Keep It Small, Stupid
Reading a cranky eco-socialist about the scale of technology and the size of cities
One of the best rejoinders to techno-criticism is that so much of that critical writing is done on computers and posted on social media. Perhaps the best criticism is never read because it is only written on hand-made paper or scraps of bark! But Murray Bookchin, a prominent figure in the 20th century eco-socialist left wing, managed to commit enough of his best critiques of technology to durable media for us to read them now. His essay compilation Toward An Ecological Society is an incisive summary of his thinking about the relationship of human to nature, technology, and the city.
As a consistent communist, Bookchin abjures hierarchy and domination in all its forms. Far from disbelieving the Marxist drive for worker control of production, he instead argues that it does not go nearly far enough. Instead, he sees in the sheer scale of industrial production yet another master which is capable of domination. Even were the means of production truly owned by the workers, the apparatus which they operated would only manage to re-enact the domination of the capitalists who ran it before. He said "To state the issue bluntly: can present-day technics remain substantially the way it is while the men and women who operate it are expected to undergo significant transformation as human beings?" (117)
Bookchin's critique is specific: his problem is not with technology, but with big technology. Put another way: technology that is the right size—in his definition, technology "which people could comprehend and directly manage by themselves" (92) —can be a liberating, not a subjugating force. Technology that goes beyond the degree to which an ordinary person could comprehend and directly manage must by necessity introduce experts and managers: industrial bureaucrats, political technocrats, and the like. These "bosses" can therefore govern the satisfaction of an ordinary person's material needs because they exert control over these suprahuman technologies.
This critique seems extreme, and it is. After all, is all technology really exploitative, inflected with hidden forces of domination, authoritarian by definition? We can certainly think of some examples of technology run amok, where its moral inflection is clearly negative: mass surveillance, or social control via censorship, for example. But Bookchin's critique is far more wide-reaching: it touches even upon seemingly neutral technologies, as long as they were large enough in scale, even if those technologies were administered anarchically or by workers' collectives. By necessity, any kind of supra-human scale to technology invites tyranny, whether the mindless tyranny of the algorithm or the intentional subjugation of workers by technology which alienates them from their craft.
This argument has clear forebears in anarchism, but its critique is repeated often as well by the dissident right, who see in "Big Tech" instruments for ideological domination. In fact, much of the character and tenor of Bookchin's description of his utopian alternate, an eco-socialist future with technology at just the right scale, would rhyme well with the dreams of the yeoman-style localist conservatism of the Anglosphere:
The means by which we acquire the most fundamental necessities of life would cease to be an awesome engineering mystery that invites legends of the unearthly to compensate for our lack of control over technology and society. They would be restored to the everyday world of the familiar, of the oikos, like the traditional tools of the craftsman. Selfhood would be redefined in new dimensions of self-activity, self-management, and self-realization because the technical apparatus so essential to the perpetuation of life—and today, so instrumental in its destruction—would form a comprehensible area in which people could directly manage society. The self would find a new material and existential expression in productive as well as social activity. (93)
He also sees a humanizing and grounding influence in the craft needed to create, operate, and maintain these small-scale technologies. Working on projects of too large a scale, that pull the craftsman both away from the concerns of his community and from the ecological terrain which formerly made that technology possible, can spiritually malform the worker, transforming him into an agent of the soft, invisible domination that so easily slips into technology as it scales.
This is a critique of industrialization; of the process by which craft industries are wrested upward by the gravitational pull of markets into cheaper, more modular, more repeatable processes for producing goods and services. By scaling upward, the craftsman becomes a manager, a technical bureaucrat, a cog in a machine. Bookchin worries about the transformation of humans into industrial units of production, a shadow he sees hiding behind the concept of self-management. He sees in that phrase a cruel inversion: that self-management, in promoting the efficient operation of administrative strategies by a 'self' in service of a larger, industrial goal, has lost something important: the autonomous self. Bookchin wants self-management and self-improvement to be oriented around the achievement of craft in service of self-liberation by individual effort. Where the industrialist sees human self-improvement as a means to an end for the more perfect functioning of an industrial apparatus, the craftsman sees it as a means to liberate himself and his society from the dominating influence of supra-human technology, giving him individual control over the activities and technologies that give him daily sustenance.
