from technical innovations (Law, 195). The history of Industrial factory technology begins to appear as a collective fetish of the ruling classes for instruments of control. In American Industrial development, the direction of technological development since the Civil War has been driven by the largest customer of that Industry, the Military (Noble, 334), and the society that works in and uses the products of that Industry has been affected by that direction. But as to the woes of our civilization, "...Technology is not the problem, nor is it the solution. The problem is political, moral, and cultural, as is the solution: a successful challenge to a system of domination which masquerades as progress." Noble, 351) Luddite Technology Social power is needed to direct the resources necessary for technological innovation; so during the history of the Industrial Age, at the beginning, the machines were new, large, and expensive, so only those who controlled enough social power to bring about the machines could decide on what forms those machines came in-- the wealthy, and the state, through the needs of the military. Less expensive and more efficient technologies were stifled by those in authority if they did not contribute to the goal of taking power away from the workers and placing it in the hands of management. In this century, the development of Numerically Controlled (N/C) machine tools was controlled by the emerging military-industrial complex, which spared no expense to implement a troublesome and complicated technology that was no better than the conventional methods, and inferior to the alternative Record/Playback automated machining (Noble, 146). The Boeing plant in Seattle even had special switches on the machines so the operators could signal the manager for permission to go to the bathroom! (Noble, 243) The engineers of the 1950's announced the dawning of a Second Industrial Revolution- one that would finalize the subjuga...
