Talk:Technics and Civilization

Untitled
Paleotechnic and neotechnic are concepts previously occupied by Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford teacher. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.14.167.190 (talk) 10:22, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Mumford is my "main man," and Technics is my main source. I think what he was saying (in a nutshell) is that technology (from pots, to glass, to plumbing, to CPUs) is initiated by the democratic technic (average but inventive people) and then annexed by the authoritarian technic (oligarchies and capital structures) to be further developed, and usually ruined (e.g. Microsoft and "windows"). While he created a road map in 1934 that predicted the tech crash of 2000 (based on RCA), and this book is still valid in our time as a road map, he left a lot of holes to be filled in by us. One is that he despised ancient Rome but loved ancient Greece; he failed to differentiate by oligarchic Greece (authoritarian law-givers such as Plato) and democratic Greece that purportedly required democratic participation, and not just allowed it. Also, he did not connect the marginalized defectives that wandered the woods for eons killing animals and each other to form nations states to kill the rest of us with the capital families/structures that obviously use these defectives to kill to protect their property which, as Mumford states, they took by annexing the public domain (along with the natives to make the slaves, serfs, etc). My 2cts. --John Bessa (talk) 19:52, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Anachronism in lead
The lead stated that Mumford warned of the dangers posed by nuclear warfare, but he clearly could not have known about that in 1934! Of course he did comment at length on that topic in later books, but not this one. DaveApter (talk) 11:49, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

What sticks?
Mumford's 'Technics and Civilization' was my second social discovery (after switching from tech to humanity in 2002). My first was Bonnie Shapiro's little red book, 'What Children Bring to Light,' which syncs with T&C. His key values that I recall (that are not mentioned here) were the
 * dichotomy of democracy and authority, which he described in terms of ancient Rome vs ancient Athens, the idea that the
 * first 'machine' that built the pyramids cannot be excavated at the site, because it is buried in the cemetery, the
 * marginalization of the anti-social by normal society inadvertently formed the military side of the nation-state by allowing hunting gangs to become homicidal,
 * empires were (and still are) built from the annexation of public domain lands by family capital whose original residents, usually First Peoples, where horribly savaged, that the
 * Great Depression was triggered by the deflation of RCA stock--the first tech bubble--and that he
 * predicted that there would be a market crash similarly-triggered that would be the tech crash of 2000, a lead-up to the Great Recession

This is a lot! And I am so grateful for his effort, but it is not all. I will update it when I remember the other factors. (Waiting on kid's bus.) --John Bessa (talk) 16:39, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

Permissible link?
A scan of the book is available here: https://monoskop.org/File:Mumford_Lewis_Technics_and_Civilization.pdf

It's labeled as available under fair use. Is it permissible to put this link into the article? Theosch (talk) 09:10, 29 January 2020 (UTC)