illustrations of this‘societal technology’variously include: systems of nomen-
clature; street numbers; sporting rules; time zones; road conventions; electoral
systems; the rationing of goods and immigrants; conscription; land registra-
tion; all manner of codes and regulation; and bureaucracy.
Societal technology culminates in well-wrought machines, human
machines, in which, unlike ordinary machines, the material (‘paperwork’)is
relatively trivial, however notorious. For all their human elements, these
human machines are greatly complemented by material technology. Societal
technology and material technology often run together, and meet in‘public
health’and‘preventative medicine’, which might be the paradigmatical of
societal technology. Or, even more, the‘safety’ethic, of which Australia has
been such a vigorous‘early adopter’(Jessop 2009).^23
Societal technology is more naturally midlife rather than adolescent, more
suburban rather than rural. It is palpably Scandinavian (Daun 1996) and, with
the two clocks of railway Ballyhough station in mind, not obviously Irish.
Societal technology appears to be the inevitable adversary of the sphere
autonomy; it was hugely important to twentieth-century socialism as a
means offilling a void created by the retrenchment of that sphere. Yet in
Australia it has sometimes tolerated‘the market’as a device of societal
technology.
Societal technology waxes fat in Australia. It is seen everywhere, literally, in
the pointless road signs that festoon roadways. It is seen in specificand
favoured creations of state, such as the Commonwealth Scientific and Indus-
trial Research Organisation (CSIRO). It is seen, perhaps, in the overambitious
hopes for computing technology by Australian governments, and the recurrent
catastrophic consequences of that misplaced faith.^24 It is seen in the language;
it has been claimed the term‘public servants’originates in Australia (Richards
2015). It is seen, above all, in the bureaucratic; in the treatment of the civilian
by the state that has maddened visitors, both recent and long past (Martineau
1869; Brûlé 2015);^25 in the warping of the state so that‘Federation’becomes
a bureaucracy in three layers; and in formations outside the state. Unions,
with their‘tentacular grip’on Australian life (Davies 1958) are, of course,
elaborate bureaucracies, and have been so from their origin. Their most import-
ant product is policies; policies that at best only obliquely serve equality and
fraternity but gratify the quest for control, such as compulsory peacetime
(^23) Victoria was thefirst jurisdiction in the world to introduce the compulsory wearing of
motorcycle helmets and seat belts, and random breath tests.‘Safety’can, of course, be dangerous
(Peltzman 1975). For safety, read 24 ‘regimen’.
25 See Chesterman (2013) on how a $6 million IT contract became a $1.2 billion cost.
The talent for bureaucracy sometimes impressed visitors:‘It would be difficult tofind a higher
type of public servant anywhere in the world’(Nelson T. Johnson quoted in Edwards 1973, p. 85).
William O. Coleman