When we write about the Megamachine, we easily lapse into one of two opposing views: either we see it as an entity that came into being independently of human beings — like a demon that has descended upon the world — or we see it as an ancient, gigantic conspiracy of the elites, propagating itself over millennia, for the perpetual exploitation of the great majority of humankind. Both are wrong.
The Megamachine came into being through people. And it has always been people who have ensured its further development — not only wicked people with wicked plans, but very often ordinary people who made ordinary, rational decisions.
Yet it has become an intelligent entity and has developed a life of its own — whose phases of emergence, workings and background we set out in detail in the main paper Europe and the Megamachine.
Lewis Mumford reconstructed this in "The Myth of the Machine" — on the basis of what is known from archaeological finds and early records. Here we try to translate the core of his insight into the language of these working papers.
I. Property — the first social fiction
At some point — nobody knows when, nobody knows where — a human being declared a piece of land to be his. And others accepted it. That is the primal act of the Megamachine: a social fiction that becomes reality through consensus.
Rousseau saw this: "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society." The sentence sounds like an indictment. It is a description. For the man who declared the land his did not do so out of malice — he did it because it worked. Because others accepted it. Because property is a social technology that makes coordination possible.
But with property there also arose the possibility of inequality as a state of the system. Whoever has more land can produce more, can accumulate more, can exercise more power. Positive feedback without built-in negative feedback — from the very beginning. The first property was the first cruise control.
II. Servitude — the first highway robbery
The first human being who exploited another's plight or inferiority and made him his servant or slave invented highway robbery in its purest form. Not control of a bottleneck over a resource — but control of a bottleneck over life itself.
This, too, was no invention of evil. It was a discovery: that a person can produce more by forcing another to work than by working alone. That superiority — physical, numerical, technological — can be converted into domination. That was a gain in productivity. For one. At the expense of another.
The inventor may well not have regarded this as evil either, for rather than let the other starve — for whatever reason — he gave him work and bread. Once wars were being fought — for whatever reason — it was positively noble not to kill the other but merely to enslave him. Both were economically decisive turning points: for a person can produce more when working under compulsion for someone else than when he has to survive alone — and a living slave is worth more than a dead enemy.
Servitude equipped the Megamachine with its central structural principle: that profits can be privatised and costs externalised. That a system can work for some by exploiting others. This principle has survived in a thousand forms — from slavery to serfdom to wage labour to the platform economy. The form changes. The structure remains.
III. Protection — the invention of the state
The first human being who offered his protection against a villain invented the political means. And in doing so he invented perhaps the most perfidious basic structure of the Megamachine: the provider of protection who is identical with the threat — or at least profits from it.
The robber and the protector are often the same person, or at least the same system. The prince who protects his land from foreign robbers is the same prince who exploits his own peasants. The state that protects its citizens from crime is the same state that creates the conditions that foster crime. The offer of protection presupposes the existence of a threat — and whoever sells protection has a structural interest in the threat persisting.
That is the primal form of the war dividend. And it is as old as human organisation.
IV. The leader — the invention of the political means
The first human being who made himself leader of a horde invented something new: power no longer through brute force alone, but through consensus, narrative, legitimation. He told others why he should lead — and they believed it, or accepted it, or submitted.
That is the moment at which the Megamachine acquires its own ideology. No longer just compulsion — narrative as well. The leader is strong because the gods will it. Because blood decrees it. Because history demands it. Because there is no alternative. ALTERNATIVLOS — "without alternative" — is not an invention of Angela Merkel — it is as old as the first horde that followed its first leader.
Mumford showed how these four basic structures — property, servitude, protection, leadership — grew together in the early high civilisations into a first explicit Megamachine: the pyramid. Not as a building — as an organising principle. Thousands of people working in perfect coordination towards a goal none of them chose, for a ruler who told them it was the will of God. Command, obedience, specialisation, hierarchy — all present. The first Megamachine of flesh and blood.
V. Emergence without a plan
The decisive point about this genesis: nobody planned the Megamachine. The first person who claimed land did not think: I am hereby laying the foundation of capitalism. The first slaveholder did not think: I am inventing a system of exploitation that will last three thousand years. The first protector did not think: I am founding the state as the monopoly on legitimate violence.
They all did what lay closest to hand. The sensible thing. What made sense in their situation. And the sum of these sensible individual decisions has produced a structure that today encompasses the whole world and that no single person can any longer survey or control.
The Megamachine is not only the work of wicked people. It is also the emergent result of ordinary — often even decidedly good — people who made ordinary decisions, in situations where those decisions were locally rational and globally produced a structure that none of them wanted. Villains and the utterly evil exist, unfortunately, in great numbers — but they too are merely cogs in the gigantic machine, able to be as they are because the structures and rules are perfect for them and people of their kind. They did not create these structures — but they take an active part in developing them further in a way that suits them. That is the real strength of the Megamachine: it needs no conspiracy. It needs only structures and rules that reward evil — and people who make use of both — some with conviction and others with a bad conscience.
Understanding this is no relativisation of personal guilt. Yet naming it and fighting it achieves nothing. The precondition for any attempt to change something is an understanding of the structures and rules. Whoever does not understand the connections and tries to fight is tilting at windmills and can only lose. Whoever understands the structures and rules at least has a chance.