At the very moment Western nations threw off the ancient regime of
absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were
restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their
technology
...The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a
magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract,
each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every
intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly
available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift
transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care,
entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely
ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to
take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and
equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the
person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice
remains.
...[T]he system is so far from being under effective human direction that
it may poison us wholesale to provide us with food or exterminate us to
provide national security, before we can enjoy its promised goods.
-- Lewis Mumford. "Authoritarian and Democratic Technics" in
Questioning Technology: Tool, Toy or Tyrant?,
edited by John Zerzan and Alice Carnes,
Philadelphia PA: New Society Publishers, 1991.