Sunday, December 20, 2009

The future of Technics and Civilization

I reckon I only have a cubic meter of books to read in my unread book collection. Thanks to the general crappness of the German postal system, I have not been buying too many new books. I spent part of the weekend speed reading "The future of Technics and Civilization" by Lewis Mumford. I think I got this book from the Anarchist Freedom press in London.

The book is about the effect of the development of machines and automation on human society. When I was reading it I did think I should really read it more slowly to really absorb the content. However, since I was also writing perl scripts to extract data from xml files I didn't really have time. So I really misunderstood the whole point of the book, since it is partly about how automation could be used to free us from drudgery.

What the scientific spirit has actually done has to be exercise the imagination in finer ways than the autistic wish -- the wish of the infant possessed of illusions of power and dominance -- was able to express. Lewis Mumford