Technics and Civilization

The book that inaugurated the philosophy of technology as a discipline. Mumford's distinction between "polytechnics" (technologies oriented toward life and variety) and "monotechnics" (technologies oriented toward power and uniformity) is the ancestor of every critical argument Illich, Postman, and Franklin later made. For product people: the earliest and still sharpest analysis of how the tools we build shape the society that uses them — and how the causation runs both ways.