Technology as Magic

Peter M.R. Stirk is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for the History of Political Thought at Durham University, UK. His previous books include Max Horkheimer: A New Interpretation (1992) and, as co-editor, An Introduction to Political Ideas (Pinter, 1995).

"Prepare to be rewarded. Stivers' erudition, astringency and finely modulated outrage at the vast apparatus of technological hoodwinkery now operative in various well-intentioned (and some venal) bureaucracies all serve to make the book engrossing and compelling. Technology as Magic is full of startling insights into the sometimes visible, more often mystical appurtenances of technology, in which our society has vested its faith, and to which much of humanity has deeded its soul....Technology as Magic includes some remarkable-and entertaining-capsule histories of advertising, applied psychology, statistics, law, bureaucracy, and the theory and practice of management, all of which, in Stivers' view, are 'imitation technologies.'...Technology as Magic is a careful and urgent moral tome. It works brilliantly to disclose the intellectually suffocating, morally numbing and spiritually degrading effects of the technological milieu and its concomitant instrumental world-view."-Resurgence