"When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it - whether it be a factory or a government"
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The line lands like a cold joke with a blade inside it: the moment a system no longer needs us, it has stopped serving us. Chase’s phrasing treats “factory” and “government” as variations of the same contraption, built to process human lives into outputs - goods, votes, order, profit. The real target isn’t automation as technology; it’s automation as ideology, the dream that any complex human problem can be turned into a self-maintaining mechanism.
“Runs without human aid” sounds efficient until you notice what’s missing: consent, accountability, mercy, judgment. Chase is warning that when an institution can perpetuate itself without active human participation, it starts to confuse continuity with legitimacy. A factory that hums without workers becomes a monument to dispossession. A government that runs without citizens becomes something worse than inefficient: it becomes unanswerable. The provocation is that “scrap it” isn’t reformist language. It’s the language of junkyards and revolutions, implying that some systems aren’t fixable because their very smoothness is the problem.
Contextually, Chase writes from the mid-20th century, when bureaucracies scaled up, Cold War technocracy promised managerial solutions, and industrial automation began to feel like fate. His sentence compresses that unease into a simple diagnostic: if a system’s feedback loop no longer includes real people, it’s not “stable.” It’s a runaway machine. The wit is in the blunt equivalence - factory or government - forcing readers to admit how often we tolerate dehumanization when it wears the mask of efficiency.
“Runs without human aid” sounds efficient until you notice what’s missing: consent, accountability, mercy, judgment. Chase is warning that when an institution can perpetuate itself without active human participation, it starts to confuse continuity with legitimacy. A factory that hums without workers becomes a monument to dispossession. A government that runs without citizens becomes something worse than inefficient: it becomes unanswerable. The provocation is that “scrap it” isn’t reformist language. It’s the language of junkyards and revolutions, implying that some systems aren’t fixable because their very smoothness is the problem.
Contextually, Chase writes from the mid-20th century, when bureaucracies scaled up, Cold War technocracy promised managerial solutions, and industrial automation began to feel like fate. His sentence compresses that unease into a simple diagnostic: if a system’s feedback loop no longer includes real people, it’s not “stable.” It’s a runaway machine. The wit is in the blunt equivalence - factory or government - forcing readers to admit how often we tolerate dehumanization when it wears the mask of efficiency.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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