuously and reverently from time immemorial. Out of these primal elements man developed his sense of dependence on—and respect for—the natural environment, a dependence that kept his destructive activities in check. The Industrial Revolution and the urbanized world that followed obscured nature's role in human experience—hiding the sun with a pall of smoke, blocking the winds with massive buildings, desecrating the earth with sprawling cities. Man's dependence on the natural world became invisible; it became theoretical and intellectual in character, the subject matter of textbooks, monographs and lectures. True, this theoretical dependence supplied us with insights (partial ones at best) into the natural world, but its onesidedness robbed us of all sensuous dependence on and all visible contact and unity with nature. In losing these, we lost a part of ourselves as feeling beings. We became alienated from nature. Our technology and environment became totally inanimate, totally synthetic—a purely inorganic physical milieu that promoted the deanimization of man and his thought.

[There is an interesting insight here into how the means of obtaining energy affects society and thinking. Coal/Fossil fuels support an extractive/resource view of the world, while electric transmission supports a dissociation from the power source, which is only relevant to the extent that we have power flowing to our homes, etc.]

To bring the sun, the wind, the earth, indeed the world of life, back into technology, into the means of human survival, would be a revolutionary renewal of man's ties to nature.

Human systems would in effect be part of their local ecological system, not an [alien force] operating against it.

Crafts would regain their honored position as supplements to mass manufacture; they would become a form of domestic, day-to-day artistry.

Higher quality would replace [planned obsolescence] and overall shoddiness/cheapness of mass production; the ecological sustainability of an item would be part of its appeal.

In the final part of the essay, called “Technology for Life,” Bookchin turns more explicitly to how he expects technology to work in a revolutionary society. His critique of previous revolutions could be said to be that they were a sort of holiday or world-turned-upside down ritual, in which business as usual was briefly suspended, but after which everyone had to “go back to work,” and this fact – that working people remained tied to their labor – allowed for elites to re-install themselves and eventually bar the working class from effective political participation.

In a future revolution, the most pressing task of technology will be to produce a surfeit of goods with a minimum of toil. The immediate purpose of this task will be to open the social arena permanently to the revolutionary people, to keep the revolution in permanence. (152)

Thus far very social revolution has foundered because the peal of the tocsin could not be heard over the din of the workshop. Dreams of freedom and plenty were polluted by the mundane, workaday responsibility of producing the means of survival. (153)

This means the people were too busy, and so “the reins of power fell into the hands of the political ‘professionals,’ the mediocrities of Thermidor.” He gives the example of the bourgeois Girondin party during the French Revolution, who wanted the doors of the popular assemblies closed at ten in the evening, to keep the workers from arriving after work:

Essentially, the tragedy of past revolutions has been that, sooner or later, their doors closed, "at ten in the evening." The most critical function of modern technology must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever!

Bookchin celebrates “those magnificent madmen,” the Dadaists, for their refusal of work. Turning to the question of technology, he criticizes the idea of technology as an “extension” of the human [in a way that could be said to presage Stiegler’s discussion of technology as pharmakon]. Only in the case of traditional technology, argues Bookchin, can technology be seen as an “extension of man,” because back then craft workers controlled their tools, instead of being controlled by them: 

The tool amplifies the powers of the craftsman as a human; it amplifies his power to exercise his artistry and impart his identity as a creative being to raw materials.  (154)

With the industrial revolution, this relationship is reversed:

The machine now appears as an alien force—apart from and yet wedded to the production of the means of survival.

Technology becomes part of a “social machine” which is also distinguished from the human or individual (aka “men”):

Although initially an “extension of man,” technology is transformed into a force above man, orchestrating his life according to a score contrived by an industrial bureaucracy; not men, I repeat, but a bureaucracy, a social machine.

With the arrival of mass production as the predominant mode of production, man became an extension of the machine, and not only of mechanical devices in the productive process but also of social devices in the social process.

This distinction between “mechanical devices in the productive process” and “social devices in the social process” echoes his discussion back in Chapter 2, where part of his critique of the Marxist position on class had to do with the creation of consumer consciousness through mass media, marketing, education, etc. – this is presumably what “social devices,” refers to, though the term seems even more relevant to a smartphone-dominated society. In line with this, he denounces the consumer as an unwittingly manufactured dupe:

The decline from craftsman to worker, from an active to an increasingly passive personality, is completed by man qua consumer—an economic entity whose tastes, values, thoughts and sensibilities are engineered by bureaucratic "teams" in "think tanks." 

Man, standardized by machines, is reduced to a machine.

In a footnote, Bookchin lists the ways in which “man-the-machine” is an ideal tool of power:

The “ideal man” of the police bureaucracy is a being whose innermost thoughts can be invaded by lie detectors, electronic listening devices, and “truth” drugs. The “ideal man” of the political bureaucracy is a being whose innermost life can be shaped by mutagenic chemicals and socially assimilated by the mass media. The “ideal man” of the industrial bureaucracy is a being whose innermost life can be invaded by subliminal and predictively reliable advertising. The “ideal man” of the military bureaucracy is a being whose innermost life can be invaded by regimentation for genocide. (155)

Here is another one of Bookchin’s dense paragraphs where he contrasts the idea of the eternally renewing revolutionary potential of the youth, versus the sloth of the bureaucracy: the “man as machine” ideal

is continually defied by the rebirth of life, by the reappearance of the young, and by the contradictions that unsettle the bureaucracy. Every generation has to be assimilated again, and each time with explosive resistance. The bureaucracy, in turn, never lives up to its own technical ideal. Congested with mediocrities, it errs continually. Its judgment lags behind new situations; insensate, it suffers from social inertia and is always buffeted by chance. Any crack that opens in the social machine is widened by the forces of life.

