Machine mastery perpetuates rather than ends enslavement

Evidence

One might call autocratic a philosophy of technics which takes the technical whole as a place where machines are used to obtain power. The machine is only a means; the end is the conquest of nature, the domestication of natural forces through a primary enslavement: The machine is a slave which serves to make other slaves. Such a domineering and enslaving drive may go together with the quest for human freedom. But it is difficult to liberate oneself by transferring slavery to other beings, men, animals, or machines; to rule over a population of machines subjecting the whole world means still to rule, and all rule implies acceptance of schemata of subjection. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 635

Categorization

• XREF: Simondon’s point — the machine is a slave making other slaves, and ruling a machine population is still ruling — directly echoes the reader’s ‘On Sacrifice’ theme of systems that bind the rulers as tightly as the ruled. — connects to: Mechanization sustains exploitation while shifting its form from muscular to mental exhaustion. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 169; Losing professional enslavement also costs workers their power of negation. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 178; The masters of industrial society are themselves trapped by the machinery they administer — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 188 (+13 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘autocratic philosophy of technics’ as a named framework worth keeping for critical-theory work.
• STORYSTEM: The image of a machine as a slave that makes other slaves, and liberation via transferring slavery to machines being illusory — could seed a speculative-fiction world where a utopia built on machine labor secretly reproduces the same patterns of rule.

Broader Connections

• Domination is perpetuated by thought’s own ossification, not by technology #qualifies (0.82)
• Rule-based machine ethics produce unintended emergent consequences #complicates (0.78) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 1591
• Mechanized work frees the worker’s brain rather than mummifying it #contradicts (0.78) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1139
• Large-scale systems enable rather than merely threaten individual self-actualisation #complicates (0.75) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 371
• Generative AI threatened to devalue the very concept of labor #complicates (0.70)