The Machine in the Garden
"For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define - and continues to enrich - the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines the differences between the "pastoral" and "progressive" ideals that characterized early 19th-century American culture, and which ultimately evolved into the basis for many of the environmental and nuclear debates of contemporary society."--Jacket.
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2recommend
7mentions
4people
2013–2025years
29% recommend71% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I was surprised to see no mention of Leo Marx's: The Machine in the Garden, because that's probably the most canonical book on exactly what the article talks about, the idealization of pastoral life in America[1].
As the blog post hints at it's not really limited to programmers or cubicle workers as such, it's deeply ingrained in the US psyche. Practically you can just hop on any social media platform and see examples. A few days ago I saw some pictures of the new BYD factory in China and it's quite funny to see the difference between Chinese reactions "it'll make us independent" or "jobs there pay better" to English media which have a lot of "that's so big and dystopian", "it'll automate away jobs" etc.
There's an observation by Fukuyama that Americans modernized before they urbanized which has left them midway between urban dweller and villager and that's really what's behind "cottagecore" and also behind the inability to build and automate and the constraints that everyone in American politics complaints about all the time.
- I plan to go to grad school in history of technology, and spent senior year studying the history of technology at MIT, which has one of the best such programs around. Of my library, designed in preparation for quals one day, these are the best books fitting your description. These are all _broad_ histories of technology, more on the order of the Industrial Revolution than on modern technology. Amazon has good summaries of all of these.
The Unbound Prometheus --- a history of eastern europe technology and its social impacts.
From The American System to Mass Production --- Hounshell, a history of the development of the assembly line, and in particular the forerunners to Ford's mythologized mass production line (which, in many elements, surpassed it, and demonstrate that it was not particularly unique except in marketing)
America By Design --- Noble is a very circumspect, controversial historian of technology.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism --- classic on the controversial idea that protestantism was responsible for capitalism and the resulting technology
Does Technology Drive History -- collection of essays by the founders of the field of science, technology, and society.
Civilizing the Machine --- technology's interaction with American values and how those developed concurrently.
Major Problems in the History of American Technology --- a collection of original documents and essays interpreting them in a historical basis, ed. by a founder of the field.
The Tentacles of Progress --- how technology lends itself to imperialism, and furthers exploitation, even when other nations fund the development of infrastructure in developing nations.
The Machine in the Garden --- possibly the single most important book on this list, the one that turned my life upside down and which I think about most regularly. It posits that America's idyll of a tech-free natural scene is actually a balance of technology and nature, and is a artificial nature propped up by machine, and demonstrates this history of this tension in American life from Shakespeare to Jefferson to Thoreau to the modern day. It completely turned my conception of the perfect life upsidedown.
Digital Apollo --- a history of the computing history of the Apollo program, especially the tensions in the software development sides between good management and perfect programs.
Science and Corporate Strategy, DuPont R&D 1902-1982 --- if you're interested in the development of big chem, or in the history of companies having R&D departments, this is the book for you. The DuPonts were very well-educated, many being MIT alums, and the chemical company they built was innovative in many different ways --- this book is a interesting discussion of the society and the technological pressures that drove and still drive innovation.
- The writer of this article seems confused, his examples of "technological criticism" are more about the technological society than the technology but he seems to be advocating for the more specialized form of criticism such as literary criticism which software is not really developed enough for and this sort of criticism is an outgrowth of theory, not some general push for "criticism" as a field.
I suspect we already have a culture of software (or at least programming) criticism in the CS journals, most fields have them and they are a natural evolution of the journals, but it takes some times for the culture and vocabulary to develop. Music* and literature are the only two fields which have well developed fields of criticism, art and film are close but their medium is not written and that forces them to go into rather vague and subjective areas. The technology has been around for awhile now for art and film (and software) to exploit their own mediums for criticism but I have yet to see it, we can analyze the importance of the smile on Mona Lisa's face and reproduce it with her having different expressions without much effort.
We absolutely have code level criticism but it has yet to coalesce, a book on data structures which explores their forms over time, how those forms affect the whole, strengths/weaknesses, etc is criticism and not much different than works of literary criticism like Closure in the Novel, The Machine in the Garden or Mimesis which all take one aspect of literature and explore its different executions and forms; the ending, technology v nature, and reality respectively.
*Music theory is largely a written discipline—a mix of on the staff and in written language—and as I said, criticism is an extension of theory.
- I think both fit very well within the trope that Leo Marx when talking about American literature called the Machine in the Garden[1] myth. It's a sort of story in which authors long for pastoral, naturalistic settings that are small scale and untouched by machinery, and so forth.
This is both found in Orwell's democratic Socialism as well as in Tokien's idealized Christian community that is Hobbingen. Orwell of course literally attacks Stalinism and I always interpreted Tolkien's work as doing the same thing, not entirely sure how else to interpret Saruman industrializing the Shire, even though he of course always denied these parallels.
Personally I never really could stand this kind of literature for a lot of the reasons Asimov talks about in his review of 1984[2]. It's parochial, technophobic, stereotypically English with its snobbish attitude towards literature, ink quills, pipes and so on and paranoid about anything that seems like popular mass culture or too large or organized in scal or in any other way related to modernity.
- BNW remains to this day one of my biggest disappointments when it comes to the classics. I remember reading it maybe fifteen years ago and I went in with this expectation to read this brilliant critique of modern consumer society everyone was referencing, what did I get? The antagonists of the book are called Marx, Lenina and Mustapha (read: muslims, women and commies running the world government), and the hero is a guy called John the Savage who reads Shakespeare in the redneck reservation and is the real woke one compared to all the sheep on soma and sex.
If someone wrote this book today you would think they have listened to too much talk radio, and I think it's one of the best examples of what Leo Marx called 'the machine in the garden' myth.[1] the anxiety of (predominantly anglosphere) authors that technology and industrialization disrupt their naturalistic and God given, pastoral community.
I think I might be one of the few people who read the book and came away liking the one world government more, because the book completely and utterly failed to convince me how it is anything but fear of modernity, technology and the liberation of women from reproductive obligations. That last part is very important and in that respect the book has aged particularly poorly. The author of the essay at the end calls the book a warning of 'feminine tyranny', and I think that's exactly right. Huxley seems to be dead afraid of a society in which the monogamous family is washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization, without really making the case why hanging out in the reservation is supposed to be any good.
- >How to account for the enduring interest in Orwell’s life and work?
I actually have a fairly uncharitable take on why he's so popular in the English speaking world. One reason is Orwell's inherent technophobia and parochialism which is arguably the dominant theme in American and English speculative fiction, what Leo Marx dubbed 'the Machine in the Garden' myth. It's about the idea of modernity, industrialization and urban society intruding an idealized agrarian culture. You find in in LOTR, Brave New World, 1984 with its waxing over natural chocolate and ink-pencils. Asimov addresses this in his pretty scathing critique of the book[1]. It also still pops up in virtually every English-language piece of dystopian fiction.
Another reason is the political aspect of his work in the US in particular. Orwell's politics was to a large degree a personal feud with Stalinism due to his experiences in the Spanish civil war. This unorthodox critique of Soviet communism coming from a socialist made him pretty much the ideal figure in the anti-communist discourse of US 20th century politics on both sides of the political spectrum. Rebellious enough to appeal to the liberal side, but actually pushing deeply conventional, conservative ideas. Also mirrored in Hitchens personal trajectory, who was a big admirer of Orwell.
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