The Broken Machine: Histories of Technology, Social Order, and the Self

A cultural history of technological breakdown, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World.

The Broken Machine explores the intertwined histories of breaking machines, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World. Edward Jones-Imhotep reveals how breakdowns are not the kinds of objects we imagine. More than just material failures or social disruptions, since the 18th century, breakdowns served as moments for defining a modern technological self and the core values of social order in Western democracies: what kinds of people belonged to it, what virtues they should possess, and who stood outside it.

Tracing this politics of breakdown and belonging across two centuries and two continents, the book rewrites five well-known episodes in the history of technology, influential histories that we thought we knew: the politics of the guillotine during the French Revolution, the causes of railway accidents and the rise of “systems” as a tool of self-responsibility and self-governance in Victorian Britain, the surprising antebellum history of breakdown in American slave cultures, the Gantt chart’s origins as a Progressive Era tool for linking failure as a condition of industrial machinery to failure as a kind of person in the US, and, finally, the electronic malfunctions during the Cold War that helped define the rational selves underpinning Western democracy.

About the Author :
Edward Jones-Imhotep is Professor at Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at University of Toronto.

Review :
ENDORSEMENTS

“Broken machines as engines of selves and social orders, plural and specific—this is technology studies at its daring and imaginative best.”
—Steven J. Jackson, Professor of Information Science and Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University

"Who knew that histories are written not by the relentless machine, but in its eloquent stutters? This book masterfully reveals how the jammed guillotine, the derailed train, and the misfired missile truly shape our world. Elegant, essential, and profoundly disruptive: a truly innovative insight on how technology actually happens."
—Dagmar Schäfer, Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin; author of The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China

"This brilliant and relentless book takes apart the white innocence of the history of technology and the modern self. Jones-Imhotep masterfully poses alternative ways of technological being.”
—Tiago Saraiva, author of Fascist Pigs and The Orchard in the Ruins