CONCEPT
Authoritarian Technics
Mumford's category for technologies whose defining feature is the subordination of individual purposes to systemic requirements — achieved in modern form through the distribution of genuine benefits that make subordination feel rational.
Authoritarian technics are not defined by their scale, though they tend toward large scale because their power derives from the coordination of many components into a single system. The defining feature is that they require their components to subordinate individual purposes to the system's requirements, and they achieve this subordination through a combination of genuine benefits and structural constraints that make the subordination feel rational — or, in the most sophisticated systems, invisible. The modern authoritarian technic differs from its ancient predecessor in one critical respect: it has accepted the democratic principle of distributing benefits widely, achieving through the magnificent bribe a hold over the whole community that no pharaoh could have attained.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The gig economy platform is the paradigmatic contemporary authoritarian technic, and its structural features are worth examining because they reveal what distinguishes authoritarian from democratic deployment with a clarity that more ambiguous cases obscure. The platform assigns tasks through an algorithm the