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Episode 8: George Jepson, 'Demystifying Automation'

George Jepson:

‘The most perfect manufacture is that which dispenses entirely with manual labour.’

Andrew Ure, 
The Philosophy of Manufactures

In 1834, following a series of factory surveys that he conducted across the north and Midlands of England, Charles Babbage published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, a book that aimed to outline in plain terms what he understood to be a new, rational and ‘scientific’ mode of industrial production. It opens as follows: ‘The object of the present volume is to point out the effects and the advantages which arise from the use of tools and machines; – to endeavour to classify their mode of action; – and to trace both the causes and the consequences of applying machinery to supersede the skill and power of the human arm.’ From the very first line of the text, the author’s intention is clear: to extol the virtues of the machine. Set against the inefficient ‘making’ of 18th-century cottage or homesteading industries, Babbage thus aims to explicitly show how such forms of production can be displaced by mechanisation and overcome by the imposition of a rigorous division of labour that was being implemented in the mills and factories of Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire at the time.

It is notable that as the son of a wealthy banker from whom he received a salary, Babbage’s base material needs were rarely a concern. His perception of the value that could be produced by the actions of human labour therefore skewed towards the wealth that was generated by the owners of the means of production, rather than the commodified forms labour that Marx understood would be consumed by industrial machines. In fact, Babbage amassed ‘early patronage…from an emerging group of businessmen and amateur astronomers who sought to economise the labour of “celestial observation” while dividing it from the ‘glory’ of discovery that they sought for themselves’. This new economy of labour had numerous functions for both himself and his patrons, but at its core was the separation of labour from its products; of the work of early human computers from the results of their calculations. Intentionally splitting wage-labour from its output in this way enabled the labouring body to be seen as commensurable to the machine itself, which meant that collective labour, for Babbage, was considered a mere mechanical element of the production process. As such, it was ripe for rational improvement like any other, whether in the calculation of astronomical tables or the spinning of cotton. 

According to David Grier, the ‘story of organised scientific computation shares three themes with the history of labour and the factory: the division of labour, the idea of mass production and the development of professional managers’. These concurrencies neatly map onto the almost seamless process by which Babbage’s early computational logic was translated into the paradigmatic spatial model of industrial production, within which human labour was considered to be a subject-less form of input for a machine that had begun to operate at a hitherto unprecedented scale by the middle of the 19th century: the factory itself.

By tracing the investigations and speculations that led up to and informed his writing of On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, it becomes clear that the mystification of labour in things, in objects and machines, was not an unintentional consequence of Babbage’s work. In fact, it has an entire history of its own, and the book is just one representative example of a broader project of effacement and concealment that had been initiated by an emergent class of elite merchants and entrepreneurs, buttressed by the economic liberalisation of the British state. This history is inextricably bound to the early combination and unionisation of the labour force, as well as to the constitution of the factory as a machine to crush political resistance and, in turn, to both the governmental and private actors whose sole function it was to obfuscate the value of human labour for profit.

In considering how Babbage reflected on and theorised a future division of labour on the factory floor, it is important to acknowledge the broader social, political and economic context within which his ideas emerged, consequential to which were the salon and society cultures of the intellectual movement in early 19th-century London. Babbage was a central actor in this scene, and his home in Marylebone served as the site for the exhibition of his early machines. It is where his Difference Engine, for example, was first shown alongside other mechanical intrigues of the period. From their inception, though, such marvels always included an element of performance, and so it comes as no real surprise that the operation of Babbage’s machine was invariably framed as an expression of its creator’s mastery over the calculative processes it carried out.

In this sense, what might now referred to as Public Relations was integral to Babbage’s presentation of his machines as the products of a single inventive will. Taking Karl Marx’s definition of machinery as the material embodiment of collective labour, however, such claims to individual credit appear not only false, but redolent of a political position that actively sought to devalue the mental and manual labour that Babbage was actually aiming to economise. In fact, it can be argued that the embodiment of labour in the machine is something that Babbage explicitly sought to make invisible and appropriate by, in Marx’s terms, casting workers as ‘merely conscious linkages’. As historian of science Simon Schaffer states: ‘To make machines look intelligent it was necessary too that the sources of their power, the labour force which surrounded them, be rendered invisible’. This was as true of the Difference Engine, the sole aim of which was to obfuscate the mental labour of the mathematicians whose calculations it sought to emulate, as it was of any machine of manufacture.