In a later essay, Bookchin turns this two-part critique of scale and its tendency to interpret human activities as industrial operations onto the home and the city. He has nothing but derision for 20th-century architectural theorists—Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright—who all analogized homes or cities as machines or sites of industry. Fuller's 'spaceship earth', Le Corbusier's ''a house is a machine for living in", and Frank Lloyd Wright's ‘Usonian Automatic’ homes are anathema to Bookchin. Those theorists’ dreams of homes and cities operating with mechanical efficiency and rational control transform dwelling into factory, and community into bureaucracy. Once again, his critiques of this industrial modernism are squarely rooted in the left, but their tone and affect are ones found also in great supply in the localist right wing. Here, Bookchin begins by quoting Bucky Fuller, although he cannot resist slipping in a parenthetical:
"Housing is an energetic environment-controlling mechanism. Thinking correctly of all housing as machinery (one is tempted to ask, not as home or community? — M.B.) we begin to realize the complete continuity of interrelationship of such technological evolution as that of the home bedroom into the railway sleeping car, into the automobile with seat-to-bed conversions, into the filling-station toilets, which are accessories of the parlour-on-wheels; the trailer, the motels, hotels, and ocean liners.” (158)
In response, he notes that, in this approach to the home:
Portability replaces community and mobility a sense of rootedness and place. The individual becomes a camper who belongs everywhere—and nowhere. Perhaps more appropriately, Fullerian social theory envisions the individual as an astronaut who pilots the earth as a mechanical spaceship. (158)
Bookchin also turns his critique of mechanization and industrialization from the human and the home to the city at large. Here again, his critique is not of urbanism or cities per se but of the megalopolis. He writes that modern urbanism is too large and is crassly utilitarian; that its scale is supra-human and designed like a machine for the mechanical workings of a rational organization rather than for the heart and life of a polis. Where his standard for right-scaled technology was that which an ordinary person could comprehend, his standard for right-scaled urbanism was that which an ordinary citizen could comprehend. Here he reaches back to Aristotle, who wrote that the polis should be limited to whatever size (1) suffices for the purposes of life, and (2) can be taken in at a single view. A city larger than this, Bookchin writes, ceases to become a community and instead becomes a political territory sufficient only for the purposes of authoritarian and bureaucratic managers.
Aristotle's influence on Bookchin's thinking continues. Bookchin's antagonists in urban theory, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, at times called the city a tool, a logistical device, or an ideal machine. Aristotle by contrast thought of the city as a way of life; that a city should be judged not by size, population, or logistical efficiency, but by how well it enabled its citizens "to live temperately and liberally in the enjoyment of leisure." But in this drive for logistical efficiency, Bookchin saw echoes of hierarchy and domination. Two of the most famous 'modern' urban design and renewal projects, the Haussmannization of Paris and L'Enfant's master plan for Washington, D.C., were designed not only with an idea toward rational planning and design, but were explicitly laid out to lay the city bare to the gaze of law. Paris was gutted and reformed in part to make the regular riots that convulsed its crooked streets more spatially difficult to organize and maintain. D.C. was designed as a political capital with the same proactive concerns. To make a city legible and translucent to outside control and monitoring was to make it a territory of domination and hierarchy in Bookchin's eyes; it was to transform it into a supra-human machine for the storage and disposition of humans, not a polis for the cultivation of citizens.
The modern city can very easily grow so far removed from the human scale (and human control) that it becomes impossible to shelter any kind of individuality in its vastness. Even the very geometry and ornament of modern megacities instill a powerlessness and helplessness in the ordinary individual. These monuments are designed and styled to resemble not works of men, but of institutions. "Confronted every day by this architectural nullity, the urban dweller finds no monarch against whom she or he can rebel, no gods to defy, no priests and courtiers to overthrow. There is nothing, in fact, but an interminable bureaucratic nexus that traps the individual in an impersonal skein of agencies and corporations." (146)
Bookchin's chimeric critiques of large-scale technology and the supra-human city read deeper meaning into each other. As a communitarian, he worried that its scale could pull humans away from each other. As an ecologist, he worried that its scale could pull us away from nature. Nature acquires a unique twist in Bookchin's work. He insists that, whether we think it or not, we are never 'disembedded' from nature, even in the tallest and most forbidding modern building, or even when operating the most alienating technical apparatus. For him, the only difference is what kind of nature we are embedded in: organic or inorganic, ecological or physical, real or mythic, whole or one-sided, subjectivized or mindless. He despised the way the modern city blotted out the horizon, hermetically sealing the inhabitant from the reality of his own surroundings. And he worried that technology that obviated the very real ways in which power, food, and resources (although he hated describing nature’s bounty as ‘resources’) come from nature would alienate us still further. He pushed for a specifically ecological relationship with nature; one in which the demands of our human-scaled technology would put us in context with nature; that dependence on sun, wind, soil, vegetation, and animals would re-wire our relationship with the natural world.
