Short answers, pulled from the story.
Lewis Mumford was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic who lived from the 19th of October 1895 to the 26th of January 1990. He was particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, his long-running architectural criticism in The New Yorker, and his philosophical framework of organic humanism. His 1961 book The City in History won the National Book Award.
Mumford introduced the term megatechnics in The Myth of the Machine Vol II: The Pentagon of Power, published in 1970, to describe the modern tendency toward constant, unrestricted expansion, production, and replacement of technology. He argued that megatechnics uses tools such as planned obsolescence, defective designs, consumer credit, and cosmetic fashion changes to prevent products from reaching lasting quality. He contrasted it with biotechnics, which he defined as technology that operates in an ecologically responsible manner.
Mumford argued that the mechanical clock, not the steam engine, was the key machine of the modern industrial age. He traced the clock's development to monks in the Middle Ages and its subsequent adoption by broader society. He described it as a piece of power-machinery whose product is seconds and minutes, making it the device that first imposed mechanical regularity on human life.
Mumford introduced the distinction in Technics and Civilization, published in 1934. Polytechnics enlists many different modes of technology in a complex framework to solve human problems, while monotechnics pursues technology only for its own sake, moving along its own trajectory regardless of the effects on people. He cited American road networks, built around automobiles at the expense of walking, cycling, and public transit, as a clear example of monotechnics.
Mumford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca in 1976, and the National Medal of Arts in 1986. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1941 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1947. In 1963 he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism, and in 1975 he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Mumford developed the concept of biotechnics most fully in the later sections of The Pentagon of Power, written in 1970. He defined it as technology that functions in an ecologically responsible manner, respecting the relationship between the living organism and its environment. A biotechnic society, in his view, would pursue what he called qualitative richness, amplitude, and freedom from quantitative pressures rather than the unchecked expansion he associated with megatechnics.