Critical to the design and exhibition of Babbage’s machines, therefore, was a mystification of labour that signified a major shift in the perceived relationship between work and production at the time. In the Grundrisse, Marx frames this transition as a movement towards labour being determined and regulated by the machine to which it is subservient, rather than the other way around. This idea, of course, was not without precedent, and Babbage’s outline of the necessary division of labour within the burgeoning factory system in On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures naturally took the work of Adam Smith as its most immediate antecedent.

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith had famously used the production process for metal pins to illustrate the relative efficiency of two different modes of production. In the first, a single workman produces a single pin in its entirety, completing each and every task independently. In the second, these actions are subdivided into 18 specialised but unskilled tasks, each of which is completed by a separate workman. By Smith’s reckoning, the subdivided labour of 10 men could produce 48,000 pins in a day, whereas the single workman could make ‘perhaps not one’. Babbage, in turn, took this contrast between the two processes in order to draw a distinction between ‘making’ and ‘manufacture’, and extended Smith’s methodology in order to further economise. According to what became known as the ‘Babbage Principle’, rather than simply dividing the necessary tasks of a given production process between a body of indistinguishable workers, the labour force should further be hierarchised as a means by which to categorise the financial value of its constituent parts.

For Babbage, ‘making’ referred to the production of a small number of objects by artisanal craftsman and, by extension, to the homesteading industries within which they would have traditionally worked. ‘Manufacture’, on the other hand, was the mechanised production of these objects at scale within an automated factory system. And so, while Babbage acknowledged the utility of the machine to the individual artisan, insofar as it could be used to make their labour more efficient, their becoming a manufacturer represented a different proposition entirely. Doing so was a question of scale and logistics, rather than individual improvement. He states:

‘If therefore, the maker of an article wish to become a manufacturer…he must attend to other principles besides those mechanical ones on which the successful execution of his work depends; and he must carefully arrange the whole system of his factory in such a manner, that the article he sells to the public may be produced at as a small a cost as possible.’

The Babbage Principle, then, represented a novel division of labour, the aim of which was to separate out the numerous roles of the individual ‘maker’ into a hierarchical payment structure that would minimise the overall cost of production. Underpinning this proposition was Babbage’s concern that highly skilled labourers would otherwise spend at least some of their time working on low-skill tasks while being paid in line with their experience and ability. Woven into his proposed division of labour, therefore, was the reduction of wages for low-skill processes and their distinction from high-skill tasks that required greater pay. Marx himself quotes Babbage in Capital: 

‘[By] dividing the work to be executed into different processes, each requiring different degrees of skill, or of force, the master manufacturer can purchase exactly that precise quantity of both which is necessary for each process. Whereas if the whole work were executed by one workman, that person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to execute the most laborious, of those operations into which the art is divided.’

In Babbage’s system, the fundamental method of economisation was thus the creation of a hierarchy of labour that was engendered by pay grades. Within this structure, each labourer was only as valuable as their skill set, and thus became a purchasable asset. This, in turn, enabled the creation of a collective, unskilled labour force, the tasks of which were repetitive and the wages of which could increasingly be lowered as more and more of its work was undertaken by the machine. Unsurprisingly, this expanding, unskilled labour force has, since the advent of the Babbage Principle, become the single largest component of any mode of production. Babbage, then, seemingly anticipated Marx’s ‘collective worker’, ‘the item of machinery specifically characteristic of the manufacturing period’ that he went on to define in detail 30 years later:

‘Formed out of the combination of a number of individual specialised workers…the collective worker now possesses all the qualities necessary for production in an equal degree of excellence, and expends them in the most economical way by exclusively employing all his organs, individualised in particular workers or groups of workers, in performing their special functions.’

Both thinkers shared a clear understanding of the value (and cost) of human labour, as well as the ways in which machines could be inserted into the production chain to augment and often replace it. The discrepancy between the two, however, lies in the value that each sought to claim for labour and the humanity of those who conduct it. Marx’s definition of the commodity saw it as containing the value of the labour by which it was formed, which is purchased from the worker, while Babbage saw it as consquence of the intelligent design and organisation of the production process itself, within which labour is merely another necessary capital expenditure.

