/lit/ - Literature

>Mass production imposes on the community a terrible new burden: the duty to constantly consume. In the arts, at the very moment the extension of the reproductive processes promised to widen the area of freedom, this new necessity, the necessity to keep the plant going, has served to undermine habits of choice, discrimination, selectivity that are essential to both creation and enjoyment. Quantity now counts for more than quality. There used to be an old popular song with the words, ‘I'll try anything once, if I like it I’ll try it again.” But under the machine system, you'll not only try it again, you'll try it a thousand times, whether you like it or not, and a vast apparatus of propaganda and persuasion, of boasting and bullying, will coerce you into performing this new duty.

>You know the old fable of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, which Goethe thought it worth while to put into verse, and which has even, in our time, gotten into the animated cartoon: the clever apprentice who repeated the old sorcerer's spell and got the pail and the broom to do his work for him, when the master was away, while he stayed idle. Unfortunately, though he knew how to bring into existence a whole regiment of pails and brooms, which went about their work with unflagging automatic energy, he had never mastered the formula for bringing their activities to an end: so presently he found himself floundering in a flood of water that these self-willed pails were pouring into his master's house. So with the apprentices to the machine. We not merely encourage people to share the new-found powers that the machine has opened up: we insist that they do so, with increasingly less respect for their needs and tastes and preferences, simply because we have found no spell for turning the machine off. The grim fable of the Sorcerer's Apprentice applies to all our activities, from photographs to reproduction of works of art, from motor cars to atom bombs.

>It is as if we had invented an automobile that had neither a brake nor a steering wheel, but only an accelerator, so that our sole form of control consisted in making the machine go faster. For a little while, on a straight road, we might feel safe, and even, as we increased our speed, gloriously free; but as soon as we wanted to reduce our speed or to change our direction or to back up, we should find that no provision had been made for this degree of human control—the only open possibility was Faster, faster! As our mass-production system is now set up, a slowing down of consumption, in any department, produces a crisis if not a catastrophe. That is why only under the pressure of war or preparation for war, in which wholesale waste and destruction come to its aid, does the machine, as now conceived, operate effectively on its own terms.

-- LM/AaT

the Sorcerer's Apprentice is JB's favorite fable also. and it has to be land's as well, who theorized Broom.Net as well as anyone.