The New Machine

“We walk—one million-headed body—with a humble joy in each of us, similar, I imagine, to what molecules, atoms, and phagocytes experience. The Christians of the ancient world (our only predecessors, as imperfect as they were) also understood this: humility is a virtue and pride is a vice.” — Yevgeny Zamyatin, “We”

“We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents with explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” — Tommaso Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto”

The 20th century’s official story crowns liberal capitalism as the unambiguous victor over Communism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism—three ideologies that supposedly promised to abolish the private individual and replace him with a planned, engineered, mechanised humanity marching in lockstep toward a seemingly radiant future. The Collective Man is many in one, whose inner life is negated in the face of shared purpose: “to him belongs the empire of the future; only he will be able to reign therein.” The ethical conflict was presented as absolute: on one side, a society deliberately planned from above, freedom erased for the sake of collective efficiency and a perfected species; on the other, a society that was supposedly unplanned, spontaneous, natural, emergent from millions of individual choices and transactions within the mythologised free market. This binary, planned tyranny versus unplanned freedom, became the moral foundation of the West.

Yet both Communism and Fascism were openly eugenic projects to create a new kind of human. Fascism’s version was the most violent, but it was Soviet Communism that first gave the world the enduring image of the mechanised multitude: millions of bodies moving as one great machine, the individual soul deleted, the Collective Man striding forward to claim history. As detailed in Rene Fueloep-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, Bolshevik philosophy methodically eroded the concept of an intangible, spiritual interiority, substituting it with a paradigm rooted in mechanical precision and collective purpose. The solitary soul, with its unpredictable depths, was rendered superfluous, overtaken by an all-encompassing societal blueprint that synchronised human endeavors with the inexorable logic of production and progress. Fueloep-Miller interpreted this shift as an outright “machine cult,” one that assembled the “Collective Man”—a multifaceted yet singular being in which private introspection paled against the imperative of a unified mission. This amalgamated form, he contended, was poised to inherit the unfolding movement of epochs, for only an entity devoid of individualism could truly harness and shape them. This vision aligns with Karl Marx’s view on the character of machinery and modern industry under capitalism, who in Capital, Volume I expounded that “owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage for the machine and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him.” Yet under Bolshevism, this revolutionary impulse was redirected toward a socialist machine, where, as Engels later reflected in The Condition of the Working Class in England, the industrial revolution had “carried this out to its logical end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from them the last trace of independent activity.” This undercurrent of transformation extended to influential Bolshevik minds like Leonid Trotsky, who, beyond establishing the Red Army, wove eugenic threads into his intellectual fabric, though in a manner that inverted the racial and exclusionary thrust of Nazism.

Trotsky dismissed the Nazi pursuit of racial isolation, championing instead a cosmopolitan synthesis wherein humanity’s varied strands would converge into an internationalist dream. He foresaw a global “melting pot” yielding “a new breed of men–the first worthy of the name of Man,” born from cross-cultural amalgamation. Such aspirations find modern resonance in thinkers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose Empire proposes a “multicolored Orpheus of infinite power,” a figure embodying the collective aspirations of the masses. In their view, this is not about erecting a monolithic world government but cultivating a novel species through persistent, transformative conflicts that dismantle barriers of identity, fostering a shared biological and social destiny resilient to fragmentation—yet always underscoring the dialectical tension between this planned global unity and the spontaneous diversity it seeks to override. Through a benign globalisation achieved through struggle, the human race is transformed.

Similar forms of machine-worship permeated Italian Fascism, exemplified by Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, which heralded the “metallisation” of the body—a radical fusion of organic life with machine technology. Marinetti portrayed warfare as an alchemical accelerator, dissolving the confines of personal identity to engender a revitalised human condition amid the ruins of battle. War, it was believed, could destroy the boundaries between the Self and the machines Outside, and out of the ashes of that struggle a new humanity would emerge. These futurist visions informed Mussolini’s movement, yet it was Nazi ideology that forged the most iconic Fascist human ideal: the Steel Man, a streamlined race, honed by systematic purification and the annihilation of races deemed ‘untermensch.’ Invoking a distorted Darwinism, this approach pursued species-harmony through absolute conformity. Humanity would also become a One, but this humanity would be unified in their sameness, rather than occupy a racially-mixed multitude as in the Bolshevik vision. Nazism’s crude embrace of social Darwinism stigmatised eugenics as a field, confining it to whispered academic corners. Against the homogenising effect of a wilfully global species or the embrace of a master race, the West, in turn, cast their societies as bastions of authentic multiplicity free from engineered conformity, framing an ethical divide between the mechanised march of planned economies, devoid of true freedom, and the organic, unplanned flow of natural human interactions begotten by liberal democracy and the free market.