He writes movingly and poetically about re-enchanting local-scaled technologies, like small-scale wind and solar farms, that he believes should arouse an aesthetic reflection in us—the shimmer of sunlight on a solar panel, or the whirring of a small wind turbine. These technologies differentiate themselves by their low-scalability; a few solar panels or a small turbine is certainly enough to power the day-to-day activities of a single household. He argues we have ignored them: "Our minds have shut out these responses and denied them to our spirit because the conventional sounds and imagery of technology are the ear-splitting clatter of an assembly line and the eye-searing flames of a foundry. This is a form of self-denial with a vengeance." (94)
What is striking is how far his vision of the ecological society seems from coming true. To be certain, there are mystics and malcontents aplenty who doubtless live a kind of embedded life, subject to the vagaries of nature and in daily contact with its rhythms (and blues). But for those of us closer to the median, what might the rediscovery of an ecological society look like? Here, Bookchin strikes a hopeful note for even feeble attempts at self-determination. In the paltry, seemingly insignificant acts like a community garden, neighborhood solar array, local windmill, or mutual aid society Bookchin saw initiatives by ordinarily passive communities to reclaim control over the material conditions of their lives. Even if these alternate forms do not replace their industrial counterparts, he saw them as technical symbols of a resurgence of self-hood and the growth of a tradition of competence that is ordinarily foreign to a 'client citizenry.' (130) Like so many things, it may be that he envisioned the accumulation of these small motions forming an inertial tug on our technical and civic culture. It certainly lowers the stakes for us.
I read this essay collection in 2017 or 2018 as a self-assigned reading as part of my graduate studies. Upon reviewing my notes about the book, I realize now how key concepts in Bookchin's writing have turned up in my writing even this year. I will call your attention to a few of them to illustrate the often alchemical ways concepts like these can branch out into other realms of thought.
One obvious reference is the three-part series I began with on Equilibrium. In Part Two, the concept of legibility to outside control, for Bookchin an urban theory regarding anti-anarchist city planning, came up in a discussion of polycultural agriculture and the tendency of the industrial farmer to make decisions about planting on the basis of how easy it would be to deploy 'supra-human' technologies like chemical fertilizers and pesticides or mechanized planting and harvesting. The weeds and pests anathema to the industrial farmer are the anarchist rioters Georges-Eugène Haussmann sought to design out of existence in Paris, to mixed results.
Also in Part Two, I theorize that the accumulation of many small interventions can, in the right 'soil', yield a positive equilibrium, a virtuous cycle. Perhaps this is what Bookchin intended by encouraging his readers not to despair of the relative unimportance of their community garden.
And in an essay on industrialized war, I call the hyper-specialization of humans into efficient war-fighting machines a kind of mechanization of the human:
We are so obsessed with efficiency and effectiveness that we see these machines–war, education, health–and can only see what cogs and gears are missing. We then fashion pieces to fit out of the clay of our fellow humans, tune their functioning for efficiency with ever-more-precise training regimens, not realizing that the perfect piece, could it be found to fit, would not be a human at all but a machine too.
Bookchin would extend my critique of the mechanization of the human. I was only claiming that operating a war machine on too large a scale can mal-adapt the human to living humanely. Bookchin might claim that operating any machine on too large a scale can have the same effect.
The critical insight that I have taken from this book, however, is not one I have written about publicly yet. It is that technology isn’t the problem; that it is the scale and ubiquity and comprehensibility of the technology that is the problem. It can alienate us from the means of sustaining our own life; it can isolate us from each other; it can degrade our skills and crafts and competencies; it can render us inert clients to the mechanical bureaucracies of city and technology. These critiques are plentiful elsewhere, but the insight about scale isn’t. It is that preoccupation with that scale does that stays with me even five years after reading, and that I hope stays with you.