care-tags.org

The shaping of modern technology by the military is central
to David Noble's account of the development of machine tools
after the Second World War(12). While the diffusion of
interchangeable parts manufacture was an unintended
consequence of its use in small arms production, David Noble
has argued that the American military have played a very
important role in developing numerically-controlled machine
tools to de-skill workers, and make them part of a strictly
delineated hierarchical system of production for both civil
and military products. The dynamics of modern capitalism and
modern militarism are no longer seen as the opposing ideal
types of the nineteenth century progressivist vision. It is
not a question of swords becoming ploughshares; rather,
ploughshares become increasingly swordlike. Military
technology, and its technology of production, embodies
military ideas about human organisation, displacing
alternative civil notions of what technology could be like.