a clarification

A quick note: in response to my previous post several people have emailed or tweeted to recommend Jacques Ellul or Lewis Mumford or George Grant or Neil Postman. All of those are valuable writers and thinkers, but none of them do anything like what I was asking for in that post. They provide a philosophical or theological critique of technocratic society, but that’s not a technological history of modernity. If you look at the books I recommend in that post, all of them are deeply engaged with the creation, implementation, and consequences of specific technologies — and that’s what I think we need more of, though in a larger frame, covering the whole of modernity fromt he 16th century to today. A deeply material history — a history of the pressur of made things on human behavior; something like Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command but theologically informed — or at least infused with a stronger sense of human telos than Giedion has; a serious critique of technological modernity that’s not afraid to get grease on its hands.