Technology

Seminar tutor: Thomas SimpsonLink opens in a new window

Although technologies are arguable coextensive with human existence, what philosopher Martin Heidegger termed ‘the frenziedness of technology’ has perhaps never been so apparent as in our era of late, high, or post-modernity. Our discussion this week will consider four quite different readings in order to think through multiple elements of the relationship between technology and modern history.

Reading E. P. Thompson's classic article, we will explore how technologies (in this case, clocks and an associated ‘time-sense’) restructure human minds and bodies, and provide foundations for modern social, economic, and political orders.

Turning to Nathan Ensmenger’s piece, we will examine:

1. How, and how far, historical enquiry can underpin critical assessments of contemporary technologies such as A.I.
2. To what degree today’s cutting-edge information technologies are extensions of much older social and technological structures.

Looking at Jo Guldi’s article, we will think about whether and how historians might embrace emerging technologies to pursue important new tasks through their scholarship.

And finally, with reference to historian of science D. Graham Burnett’s recent journalistic article, we will ask:

1. What becomes of learning and teaching university humanities in the age of A.I.?
2. What role can we historians play in discussions of the ethics and politics of A.I.?

Core readings

• E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present 38 (1967), pp. 56–97
• Nathan Ensmenger, ‘The Environmental History of Computing’, Technology and Culture 59, 4 Supplement (2018), pp. S7–S33
• Jo Guldi, ‘The Climate Emergency Demands a New Kind of History: Pragmatic Approaches from Science and Technology Studies, Text Mining, and Affiliated Disciplines’, Isis, 113, 2 (2022), pp. 352–65
• D. Graham Burnett, ‘Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?’, The New Yorker, 26 April 2025, [accessed at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/will-the-humanities-survive-artificial-intelligence]

Further readings

Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021)

Zac Zimmer, ‘Bitcoin and Potosí Silver: Historical Perspectives on Cryptocurrency’, Technology and Culture 58, 2 (2017), pp. 307–34

Timothy J. LeCain, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)

Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 213–38

James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (London: Allen Lane, 2022)

Jonnie Penn, ‘Animo nullius: on AI’s origin story and a data colonial doctrine of discovery’, BJHS Themes 8 (2023), pp. 19–34

Simon Schaffer, ‘OK Computer’, in Ecce Cortex: Beiträge zur Geschichte des modernen Gehirns, ed. Michael Hagner (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1999), pp. 254–85 [accessed at www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/16/ok-computer-by-simon-schaffer]

Sverker Sörlin and Nina Wormbs, ‘Environing technologies: a theory of making environment’, History and Technology, 34, 2 (2018), pp. 101-25

Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)