[That technology makes all causes lost causes] The Brick Bradford brains of modern laboratory technicians, the zanies of big business fed on the adventures of Tarzan and detective thrillers, have finally given adequate physical form to the romantic nihilism of nineteenth century art and revolution. Every human cause has now the romantic charm of a “lost cause,” and the irreverence of proposed human ends is only equaled by the likelihood of the annihilation of human beings. Even the “lost” cause of the South begins to assume intelligible and attractive features for a great many who formerly assumed it was more fun to be on the side of the big battalions. In fact, the “Southern cause” is no more lost than that of the present-day left-wingers, whose literary production, for that matter, having been dependent on the creative effort of men like Hopkins, Eliot and Yeats, whose own allegiance was in turn given to the seemingly most forlorn of causes.

From our division of time into uniform, visualizable units comes our sense of duration and our impatience when we cannot endure the delay between events. Such a sense of impatience, or of time as duration, is unknown among non-literate cultures. Just as work began with the division of labor, duration begins with the division of time, and especially with those subdivisions by which mechanical clocks impose uniform succession on the time sense.

Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogenous and the simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful.

These two ads help us see one of the most peculiar features of our world -- the interfusion of sex and technology. It is not a feature created by the ad men, but it seems rather to be born of a hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique on the one hand, and, on the other, to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way.

Motion pictures are a blend of Euclidean and acoustic thinking, the mechanical and the electrical…”

As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern. Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience. The mechanical clock, in short, helps to create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe. It was in the world of the medieval monasteries, with their need for a rule and for synchronized order to guide communal life, that the clock got started on its modern developments. Time measured not by the uniqueness of private experience but by abstract uniform units gradually pervades all sense life, much as does the technology of writing and printing. Not only work, but also eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to the clock rather than to organic needs. As the pattern of arbitrary and uniform measurement of time extended itself across society, even clothing began to undergo annual alteration in a way convenient for industry. At that point, of course, mechanical measurement of time as a principle of applied knowledge joined forces with printing and assembly line as means of uniform fragmentation of processes.

Just as work began with the division of labor, duration begins with the division of time, and especially with those subdivisions by which mechanical clocks impose uniform succession on the time sense.

These two ads help us to see one of the most peculiar features of our world — the interfusion of sex and technology. It is not a feature created by the ad men, but it seems rather to be born of a hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique, on one hand, and, on the other, to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way.

In the mechanical age of the wheel and the lever, acceleration had expanded and enlarged the sphere of action. At electric of instant speeds the same sphere contracts almost to the dimensions of a single consciousness.

But the undercurrent of mechanical music is strangely sad.

The idea of marching in even rows was a startling innovation of that time [the 16th and 17th centuries] Even in Napoleon’s time it was considered radical to drill men on the field in rigid rows, marching in uniform patterns. Napoleon laid planks, I’ve been told, on the field so that his yokels could march in straight lines. Because it’s not natural to march in straight lines in sequence. And he tied the legs of his men together 18 inches apart so they could march uniformly.

Today we get inside the machine. It is inside us. We in it. Fusion. Oblivion. Safety. Now the human machines are geared to smash one another. You can't shout warnings or encouragement to these machines. First there has to be a retracing process. A reduction of the machine to human form. Circe only turned men into swine. Our problem is tougher.

The industrial age built more than its share of…boxes. It split class from class, job from job, profession from profession, work from play; divorced the self from the reality and joy of the present moment; fragmented the senses from the emotions from the intellect; and, perhaps most consequential of all, created highly specialized and standardized men and women.

As we experience the new electronic and organic age with ever stronger indications of its main outlines, the preceding mechanical age becomes quite intelligible. Now that the assembly line recedes before the new patterns of information, synchronized by electric tape, the miracles of mass-production assume entire intelligibility. But the novelties of automation, creating workless and propertyless communities, envelop us in new uncertainties. 

On the other hand, the old-fashioned kind of "war" becomes as impracticable as playing hopscotch with bulldozers.

Newton discovered levity, not gravity. He discovered the ex-fluence of the moon. So far as NASA is concerned, the attractions of the moon still over-ride all the traditional thoughts of dignity and gravity.
“Kahn-frontation”, unpublished essay written for Newsweek, June (1969), LAC: MG 31, D 156, Vol. 134, File 5, p 1

Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.