Mechanical work processes have grown immensely, both in number and in scope, and it is obvious that their automatism, controlled and watched as it is… - Friedrich Georg Jünger

From prophecies and visions we expect infallibility; that they come true with absolute certainty. But of a utopian tale we demand no more than a certain appearance of credibility [...] For what is entirely incredible and unlikely produces only boredom and discomfort; it is not worth bothering with.

When we study the apparatus and the human organization that have been created by our technology in step with its evolution, it becomes clear that they too depend on the mechanical concept of time, the only concept which can guarantee technical progress. How clockwork-like is not the whole order of modern civilization, how relentlessly does not technical progress strive to subject everything to this clocklike precision: man's sleep, his work, his rest, and his pleasures!

What is euphemistically called production is really consumption. The gigantic technical apparatus, that masterpiece of human ingenuity, could not reach perfection if technological thought were to be contained within an economic scheme, if the destructive power of technical progress were to be arrested. But this progress becomes all the more impetuous, the larger the resources at its disposal, and the more energetically it devours them. This is shown by the concentration of men and machines in the great mining centers where the mechanization of work and the organization of man are most advanced. The rationality of technology, so impressively displayed here, becomes intelligible only when one has understood the conditions on which it depends. Its concomitant is waste and contempt for all rationality in the exploitation of the resources on whose existence technology depends, as the lungs depend on air.