This mystification and obfuscation of the value of labour is also evident in Babbage’s earlier work on the Difference Engine, which attempted to economise the means of production through the direct replacement of labour (in this case intellectual) by intelligent machines. Prior to what is perhaps his most famous invention, work calculating algebraic equations had been conducted by low-status mathematicians known as ‘computers’ who were tasked with turning the inputs of a given equation into outputs in order to prove or disprove them. Here the translation of human labour, both in name and in form, into machine is as explicit as in any of his work.

A key influence on the development of Babbage’s machine was Gaspard de Prony, a French engineer who had determined his own hierarchy of aptitudes for the purposes of intellectual production in late 18th-century France. In 1791, Prony had been commissioned by the Revolutionary Government to produce a new set of logarithmic tables that could be converted to the metric system, a process that involved the computation of a staggeringly large quantity of numbers. Inspired too by The Wealth of Nations, he set about organising a team of ‘computers’ to ‘manufacture logarithms as easily as one manufactures pins’. The scheme was driven by a large workforce of labourers, each of whom would conduct elementary calculations (perhaps prefiguring the proletarian workers who would later come to populate the industrial factory) while overseen by a small group of ‘comparers’. At the apex of the hierarchy of labour sat three or four academic mathematicians whose role was to produce algorithms that were simple enough in structure and form to be understood and tested by the ‘calculators’.

Prony succeeded in his endeavour by economising the pay-scale of his workforce, hierarchising the labour it conducted and thus streamlining the cost of the overall project by reducing the quantity of skilled labour required to complete it. Babbage evidently saw this as the ideal model of large-scale calculation and, with his Difference Engine, he set about automating it so as to do away with the need for a workforce of unskilled mathematicians altogether. The skilled process of production was, by this impetus, rendered into one that primarily relied on the mechanical conversion of inputs into outputs, whether in the resolution of mathematical equations or in the transformation of raw material into commodities. The Difference Engine, in this context, can therefore be seen as representative not only of the Smithian division of labour, but also the Babbagian hierarchisation of it that sought to maximise the number of simple functions in a given process and minimise the number of complex ones. By this logic, the factory itself would come to increasingly resemble Babbage’s machine.

In the second part of On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, the scope of Babbage’s analysis expands from the scale of the commodity to the scale of the factory as he sets about prescribing a method of observing manufactories. This instructional tract of the book takes the form of a handbook of inquiries, within which the author lists a series of pertinent questions that the factory surveyor should use to conduct their research. For Babbage, an inquiry into both the function of machines and their relationship to one another is essential in deducing the most economical division of labour for a given production process. ‘The economical principles which regulate the application of machinery, and which govern the interior of all our great factories’, he states, ‘are quite as essential to the prosperity of a great commercial country as are those mechanical principles.’

By stressing the importance of the relationship between discrete machines, each of which should, in an ideal scenario, represent the essential distillation of a single operation within a given process of production and be determined by an efficient division of labour, Babbage frames the factory building as the vehicle that governs their effective co-ordination. As a consequence, he also asserts the agency of the machine in discerning its effective spatial organisation. In its concatenation of a series of single ‘instruments’ that can be ‘set in motion by a single engine, [the factory itself thus] constitutes…a machine’ and begins to function secondarily as a lucid and precise ‘synthesis of the division of labour’. Once it is in operation, new opportunities for economisation also present themselves, which then catalyses the production of new machines that can improve the efficiency of ever more minute elements of the chain of production. This process is seemingly exponential, and perpetually tightens its grasp around the rhythm of labour as it unfolds.

The first example of this constitution of the factory as a machine can be found at John and Thomas Lombe’s silk spinning mill in Derby, where engineer George Sorocold succeeded in using mechanised waterpower to drive a large-scale production process in 1717. The mill drew power from a single, vast water wheel, which was directly connected to a horizontal shaft that ran through the basement of the building and in turn drove a set of vertical shafts running up through the five floors of the timber-framed structure. Structural form, here, is inseparably bound to the distribution of power, and so determines an organisational system within which ‘the space on each floor is dedicated to a single process, and each machine articulates a fragment of floor space for itself and its attendant worker’. As such, the Lombes’ mill can be understood as a harbinger of the internal logic of factory design that would later come to spread across northern England from the middle of the 18th century onwards. In its direct application of developments in both machine technology and the division of labour, the factory at this time thus became ‘a mode of production, a diagram of functional relationships in space’ onto which hierarchies such as the pyramidal structure of mill owner, floor supervisor and wage labourer could be directly mapped.

