megamachine

English

Etymology

From mega- +‎ machine. In the social science sense coined by American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology and literary critic Lewis Mumford.

Noun

megamachine (plural megamachines)

  1. A very large or powerful machine (or computer).
    • 2018 March 15, Peter Brannen, “Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous”, in The Atlantic‎[1], archived from the original on 16 July 2025:
      In the early days of the Large Hadron Collider, when the megamachine kept running into seemingly endless, and increasingly improbable, financial and technical snags, some researchers—calling these mishaps “anti-miracles”—even half-seriously proposed that the universe was censoring us from this sort of destruction of the world occasioned by a successful run of the collider.
  2. (social sciences) The convergence of science, economy, technics, and political power.
    • 1990 January 27, “Lewis Mumford Dies at 94; A Visionary Social Critic”, in The New York Times‎[2], →ISSN, archived from the original on 28 January 2026:
      The megamachine, as he termed it, engendered a bogus existence—material, intellectual and spiritual—that reduced human endeavor to a series of ciphers.
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