There is no choice between two technical methods. [...] It is always a question of the improvement of method in itself.

"Since it was possible, it was necessary"

If politics was to become a technical activity, chance must be eliminated. The results obtained must be certain.

Everything can be called into question (God first of all), except technical progress.

We are today at the stage of historical evolution in which everything that is not technique is to be eliminated.

[...] the multitude of factors which intervene, each in its small way, in technical progress: the consumer, accumulation of capital, research bureaus and laboratories, and the organization of production, which acts "in some sense mechanically".

When a new technical form appears, it makes possible and conditions a number of others.

Once a technical procedure has been discovered, it is applicable in many other fields other than the one for which it was primarily invented.

Lewis Mumford shows that certain of our inventions cannot be improved, that the possible domain of mechanical activity cannot be extended, and that mechanical progress is limited by the nature of the physical world. This last is true. But we are far from knowing the total possibilities of the physical world.

"The law of the limit of technico-economic development is that past progress closes the door to future progress. For future progress there remains in every case only a margin, only a fraction, indeed only a small fraction, of past progress."

Self-augmentation can be formulated in two laws:
1- In a given civilization, technical progress is irreversible.
2- Technical progress tends to act, not according to an arithmetic, but according to a geometric progression.

Material techniques of communication, psychological techniques, commer­cial techniques, techniques of authoritarian government, all com­bine to produce the important phenomenon of propaganda, which represents a new technique independent of all the rest and neces­sarily produced as a consequence of the preceding phenomena.

The present level of technique brings on new advances, and these in turn add to existing technical difficulties and technical problems, which de­mand further advances still. This is a concrete problem in town planning. A large city supposes a concentration of the means of transport, air control, traffic organization, and so on. Each of these permits the city to grow even larger and promotes new technical advances. For example, to make housework easier, garbage-disposal units have been put into use which allow the garbage to run off through the kitchen sinks. The result is enormous pollution of the rivers. It is then necessary to find some new means of purifying the rivers so that water can be used for drinking. A great quantity of oxygen is required for bacteria to destroy these organic materials. And how shall we oxygenate rivers?

In other words, journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt the man to the machine.

There is an attractive notion which would apparently resolve all technical problems: that it is not the technique that is wrong, but the use men make of it. Consequently, if the use is changed, there will no longer be any objection to the technique.

I could cite innumerable examples, but the ones I have given suffice to show that technique in itself (and not the use made of it, or its non-necessary consequences) leads to a certain amount of suffering and to social scourges which cannot be completely sepa­rated from it. This is its very mechanism.

Production becomes more and more complex. The combination of machines within the same enterprise, is a notable characteristic of the nineteenth century. It is impossible, in effect, to have an isolated machine.

It is impossible to amputate a part of the system or to modify it in any way without modifying the whole. The system was not built through whim or personal ambition. Its factors were all reciprocally engendered.

And if there is a competition between this intrinsic final­ity and an extrinsic end proposed by man, it is always the intrinsic finality which carries the day.

In all countries, whatever their degree of “civilization,’* there is a tendency to apply the same technical procedures.

In the course of history there have always been different princi­ples of civilization according to regions, nations, and continents. But today everything tends to align itself on technical principles. In the past, different civilizations took different “paths”; today all peoples follow the same road and the same impulse.

On the contrary, social plasticity and a clear technical consciousness are the general terms which it forcibly imposes in every area of the world. It dissociates the sociological forms, des­troys the moral framework, desacralizes men and things, explodes social and religious taboos, and reduces the body social to a collec­tion of individuals. The most recent sociological studies (even those made by optimists) hold that technique is the destroyer of social groups, of communities (whatever their kind), and of human relations.

Now technique is me­chanically reproducing it everywhere as necessary to its existence. What force could prevent technique from so acting, or make it be otherwise than it is?

To free themselves from a corrupt art and the prevailing taste, artists have recourse to objects such as machines and mechanisms because these objects contain an objective truth.

The complete separation of the goal from the mechanism, the limita­tion of the problem to the means, and the refusal to interfere in any way with efficiency; all this is clearly expressed by Taylor and lies at the basis of technical autonomy.

Morality judges moral problems; as far as techni­cal problems are concerned, it has nothing to say.

Technique obeys its own specific laws, as every machine obeys laws. Each element of the technical complex follows certain laws determined by its relations with the other elements, and these laws are internal to the system and in no way influenced by external factors.

However, technique cannot assert its autonomy in respect to physical or biological laws. Instead, it puts them to work; it seeks to dominate them.

Industrial technique will soon succeed in completely replacing the effort of the worker, and it would do so even sooner if capital­ism were not an obstacle. The worker, no longer needed to guide or move the machine to action, will be required merely to watch it and to repair it when it breaks down.

No technique is possible when men are free.

It will be inadmissible for any part of the individ­ual not to be integrated in the drive toward technicization; it will be inadmissible that any man even aspire to escape this necessity of the whole society. The individual will no longer be able, materially or spiritually, to disengage himself from society.