At Boulton and Watt’s Soho Foundry in Birmingham (1765–1795), a sophisticated use of this spatial division in the economisation of production can be identified. Here, however, the space of the factory is structured by the machine itself, rather than the source of its power. Built to satisfy a necessity to expand the scale of the company’s earlier site, which had been engaged with the manufacture of smaller products, the Soho Foundry was the first specialised engine-building facility in the world; a machine for making machines. In a sketch that James Watt Jr sent to his father in September of 1795, it is evident that the formal constitution of the building’s floorplan was dictated by the scale of the equipment that it housed and designed to minimise the unnecessary movement of both labour and materials. The proximity of the furnaces to one another was based on Watt Jr’s assumptions about how close a labourer could work to the intense heat without passing out, while the arrangement of the stoves situated across from them was intended to stop castings being worked on from contamination by the dry sand stored in the central section of the building. This organisation of space around the machine, while still in its early stages at the Soho Foundry, would soon become the sole governing logic of the factory.

In 1804, scarcely ten years after Boulton and Watt had established their factory for making machines, Joseph Marie Jacquard finalised the designs of his eponymous loom. While Jacquard’s aim was to economise textile production by mechanising the process of weaving complex patterns into cloth, Babbage saw in the device an opportunity to streamline the labour required to operate his own computational machines. Using a modified version of Jacquard’s punch cards, which controlled the operations of the loom, he was able to automate an essential (and expensive) part of the process of solving mathematical equations: the storage of data.

If Gaspard de Prony had previously determined a mechanism for the social division of a labour force, Jacquard provided the means by which its memory could be retained within the machine itself. His gridded punch cards enabled information to be repetitively converted into a product, whether that be the solution to a mathematical equation or an intricately woven tapestry. As a consequence of this development, Babbage’s collaborator and editor, Ada Lovelace, lamented: ‘the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves’.  Essential to both machines was the rationalisation and automation of computing, which turned formerly ‘creative’ processes of calculation and production into simple, numerical tasks in order to satisfy the economic desire for more efficient processes of production.

Following the integration of Jacquard’s ‘power looms’ into the structural form of the mill at the end of the 18th century and the consequent fusion of architecture and machine that this process catalysed, the development of iron framing allowed for an exponential increase in the size and, by extension, the productive power of these expanding sites of production. Moreover, the flexibility and strength of iron permitted the construction of ever more articulate factory-machines. At Shrewsbury Flax Mill, for example, its internal cast-iron columns had split-head capitals that allowed the central drive shaft to pass directly through the building’s structural framework.

At Jedediah Strutt’s Belper Mill, north of Derby, another instance of this transference of the logics of machine design into architectural form can be found. Following a fire in 1803 that consumed the original timber building, Strutt’s son William drew up plans for a cast-iron framework that would address both the prevalence of fire in dusty wooden cotton mills and further unify the structure of the factory with the source of its power. In this case, a monumental water wheel serves as the locus around which the entire building is centred in an apparent reference to, if not a direct reproduction of, the internal form of Babbage’s calculating machines and the models through which they were portrayed. The shared diagrammatic expression of these machines of different scales testifies that their common form is one of pattern, rather than simply figuration.

Lovelace’s comparison of Babbage’s Difference Engine to Jacquard’s loom demonstrates that the constitution of the machine at this point in time was open to reimagination in terms of both scale and function. In moving away from a closed, hermetic form and towards an expression as an open, dynamic pattern, the embodiment of the machine in the exponential, almost modular expansion of the factory system itself becomes clear. This signified a radical shift in the understanding of the factory in early 19th-century England. No longer fixed, it was now ‘a moving, adjustable object, with a need for empirical control analogous to those on machines’. Strutt’s mill thus represents the crescendo of the particular feats of engineering by which the machine dreams of early industrialists were consolidated into single, functional entities that could be distilled into replicable models.

