“让我们不要再自欺欺人了。就在西方国家抛弃了在曾经神圣的国王统治下的古代专制政府的时候，他们正在以更有效的技术手段恢复同样的制度，在工厂的组织中重新引入军事性质的强制措施，其严格程度不亚于新训练的、穿制服的、集成化的军队。在过去两个世纪的过渡阶段，这种制度的最终趋势可能是值得怀疑的，因为在许多领域有强烈的民主反应；但随着科学意识形态的编织，它本身从神学限制或人文目的中解放出来，专制技术找到了一个工具，现在已经赋予它对宇宙维度的物理能量的绝对控制。核弹、太空火箭和计算机的发明者是我们这个时代的金字塔建造者：他们在心理上被一种类似的无条件权力的神话所膨胀，通过他们的科学夸耀他们日益增长的全能，如果不是全知的话，他们的痴迷和强迫性不亚于早期的绝对系统：特别是系统本身必须扩展的观念，无论最终代价是什么。
通过机械化、自动化和控制论的指导，这种专制技术终于成功地克服了它最严重的弱点：它最初依赖于具有抵抗性的，有时是积极不服从的伺服机械的依赖，但仍足够人性化，其目的并不总是与系统的目的一致。
就像最早的专制技术一样，这种新技术充满活力，富有成效：无论是科学知识的产出还是工业流水线的产出，它以各种形式的力量都趋向于无限制地增长，其数量难以被同化，也无法被控制。最大限度地提高能量、速度或自动化，而不考虑维持有机生命的复杂条件，这本身已经成为目标。与最早的专制技术形式一样，如果从国家预算来判断，努力的重点趋向于绝对的毁灭工具，这些工具是为绝对不合理的目的而设计的，其主要副产品将是人类的残害或灭绝。就连亚述巴尼拔和成吉思汗也在正常的人类极限下进行了血淋淋的行动。
在这个新的体系中，权力的中心不再是一个可见的人物，一个全能的国王：即使在极权主义独裁国家，现在的中心也在体制本身，看不见却无所不在：它的所有人类组成部分，甚至技术和管理精英，甚至科学的神圣祭司，只有他们能够接触到秘密的知识，通过这种手段，现在正在迅速实现全面控制，他们自己也被他们所发明的组织的完美所困。就像金字塔时代的法老一样，这些系统的仆人把系统的产品与他们自己的福祉联系在一起：就像神圣的国王一样，他们对系统的赞美是一种自我崇拜的行为；就像国王一样，他们被一种非理性的冲动所控制，要扩大他们的控制手段，扩大他们的权威范围。在这个以系统为中心的新集体中，在这个权力的五角大楼里，看不到发号施令的人：不像约伯的神，新的神不能被对抗，更不能被蔑视。在节省劳动力的借口下，这种技术的最终目的是取代生命，或者更确切地说，是把生命的属性转移到机器和机械的集体中，只允许有机体在可控制和操纵的范围内保留下去。”
— — 刘易斯·芒福德（Lewis Mumford）
“Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life.
Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.
Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits.
The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job’s God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.”
― Lewis Mumford