During the Cold War, this dichotomy was weaponised in American rhetoric, vilifying the Soviet vision of mechanised humanity as a threat to innate freedoms, a bias that persists in shaping attitudes toward biotechnologies such as gene editing and synthetic biology. These apprehensions are predominantly disseminated via narrative arts, where fictional explorations serve as societal mirrors and social warnings. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World remains a go-to exemplar of biotech-induced nightmares, illustrating a world of conditioned castes and suppressed desires—though it critiques from an external vantage. A more embedded perspective comes from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We,” penned by a Bolshevik writer and engineer, which exaggerated Soviet reality and ethos into a satirical extreme, inspiring later dystopias by Huxley and Orwell.

Zamyatin’s society operates as a “one million-headed body,” with participants deriving “humble joy” from their integrated roles, reminiscent of atomic or cellular harmony within a larger entity. He parallels this to ancient Christian ideals, where humility triumphs over self-aggrandisement, recasting total alignment as moral elevation in a flawlessly calibrated existence. Vladimir Lenin echoed this mechanistic optimism in his push for technological integration under socialism, famously declaring, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” This vision of harnessing technology for collective advancement was later intensified by Joseph Stalin during the period of Soviet industrialisation, who insisted on rapid progress to secure the USSR’s sovereignty:

“We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.”

Cinematic genres, especially speculative horror, escalated these cultural trepidations, embedding them in tales of external menace and internal subversion. Films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers layer allegorical depths, symbolising everything from Communist subversion to the perils of conformist zeal in the McCarthy period, evoking dread of ideological takeover. Yet, the rawer underbelly emerges in B-grade cinema, crafted for fleeting entertainment, where societal paranoias surface unadorned. The paranoia is more hysteric; the filmmaking less artful and more obvious. Teenagers from Outer Space exemplifies this, juxtaposing idyllic American domesticity against extraterrestrial despotism. It is the typification of a whole genre of science fiction movies developed during the Cold War, where ‘natural’ American society is at odds with an ordered and planned totalitarian society.

In the plot, uniform-clad aliens, indistinguishable from average men, arrive on Earth in search for new lands to conquer. In their dialogue, we are privy not only to their expansionist ambitions, but a culture defined by lab-based origins, asexual propagation, and unwavering loyalty to a One supreme entity as part of the supreme race. The narrative turns when a juvenile invader encounters a local girl, perplexed by her effortless familial ties to grandparents and siblings, unbound by rigid design. As he integrates, adopting romance, work, studies, and even mundane financial duties, the story exalts these as emblems of genuine living, superior to the invaders’ calculated void, hinting at lurking threats beyond borders. Indeed, the unplanned nature of family life is shown as comforting and nurturing, contrasted by the cold and solitary world of the planned artificiality of the totalitarian.

This motif proliferated across 1950s sci-fi invasion and monster genres, where amorphous or hive-minded threats often stood in for the perceived collectivist horrors of Communism. In The Blob (1958), a gelatinous extraterrestrial mass devours and assimilates individuals, erasing personal boundaries in a creeping, unstoppable wave. Therein, the ‘One’ is presented as this conjoined hive-mind, artificially planned toward a single purpose, the erasure of difference and totalisation of identity. Similarly, Them! (1954) features gigantic ants operating as a ruthless, hierarchical colony, invading human spaces and symbolising the regimented, worker-drone ethos of totalitarian states, only to be thwarted by plucky American ingenuity and individualism. The Thing from Another World (1951) extends this with an alien plant-being that replicates humans, undermining trust and autonomy in a remote outpost, reflecting paranoia over hidden infiltrators and the loss of self to a greater, impersonal whole.

Beyond film, these themes infiltrated other cultural mediums. Comic books, such as EC Comics’ horror and sci-fi anthologies like Weird Science and Tales from the Crypt frequently depicted mad scientists or alien overlords imposing dystopian orders, often with anti-collectivist undertones that aligned with the era’s Red Scare McCarthyism. Television episodes, including certain The Twilight Zone installments like The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street (1960), explored mob conformity and external manipulation, subtly critiquing Communist regimes and their reliance on secret police to enforce compliance through fear. Pulp magazines from the period, filled with stories of robotic uprisings or mind-controlled societies, further amplified these anxieties, portraying the “natural” chaos of free enterprise and family life as bulwarks against cold and planned uniformity. Collectively, these cultural artifacts reinforced the narrative that human warmth, spontaneity, and individualism were innate defenses against the cold calculus of planned societies, whether from outer space or the Eastern Bloc.

Another B-movie The Gamma People, set in a Soviet-esque dictatorship where gamma radiation on youths creates a caste of lesser compliant hordes and higher elite controllers. Interlopers, depicted as savvy investigators and journalists, dismantle the operation, highlighted by a scene where a talented child spontaneously composes music. “I’m playing what I feel,” she says in response to an elite child voiced in a hybrid accent fusing Germanic precision with Russian austerity who lambasts her for being undisciplined and disobedient. Individualism must be crushed, and any ambitions to transform the human being, a naturally individual figure, are irreconcilable.

