Technology and Power Devices: Machines, Mega-machines and Micro-machines

Abstract

The relationship between machines and political, social and economic power is the subject of this article, which aims to establish the relationship between capitalism and technical rationality in the age of digital technologies as well as the very concept of the digital machine. In the development, Karl Marx’s “fragment on machines” is centrally analyzed insofar as it focuses on the industrial machine in the capitalist mode of production and Lewis Mumford’s notion of “mega-machine” as a techno-political apparatus of social control from the Age of the Pyramids to advanced capitalism, in addition to other thinkers of the mechanical age (Marcuse, Habermas, Ellul). Likewise, the recent theory of Eric Sadin about the digital technologies that produce the aletheia of reality in the framework of neoliberal or hyperliberal technocapitalism is examined below. Finally, a reconceptualization of the machine is postulated based on the classic definition of the mechanical engineer Franz Reuleaux and, through it, of the digital machine and of the network system that it organizes at its various levels. From these results, by way of conclusion, this article conceives the possibility of a mutation of the modern episteme and the “end of man” as conceived by the archeology of Michel Foucault, and, therefore, the emergence of a post-human horizon or, more still, transhuman.