What myths of progress do you see shaping our world today, and how might we challenge them?
In his evocative book, The End of the Megamachine, A brief history of a failing civilization, historian, philosopher, and artist, Fabian Scheidler unveils a chilling framework for understanding civilization’s apparatus for coordination and operation: the Megamachine. This concept, first articulated by Lewis Mumford (Technics and Civilization), describes a 5,000-year-old militarized system of human organization, where people function as cogs in a metaphorical, mechanical machine driven by extraction, militarized states, vast capital accumulation, and general regimented life. Scheidler’s journey to this thesis is as compelling as the concept itself.
Scheidler’s background blends rigorous academic inquiry with intellectual activism and art. His work as a journalist and co-founder of the independent media platform Kontext TV allowed him to provide context on various global crises—climate collapse, economic inequality, and endless wars—that are all interconnected - the Megamachine and Civlization. These threads converged in his writing of The End of the Megamachine as a book born from a need to trace the historical roots of today’s chaos. Scheidler conceived the book as a narrative synthesis, weaving together insights from anthropology, history, literature, and sociology to expose the Megamachine’s enduring grip and its possible end.
The Megamachine, as Scheidler and Mumford describe, emerged with the first centralized states in Mesopotamia, where rulers organized human bodies into hierarchical roles—soldiers, laborers, bureaucrats—to extract resources and amass wealth. From ancient empires to modern corporations and financialization, the Megamachine thrives on standardization, dehumanization, and control, reducing people to interchangeable parts in a relentless engine of growth that is now considered an existential threat to the biosphere.
This apparatus, sustained by violence and coercion, is cloaked in myths of progress and order - such as in the United States with Manifest Destiny and today in technoutopianism. Philosophers, managers, and cultural institutions—business, education, religion—propagate various sophistications such as aesthetics, talent, and spirituality, thereby normalizing exploitation and extraction as inevitable progress.
Near the beginning of the book, Schneider discusses Dante’s Inferno, using its vivid imagery to frame the collective trauma inflicted by this system. Dante’s Hell mirrors the psychological toll of living within the Megamachine: alienation, despair, and a loss of agency and connection to nature. Interestingly, by Dante’s time in the 14th century, the rediscovery of nature—through early scientific thought and a renewed appreciation for the physical world—offered a counterpoint, yet, this rediscovery was double-edged. While it sparked curiosity and creativity, it also fueled the Megamachine’s next phase in industrial capitalism and reductionism as nature became a resource to be quantified and exploited as a commodity. Psychologically, the Megamachine thrives on fracturing human connections into transactions and conflicts—to each other and the Earth—fostering a sense of isolation that perpetuates compliance through rewards. Mumford called this the “Magnificent Bribe” to distract and incentivize people into perpetuating exploitation and their own degradation through diminished freedom, transactional-quantified human relationships, and loss of connection to nature. Socially, it enforces hierarchies that pit groups against one another, ensuring the system’s stability through division, where human beings rendered by this system are in a permanent state of war.
Scheidler’s analysis is not merely diagnostic; it’s a call to awareness. The Megamachine’s myths—of inevitable progress, of technology as salvation—obscure its destructiveness. By naming it and providing an in-depth explanation, Scheidler invites us to imagine alternatives. His work suggests that understanding this system’s historical and psychological roots is the first step toward liberation from the Megamachine that is likely ending.
Fabian Scheidler studied history and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and theatre directing at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. He works and lives in Berlin as a writer for print media, television, theatre and opera. He’s been published on Radio France, Le Monde Diplomatique, Berliner Zeitung, Der Freitag, Taz, Die Tageszeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Wiener Zeitung, The Nation, Jacobin, New Left Review, The Progressive, Common Dreams, Les Terrestres and many others. In 2015, his book “The End of the Megamachine was published. In 2019, he co-edited “Der Kampf um globale Gerechtigkeit” (“The Struggle for Global Justice”), conversations with Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Immanuel Wallersein, Vandana Shiva et al. He also works as a visual artist, with numerous exhibitions of his “photosyntheses“. In spring 2021, his book “The Stuff We Are Made of. Rethinking Nature and Society” was published in German. In the same year, he released his essay “The Mental Field. Theatre Essentials”.
Layne Hartsell, USA (雷恩∙哈特塞尔 - 마이클 레인 핫셀), serves as a board member of the editorial department at Korea IT Times and is a research professor specializing in the 3E fields—Energy, Economy, and Environment. He is currently active at the Asian Institute and the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. His previous roles include assistant professor in the Department of Convergence Studies at Sookmyung Women's University, researcher at the Asian Women's Information Centre, researcher at the Advanced Institute of Nanotechnology at Sungkyunkwan University, lecturer in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics at the Siriraj Medical Centre at Mahidol University, and researcher at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville.
You can find the Korean version of this article here.
