But one thing is already plain: in its new scientific form the Invisible Machine is no longer an agent for creating a visible heaven on earth in the form of the city. The autonomous machine, in its dual capacity as visible universal instrument and invisible object of collective worship, itself has become utopia, and the enlargement of its province has become the final end of life, as the guardians of our New Atlantis now conceive it.
The many genuine improvements that science and technics have introduced into every aspect of existence have been so notable that it is perhaps natural that its grateful beneficiaries should have overlooked the ominous social context in which these changes have taken place, as well as the heavy price we have already paid for them, and the still more forbidding price that is in prospect. Until the last generation it was possible to think of the various components of technology as additive. This meant that each new mechanical invention, each new scientific discovery, each new application to engineering, agriculture, or medicine, could be judged separately on its own performance, estimated eventually in terms of the human good accomplished, and diminished or eliminated if it did not in fact promote human welfare.
This belief has now proved an illusion. Though each new invention or discovery may respond to some general human need, or even awaken a fresh human potentiality, it immediately becomes part of an articulated totalitarian system that, on its own premises, has turned the machine into a god whose power must be increased, whose prosperity is essential to all existence, and whose operations, however irrational or compulsive, cannot be challenged, still less modified. The only group that has understood the dehumanizing threats of the Invisible Machine are the avant-garde artists, who have caricatured it by going to the opposite extreme of disorganization. Their calculated destructions and "happenings" symbolize total decontrol: the rejection of order, continuity, design, significance, and a total inversion of human values which turns criminals into saints and scrambled minds into sages.
In such anti-art, the dissolution of our entire civilization into randomness and entropy is prophetically symbolized. In their humorless deaf-and-dumb language, the avantgarde artists reach the same goal as scientists and technicians, but by a different route-both seek or at least welcome the displacement and the eventual elimination of man. In short, both the further affirmation of the mechanical utopia and its total rejection would beget dystopia. Wherever human salvation may lie, neither utopia nor dystopia, as now conceived, promises it.
- Lewis Mumford
