The Machine Pauses | THR Blog | Blogs | The Hedgehog Review:

An apt metaphor for a world that runs on fossil fuels, Hawthorne’s railroad, like Forster’s Machine, speaks to the dangerous tendency of technology to create its own momentum. In the mid-twentieth century, thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, and members of the Frankfurt School would take up this idea in earnest. And once again, an examination of ends and means served as the point of departure.

In Heidegger’s view, technology is “no mere means” but rather its own realm of existence, one that legislates the perspective with which we experience the world. While we use technology to exert our will over nature, our technologies exert their own will back on us, nudging us toward those modes of production and ways of thinking that are most conducive to the available technologies themselves.

Ellul saw things much the same but went even further, arguing that every dimension of modern life had been subordinated to “technique,” meaning the rational pursuit of efficiency for its own sake. “Technique,” he writes in The Technological Society, “transforms everything it touches into a machine,” and has become “the main preoccupation of our time; in every field men seek to find the most efficient method.”