What ancient China tells us about today's technology

When industrial factories were introduced in Europe in the nineteenth century, even staunch critics of capitalism such as Friedrich Engels acknowledged that mass production necessitated centralized authority, regardless of whether the economic system was capitalist or socialist. In the twentieth century, theorists such as Langdon Winner extended this line of thinking to other technologies. He thought that the atom bomb, for example, should be considered an "inherently political artifact," because its "lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command."