The transition from the 18th to the 19th century, then, ushered in a mode of systematised design that would enable the factory to be reproduced in quantity and expanded in scale using a model of mass production, as well as labour and resource mobilisation, the likes of which had not been seen since the massive networks of production and exchange that were established by Cistercian monks across Europe throughout the Middle Ages. That this model of reproduction (which relied on the development of a typology that could be ‘speedily copied in all directions with exceedingly slight modification’ according to technical, climactic or cultural needs) was understood as the most efficient of its day is therefore hardly surprising, in hindsight. In considering its manifestation in architecture, the work of engineer William Fairbairn, who translated Babbage’s ideas about the form and organisation of the machine into the structural frames of factory buildings, provides a paradigmatic window into the research methods and ideological underpinnings of the project of industrial rationalisation as a whole.

Like Babbage, Fairbairn understood the importance of engineering and mathematics to the economisation of production, and the relationship between the two men, evident in their written correspondence, was clearly one of admiration. In a letter dated 27 July 1855, Fairbairn gushes that the world should consider itself indebted to Babbage for the momentous changes that his machines could effect on the techniques of mechanical construction, were it not for the English government perpetually stripping funding from his research. It is of no small significance, however, that Fairbairn and Babbage were both, at the time, millionaires by industry and inheritance respectively.

Their shared political and economic position was therefore grounded in what amounted to a series of anti-unionist, small-state liberal ideals, the fundamental basis of which was a free market.

Apparent here is the blatant contradiction between Fairbairn and Babbage’s contempt for state intervention and their desire to have their own works and research continually funded ‘at the public expense’. To this end, on losing the financial support of the English government following a series of unsuccessful trials of his Difference Engine (Babbage, for his part, claimed that the machine was simply too advanced to be assessed or verified by contemporaneous technologies), Fairbairn wrote a letter of support to parliament on his behalf. In it, he expressed not only what he believed to be the immense scientific significance of Babbage’s work, but also blamed his failings on an unnamed assistant, who apparently undermined the inventor’s research by stealing his tools, and requested full, unadulterated state funding for the development and completion of his Difference Engine.

Written just shy of 20 years after the publication of On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Fairbairn’s letter was significant in that it attempted not only to outline the public import of Babbage’s work (insofar as it attempted to directly lobby the state to fund further experiments into the design and construction of his machines), but furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, to advocate for the pivotal leaps in technological sophistication and efficiency that could be made by combining this crucial research with his own structural proposals for the spaces of both domestic and colonial production.

Extending the lineage of Strutt’s iron-framed mill, built in 1804, Fairbairn’s designs for the Oriental Spinning and Weaving Company in Bombay (1858), as well as for the structural organisation and distribution of machines throughout Titus Salt’s mill complex at Saltaire, embody a series of novel social and economic concerns for the 19th-century mill owner. First, that colonial enterprise could provide a new terrain (and new bodies) upon which experiments in manufacture could be conducted and from which resources and minerals could be extracted at a hitherto unprecedented scale. Second, that the developing spatial sophistication of the division of labour could enable the modular expansion of their facilities (a 350- by 300-foot, single-storey shed was built in Bombay, and at Saltaire the mill was so large that it necessitated the construction of an entire town to house its 3,000-strong workforce). And third, that state support, colonisation and industrialisation could be fundamentally bound by private enterprise, a notion often latent in the self-aggrandising rhetoric of both Babbage and Fairbairn.

The urgent desire of both men to increase the capacity and scale of production across industrial England and its colonies did not, however, leave them blind to its human consequences. Rather, the two were acutely aware of the negative potential for radical social change that such technological developments engendered, and therefore sought instead to use their writings on machine design to entrench a particularly ideological and detached reading of the likely effects of industrialisation. This often contradictory relationship between the typical 19th-century liberal and the possible social consequences of their ideals emerges lucidly within Fairbairn’s work:

‘It is not for me to offer an opinion on the effects of these changes on the whole of our industrial population…[They have] altered the domestic habits of the people, and concentrated within large and substantial buildings great numbers of people employed in the different processes of manufacture, which, formerly distributed over a large surface of country, are now concentrated under one roof.’

