[W]hat economists lately termed the Machine Age or the Power Age, had its origin, not in the so-called Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, but at the very outset in the organization of an archetypal machine composed of human parts.
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This extraordinary invention proved in fact to be the earliest working model for all later complex machines, though the emphasis slowly shifted from the human operatives to the more reliable mechanical parts. <…​> As a result of this invention, huge engineering tasks were accomplished five thousand years ago that match the best present performances in mass production, standardization, and meticulous design.

This machine escaped notice and so naturally remained unnamed until our own day, when a far more powerful and up-to-date type, utilizing a congeries of subordinate machines, came into existence.
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Because the components of the machine, even when it functioned as a completely integrated whole, were necessarily separate in space, I shall for certain purposes call it the 'invisible machine': when utilized to perform work on highly organized collective enterprises, I shall call it the 'labor machine': when applied to acts of collective coercion and destruction, it deserves the title, used even today, the 'military machine.' But when all the components <…​> must be included, I shall usually refer to the 'megamachine': in plain words, the Big Machine. <…​> [A]n invisible structure composed of living, but rigid, human parts, each assigned to his special office, role, and task, to make possible the immense work-output and grand designs of this great collective organization.
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That invention was the supreme feat of early civilization: a technological exploit which served as a model [which] was transmitted, sometimes with all its parts in good working condition, sometimes in a makeshift form, through purely human agents, for some five thousand years, before it was done over in a material structure that corresponded more closely to its own specifications, and was embodied in a comprehensive institutional pattern that covered every aspect of life.
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With the energies available through the royal machine, the dimensions of space and time were vastly enlarged: operations that once could hardly have been finished in centuries were now accomplished in less than a generation. On the level plains, man-made mountains of stone or baked clay, pyramids and ziggurats, arose in response to royal command: in fact the whole landscape was transformed, and bore in its strict boundaries and geometric shapes the impress of both a cosmic order and an inflexible human will. No complex power machines at all comparable to this mechanism were utilized on any scale until clocks and watermills and windmills swept over Western Europe from the fourteenth century of our era on.
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Now to call these collective entities machines is no idle play on words. If a machine be defined <…​> as a combination of resistant parts, each specialized in function <…​> to utilize energy and to perform work, then the great labor machine was in every aspect a genuine machine: all the more because its components, though made of human bone, nerve, and muscle, were reduced to their bare mechanical elements and rigidly standardized for the performance of their limited tasks. The taskmaster’s lash ensured conformity. Such machines had already been assembled if not invented by kings in the early part of the Pyramid Age, from the end of the Fourth Millennium on.
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Capitalism <…​> relied on the method of conditioning used successfully by animal trainers to ensure obedience to orders, and to secure the performance of difficult feats. And whereas kingship had emphasized punishment, a method that has a definite limit in the death of the individual too severely punished, there was no limit under early capitalism to the possibility of reward. Moreover, this new motive did not appeal only to a single class: it theoretically held out a promise and a hope to the humblest individual who would strictly apply himself to business.
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Money, as the nexus in all human relations and as the main motivation in all social effort, replaced the reciprocal obligations and duties of families, neighbors, citizens, friends. And as other moral and esthetic considerations diminished, the dynamics of money power increased. Money was the only form of power which, through its very abstraction from all other realities, knew no limits—though finally this indifference to concrete realities would meet its nemesis in the progressive inflations of an 'expanding economy.'[]

[The invention of] the joint stock company, with limited liability, <…​> widened the number of possible investors and relieved them of the burden of individual responsibility for bankruptcy that single ownership or partnership entailed. These changes completed the depersonalization of the whole industrial process. After the seventeenth century an increasing number of anonymous workers were exploited for the benefit of equally anonymous and invisible and morally indifferent absentee owners.

Thus the various components of mechanized industry conspired to remove the traditional valuations and the human aims that had kept the economy under control and caused it to pursue other goals than power. Absentee ownership, the cash nexus, managerial organization, military discipline, were from the beginning the social accompaniments of large-scale mechanization <…​> based on <…​> contracting or expanding or diverting human needs to those that are required to keep such an economy in operation. Warfare <…​> in turn contributed further to mechanization by reverting in industry to a military discipline and daily drill, in order to ensure uniform operations and uniform results. This reciprocal interplay between warfare <…​> and mechanization was ultimately responsible for some of the most vexatious problems that must now be faced.
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The process of automation has produced imprisoned minds that have no capacity for appraising the results of their process, except by the archaic criteria of power and prestige, property, productivity and profit, segregated from any more vital human goals. The Pentagon of Power. By its own logic automation is dedicated to the installation of a system of total control over every natural process, and ultimately over every organic function and human purpose. Not strangely, the one part of this civilization that escapes the principle of total control is—automation itself! The country in which this mode of collective servitude has been carried furthest has been taught by its information-manipulators (public relations specialists) to call this system ‘Free Enterprise.’
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Hitler demonstrated his understanding of the ancient malpractices and misuses of the megamachine far better than its positive potentialities. <…​> To ensure undeviating uniformity, writers, artists, musicians, psychologists were <…​> obliged to wear the same mental uniform. <…​> Meanwhile, the military spirit of brutal drill and mindless obedience was carried into the schools and universities, where, <…​> it had never been entirely absent. In short, the Germans not merely enlarged the dimensions of the ancient megamachine, but made important innovations in the techniques of mass control: innovations that later corporate megamachines are now perfecting with the aid of spying devices, opinion polls, market research, and computerized dossiers on private life.
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Fortunately there already are many indications, though scattered, faint, and often contradictory, that a fresh cultural transformation is in the making: one which will recognize that the money economy is bankrupt, and the power complex has become, through its very excesses and exaggerations, impotent. <…​> [I]f mankind overcomes the myth of the machine, one thing may be safely predicted: <…​> present megatechnic institutions and structures will be reduced to human proportions and brought under direct human control. Should this prove true, the present canvass of the existing society, its technological miscarriages and its human misdemeanors, should by implication give valid positive directions for working out a life-economy.[]