The Technocomplex

Abstract

To pursue economic growth is to serve the technocomplex; that is the next proposition which must be examined. Here, ‘techno-complex’ is to be understood as simply a generalised version, in the sense that industries concerned with non-military technology are also now included,³⁷ of the older ‘military-industrial complex’. This itself began as a convenient, and dramatic, label for a large set of tendencies in the American governmental and industrial sectors concerned with defence, space and atomic energy. The term has a particularly sinister ring. Behind it lurk the ‘power élite’ theories of Mills³⁸ and others. Furthermore, the potential dangers inherent in the existence of the complex were given official recognition by President Eisenhower in his much-quoted farewell address. Noting that, for the first time, America’s military establishment and arms industry had both become immense, Eisenhower concluded that it was necessary in government to ‘guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex’.³⁹