These narratives implicitly canonise the nuclear family as a biogenetic inevitability, portraying deviations as invasive distortions. This narrative conveniently sidesteps the emergence of the nuclear family model as an adaptation to industrial capitalism, tailored for mobile labour and consumer isolation. Within American capitalism, this configuration claims eternal validity, retrojecting its principles into mythic origins, echoing Nazi ancestral reveries, and projecting them into visionary tomorrows, mirroring the forward marches of the Soviet Man. The breadwinner, the supportive spouse (what Italian Feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa referred to as “the slave of a slave”), and children are all subjugated by various forms of discipline: regimented work, domestic discipline or school discipline. Their worlds mirror the disciplined marches of Soviet workers to communal plants and People’s Factories, yet in America, they are innate, volitional, and perhaps divinely ordained, attributed to some collective consensus on behalf of the people. In Capital, Volume I, Marx again noted that:

“within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine.”

Even under the guise of a free-market capitalist system, the iron logic of productivity remains enforced, orchestrating lives through planning at a hidden level, factory rhythms, consumer cycles, that rival Soviet centralisation in its omnipresent control. Humanity is still reduced to a Collective One, but instead of shouldering the burden of a shared mission, respecting a Social logic, it is subordinated to the logic of Capital.

The presumed ethical conflict opposition between authoritarian a planned society without freedom and a ‘free’ unplanned, spontaneous and natural society increasingly reveals itself as a facade, with contemporary anxieties redirecting from state hegemony to corporate overlordship. Today, power operates through diffused networks rather than centralised commands, infiltrating life at molecular levels. Shows such as Westworld and Altered Carbon visualise this encroachment, rendering people as engineered wares: curled in prenatal suspension, enveloped in polymer sheaths like shelf-ready items, or fragmented on fabrication belts, limbs arrayed in echoes of da Vinci’s proportional studies. In Cyberpunk 2077, players are plunged into Night City, a dystopian sprawl dominated by conglomerates like Arasaka and Militech wherein cybernetic implants and genetic tweaks are not state-imposed but market-driven necessities, stratifying inhabitants into augmented warlords with enhanced cognition and longevity, versus the unmodified lower masses scraping by in obsolescence. Corporate agendas commodify the body, turning personal evolution into a paywalled privilege, where “choice” masks coercive economic pressures that dictate who thrives and who dies. Echoing these themes, the Metal Gear Solid franchise weaves intricate narratives around genetic engineering and mechanised warfare, where clones like Solid Snake are products of secretive projects aimed at creating perfect soldiers, and vast AI networks like the Patriots enforce a totalitarian control over information and society. In games like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, human identity is commodified through nanomachines (“nanomachines, son!”) and digital simulations, evoking the existence of a pernicious military-industrial complex that blurs the lines between flesh and machine, fostering a world where individuals are pawns in endless cycles of engineered conflict and surveillance, a literally mechanised march in service of the market. In Metal Gear Rising, Senator Armstrong’s vision for war eschews mere profit-making for a Darwinian crucible where man is pit against man in a might-makes-right arena, where the strong devour the weak in a an unbridled state of nature, akin to that famously depicted by Thomas Hobbes. Much like how the revered nuclear family model reduced stripped familial bonds based on compatibility and voluntary association to a “mere money relation” and fragmented individuals into productive socioeconomic units, the figure of the New Man re-emerges as the homo-economicus, this time not the blatant creation of an omnipresent and omnipotent state, but of Capital.

Such portrayals thus illuminate broader implications for human divergence in a biotech era: market dynamics could accelerate a subtle speciation, where affluent classes invest in bespoke genetic upgrades, extending lifespans, boosting resilience to diseases, or amplifying traits like intelligence, while lower strata remain anchored to baseline biology, widening chasms of inequality. Consumer “options” in enhancement tech foster parallel human trajectories, simultaneously eroding a shared species identity and creating the New Man. This market-driven evolution manifests as an accelerating fusion of technology and capital, where economic processes and technological advancement become increasingly inseparable and self-reinforcing to the point of singularity, eventually outpacing any form of human oversight or control. As Nick Land vividly describes in Meltdown:

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalisation and oceanic navigation lock into commoditisation take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.

If Capital is the Real Movement of history that is not human, unfolding through impulses that precede any lofty notions of innate individualism and autonomy, what this fosters is not the revolutionising of man anew, but a New Machine, begotten by inhuman impulses latent within humanity. In this inexorable process, the New Man dissolves into a post-human apparatus, propelled not by the edicts of the state but by the pressures of market logic, where augmentation and obsolescence entwine in a self-perpetuating cycle that transcends the binary of planned vis-a-vis unplanned. Far from birthing the internationalist Bolshevik vision of the Collective Man or the Nazi racial Ubermensch, humanity is mechanised into fragmented components, ultimately blurring all distinctions into a singular drive for a post-human horizon.