Dictionary

megamachine en · NOUN

Etymology

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

Meanings

1. A very large or powerful machine (or computer).
   • 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. 2018 March 15, Peter Brannen, “Why Earth's History Appears So Miraculous”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 16 Jul 2025:
2. The convergence of science, economy, technics, and political power.
   • The megamachine, as he termed it, engendered a bogus existence—material, intellectual and spiritual—that reduced human endeavor to a series of ciphers. 1990 January 27, “Lewis Mumford Dies at 94; A Visionary Social Critic”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 28 Jan 2026:

Forms