While his observations here are objectively true, Fairbairn’s contention that it is not his place to opine on the conditions of labour that were produced as a direct result of his work alongside Babbage in establishing a new paradigm for the factory system (which ultimately proved fundamental to its potency as a driving force of economic and social change) comes across as particularly disingenuous. His reluctance to give an opinion, speaks volumes about his ideological convictions, particularly when viewed in the light of his designs for Bombay and the effect that they had in entrenching a new, rational logic of production across Britain’s colonies. After all, it was arguably as a direct result of this work that the colonised labour force were tethered to, and came to materially rely upon, the fortunes of British industry.

The Oriental Spinning and Weaving Company mill was the first industrial site to be established in British-ruled India, and comprised a complex framework of spatial divisions into which the labourer could be plugged as a passive operator. Fairbairn’s blueprint for the building, which had been developed and tested domestically during the 18th and early 19th century, was subsequently reproduced elsewhere across the city by different companies, and operated as a model of wealth extraction that was used to both affirm and expand the colonial project. Its single-story structure, considered to be the simplest mechanism by which to simultaneously divide, surveil and therefore control the labour force, was also a blunt expression of Britain’s power to seize vast plots of land for the purposes of private enterprise. This horizontal spatial system, which was untenable domestically due to the exorbitant price of land in England, both improved the efficiency of the production process and undermined the workers’ capacity for political ‘combination’ by creating a flattened environment in which they could more easily be observed. As a consequence, Fairbairn’s designs can, to a certain extent, be held responsible for further entrenching the subservience of labour to the individual machines to which it was now inseparably bound.

Babbage, too, acknowledged the efficacy of architecture in addressing the possibility of workers’ resistance to the labour conditions of the burgeoning factory system. In a notable chapter of On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures titled ‘On the Cause and Consequences of Large Factories’, he explicitly outlines the utility of the factory itself in suppressing the collective demands of its workers. In setting out the reasons that cause sites of production to relocate (which he acknowledges sometimes occurs simply due to a given location’s inadequacy to support the industrial aims of its occupier), emphasis is placed on the labour force’s propensity to effect change:

‘[In] refusing the reasonable reduction of wages, or opposing the introduction of some kind of improved machinery or process…during the dispute, another spot [will] in great measure [supply] their place in the market. Any violence used by the workmen against the property of their masters, and any unreasonable combination on their part, is almost sure thus to be injurious to themselves.’

An implicit consequence of this is the necessity for surplus labour that can be used to offset any ‘unreasonable combination’ of workers. Their resistance, he states, will only give cause for factory owners to mete out justice by removing them from the labour force altogether. What remains unacknowledged in this passage, however, as focus is given to the organisational efficiency of machinery and the economisation that it makes possible, are the conditions of the workers themselves, which were, at the time, in steep decline as a result of mechanisation. It therefore becomes clear that for Babbage, the worker was merely a single, replaceable element in the chain of production. In the words of Marx: ‘machinery inserts itself to replace labour only where there is an overflow of the labour powers. Only in the imagination of economists does it leap to the aid of the individual worker.’

If the partial history outlined here is one of the mystification of the value of labour by the machine, then in the figure of Babbage we find a prototype of the modern tech entrepreneur whose work, despite his repeated championing of free enterprise, was centrally supported by state funding. Contrary to the arguments that Babbage often made in support of economic liberalisation, the results of his efforts actually evidence the critical role that the state played, and continues to play, in the construction of both a market for work and a social conception of intellectual property that buttresses a system within which the value of labour is obscured, if not claimed directly, by owners of the means of production. It is little wonder, then, that in Babbage’s On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures Marx found essentially a handbook on how best to produce and accumulate surplus value.

By reflecting on the broader intellectual and cultural context of the early 19th century, we can discern an idea of the components that are necessary to foment a technological revolution, as well as the subsequent ways in which they come to be performed and represented in popular culture. It is a history that offers a lens through which to view the fundamentality of labour to so-called intellectual revolutions and the multiform ways in which its value is mystified for both political and economic ends. By extension, it also offers an understanding of that which is necessary to redress the imbalance between the true value of labour and its appropriation in the form of industrial and social machines. In a contemporary cultural climate that relentlessly, if not blindly, champions innovation, the words of John Stuart Mill still ring true: ‘it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes’.