[Of course, how would the newer generations of so-called “digital natives” fit into this vision? Bookchin would perhaps argue that the “social device” training of the young gets earlier and earlier and more and more intrusive, because it has to; this is not a sign of the ultimate triumph of the machinification of the human, but of its fragility and desperation.]

How can we heal the fracture that separates living men from dead machines without sacrificing either men or machines? How can we transform a technology for survival into a technology for life?

Bookchin foresees two possibilities, the first of which is burying/hiding the technology [an interesting link to the soft city, not to mention the Teletubbies-Eloi and their subterraneann caretakers-Morlocks-“machines of loving grace”]:

Or these humans of the future may simply choose to step over the body of technology. They may submerge the cybernated machine in a technological underworld, divorcing it entirely from social life, the community and creativity. All but hidden from society, the machines would work for man. Free communities would stand at the end of a cybernated assembly line with baskets to cart the goods home. (155)

The fracture separating man from machine would not be healed. It would simply be ignored. (156)

Bookchin, naturally, is against such a move:

Ignoring technology, of course, is no solution. Man would be closing off a vital human experience—the stimulus of productive activity, the stimulus of the machine. Technology can play a vital role in forming the personality of man.

He cites Mumford on art and personal growth [basically Marx’s, or indeed Kant’s, insight regarding production and self-consciousness, the need to act on the world and see results]. In a liberated society, machines will make the hard work easier, while leaving the artistry and craftsmanship to humans:

A liberated society, I believe, will not want to negate technology precisely because it is liberated and can strike a balance. It may well want to assimilate the machine to artistic craftsmanship. By this I mean the machine will remove the toil from the productive process, leaving its artistic completion to man. The machine, in effect, will participate in human creativity.

The machine can absorb the toil involved in mining, smelting, transporting and shaping raw materials, leaving the final stages of artistry and craftsmanship to the individual.

In this wiser, no longer profit-driven economy, degrowth would become a reality, as the concept of what is “necessary” would change (with reference to Marx’s discussion of the “realm of necessity”):

Having acquired a vitalizing respect for the natural environment and its resources, the free decentralized community would give a new interpretation to the word “need.” Marx's “realm of necessity,” instead of expanding indefinitely, would tend to contract; needs would be humanized and scaled by a higher valuation of life and creativity. Quality and artistry would supplant the current emphasis on quantity and standardization; durability would replace the current emphasis on expendability... (157)

The shallowness of market exchange would be replaced with the creativity of a gift economy:

The repulsive ritual of bargaining and hoarding would be replaced by the sensitive acts of making and giving.Things would cease to be the crutches for an impoverished ego and the mediators between aborted personalities; they would become the products of rounded, creative individuals and the gifts of integrated, developing selves.

In contrast to the hierarchy and separation which are the effects of a centralized economic system, local production could lead to communities finding ways to cooperate over resources, which would thus act as “sinews of confederation” crossing ecological boundaries (157). He rejects the idea that society is too “complex” to operate as decentralized, autarchic communities: much of this apparent complexity is really just the fluff and wastefulness of state and corporate bureaucracy; filing cabinets, paperwork, etc.:

As in Kafka's novels, these things are real but strangely dreamlike, indefinable shadows on the social landscape. (159)

[Here is an interesting connection to Braverman, who discusses the “shadow world” of bureaucratic paperwork, stealing agency from human workers and turning them into “automata” per Taylor].

Degrowth is not just ecologically sensible, but would also lead to a simpler, and thus more anarchist, society, by getting rid of a lot of hierarchical bloat:

if we grant that buttons must be styled in a thousand different forms, textiles varied endlessly in kind and pattern to create the illusion of innovation and novelty, bathrooms filled to overflowing with a dazzling variety of pharmaceuticals and lotions, and kitchens cluttered with an endless number of imbecile appliances. If we single out of this odious garbage one or two goods of high quality in the more useful categories and if we eliminate the money economy, the state power, the credit system, the paperwork and the policework required to hold society in an enforced state of want, insecurity and domination, society would not only become reasonably human but also fairly simple. (159)

No community would specialize wholly in one product, but would instead have “rounded” economies producing “rounded” people:

Every community would approximate local or regional autarky. It would seek to achieve wholeness, because wholeness produces complete, rounded men who live in symbiotic relationship with their environment. (160)

Even today there are acts of mutual aid, even though these go against society; how much more there shall be in the future, when it is let loose! Bookchin admits we could end in disaster, but he expects rather than we will create a better society: 

Would it not be the height of absurdity, indeed of impudence, to gauge the behavior of future generations by the very criteria we despise in our own time? Free men will not be greedy, one liberated community will not try to dominate another because it has a potential monopoly of copper, computer “experts” will not try to enslave grease monkeys, and sentimental novels about pining, tubercular virgins will not be written. (161)

Echoing Brecht, he asks people of the future to forgive us for taking so long with the revolution, and to try to understand us.