The Magnificent Bribe

Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” With this label, Mumford sought to acknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems make available to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offer of a gift but of a deal. Surrender to the power of complex technological systems — allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide, manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you — and the system will offer you back an appealing share in its spoils. What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also being good for the individual, and as proof of this, here is something new and shiny. Sure, that shiny new thing is keeping tabs on you (and feeding all of that information back to the larger technological system), but it also lets you do things you genuinely could not do before. For a bribe to be accepted it needs to promise something truly enticing, and Mumford, in his essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” acknowledged that “the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.” The danger, however, was that “once one opts for the system no further choice remains.” 

For Mumford, the bribe was not primarily about getting people into the habit of buying new gadgets and machines. Rather it was about incorporating people into a world that complex technological systems were remaking in their own image. Anticipating resistance, the bribe meets people not with the boot heel, but with the gift subscription.

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Yet Mumford was not merely being sarcastic in describing the bribe as “generous” and “magnificent.” Any attempt to wrestle with the metastasizing power of the “megamachine” required recognizing that much of what it offered truly did appear impressive and beneficial. Writing in 1970, Mumford rattled off a list of some of the bribes of his time, a list that included refrigerators, private motor cars, planes, telephones, television sets, electrically driven washing machines, and the computer. Mumford emphasized that these new products should not “be arbitrarily disparaged or neglected, still less rejected out of hand.” After all, Mumford was not a reclusive ascetic hermit — he rode in cars, flew on planes, and talked with friends on the telephone. In denouncing the bribe, Mumford was not simply blasting this or that particular machine. He was questioning the ways that particular machines were used to incorporate people into a much larger technical system. What at first could seem like a “generous bargain” had a tendency to eventually feel like more of a raw deal, and once the initial excitement around a new gadget had vanished, a person all-too-often found that the new machine had not in fact solved “every human problem.”

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Even as yesterday’s bribes become today’s commonalities, a steady flow of new bribes is made available to preserve our loyalty. There are smartphones with bigger screens and better cameras, virtual reality headsets, NFTs, smart glasses, self-driving cars, personal robots, a promised land of infinite apps, artificial intelligence, and the list goes on — new bribes for the new moment. As soon as it becomes incontrovertible that the last crop of technologies promising to solve “every human problem” has created many new problems, we are offered a new crop of technologies promised to really solve “every human problem,” including all of the ones created by the previous crop of technologies. Once you start looking for them, you can see technological bribes everywhere. And once you stop mulling over the potential benefits on offer, you can begin to see the risks and harms lurking just behind the shiny façade.  

Despite the ominous tones in which he often wrote, Mumford did not believe that we were doomed to become automatons. He retained a stubborn hope throughout his life that the sleepers could awaken, and that all hands could save the sinking ship. While writing extensively about technology, time and again he emphasized that what needed to be confronted was not so much the machines themselves as the ideology that builds up around them and turns them into objects of fealty and worship. As he pithily put it in Art and Technics, “If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love-life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion.” 

It is not a good thing to be accepting bribes, but it’s even worse to think of those bribes as just friendly gifts. 

- The Magnificent Bribe: Half a century ago, Lewis Mumford developed a concept that explains why we trade autonomy for convenience by Zachary Loeb