The Beginnings of Digital Culture - Digital Culture - page 9

manufacturing, he embodied a link between calculating machinery
and rational industrial management that has never since been
broken. Both his calculating machines and his management theories
were responses to burgeoning capitalism, which was producing the
need for ways of dealing with ever-greater amounts of information,
and for more efficient and rational ways of producing profits. These
twin needs, information processing and rationalization, have perma-
nently linked the development of calculating machinery with the
development of modern capitalism, in all its protean forms. Indeed
one might argue that, though manufacturing processes did not
generally use machinery for control purposes until the twentieth
century, processes of mass production and the division of labour
clearly evolved within a paradigm of machine logic, one later devel-
oped by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford.
At a deeper level Babbage's dream of a machine capable of
responding without prompting from outside resembles the very
basis of the market. As formulated by Adam Smith in The Wealth
of Nations , this became the canonical expression of the ideology of
classical capitalism. Central to Smith's argument was the notion
5 Babbage's protégée and
programming pioneer Ada Lovelace
(1816-52), c . 1844.