It appears that the concerns about the ‘threats’ of technology have been around for an awful long time. Here, Thomas Carlyle, a Victorian historian, commentator and staunch supporter of the working classes, warns against the ‘mechanisation’ brought about by the Industrial Revolution and outlines its effect on society. This quote suggests that individual creativity and endeavour are stifled by a need to promote mechanisation. This notion has echoes in Rose’s assertion, paraphrased by Hand, that the apparent freedoms and ‘empowerment [which some software offers] disguises the positioning of users as ‘dumb’ and essentially passive…Ultimately, digitisation is skewed toward ‘technicological rather than human ends”. (cited in Hand p.39).
Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.Thomas Carlyle
