Our next book: Technics & Civilization by Lewis Mumford

Next month, we’ll be reading Technics & Civilization as part of the philosophy of technology book club. By the way, there is a PDF of an older edition of the book online for those of you unable to purchase it.

You’ll notice that this is the longest book we have read so far, totaling nearly 500 pages. This means we need to be selective in our reading.

(As a side note: I realized this year that the pace has been grueling for many. For the 2027 book club, I’ll be slowing things down, allowing us to sit with the ideas longer.)

Published in 1934, Technics & Civilization may seem a bit dated. Mumford, of course, could not be writing about the internet – which has been so much of our focus – and instead focuses on the rise of industrialization. If you take a look at Chapter II, you’ll see that much of his focus is on mining, drilling, and even clocks. We should view Mumford’s book as foundational to discussions in the philosophy of technology, even if we want to move beyond him due to new technological phenomena. This should set us up nicely for Neil Postman’s Technopoly, which we will read in October.

For reference, here are the books we’ll read in the remainder of 2026:

• September: What is Called Thinking? by Martin Heidegger

• October: Technopoly by Neil Postman

• November: I had listed two books in November: Stop All the Clocks by Noah Kumin and Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford. We should focus on Crawford’s book in our discussions, but (if people express interest) I’ll host a third Zoom call to discuss Kumin’s novel. Please let me know.

• December: The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt (part 1)

Luckily, we have five Mondays in August, so we have some additional time. I’m proposing that we read Chapters I, III-V, and then skip to Chapter VIII. Here’s the schedule:

• August 3: Chapter I, ‘Cultural Preparation’

• August 10: Chapter III, ‘‘The Ecotechnic Phase’

• August 14: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• August 17: Chapter IV, ‘The Paleotechnic Phase’

• August 24: Chapter V, ‘The Neotechnic Phase’

• August 30: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

• August 31: Chapter VIII: ‘Orientation’

Let me explain my reasoning for these selections.

First, we cannot read more than a chapter per week without moving much too fast. I typically write about 2,000 words to get the conversation started, and I can’t cover multiple Mumford chapters in that amount of time. I also recognize that many of you are very busy, and so I don’t want to overburden participants.

Second, the first five chapters are foundational to Mumford’s argument, introducing the ecotechnic, paleotechnic, and neotechnic. I needed to include most of them. Chapter II is where Mumford’s causal argument lives, and you might want to take a look at that if you have time, but I felt it was important to get to Chapter V, so I opted to skip Chapter II. We then move to Chapter VIII, which should give us a synthesis of the book and Mumford’s positive proposals.

It’s a shame not to read the entire book, but for several of the denser books near the end of 2026, we’ll have to.