Lewis Mumford

The impersonal, bureaucratic order of the counting house vied with monastic and military order in laying the foundations for the inflexible discipline and impersonal regularity that has now gradually extended itself to every aspect of institutional life in Western civilization. This order has been smoothly translated into automatic machines and computers, even more incapable of exercising humane judgement and discretion than a trained clerk. The new bureaucracy devoted to managerial organization and coordination again became a necessary adjunct to all large-scale, long-distance enterprises: book-keeping and record-keeping set the pace, in standardized uniformity, for all the other parts of the machine. The failure to reckon with this mathematical aspect of mechanization, as a prelude to industrial inventions, has resulted in a warped and one-sided picture of modern technics. This account gives to specific tools and machines by themselves the priority in effecting changes that first took place in the human mind and were translated later into institutions and mechanisms.