What is the status of technology in our lives?

Humans have recorded stories involving technology going back to the most ancient writings. We also have extensive collections of human artifacts through which we can a tendency towards technology.

What is the cultural evaluation of technology? Throughout history, the tradesman, the tinkerer, and the artificer are portrayed as trivial actors on the world stage. The characters that populate accounts before 1800 have been conquerors and clerics. The rulers had a much larger role when citizens still called themselves “subjects.” The conquerors and rulers were the men that subjugated all the residents of their countries, and the clerics explained why this was their “divine right” or “mandate of heaven.” Before the special sciences, clerical scholars were focused on morality and the organization of society.

Technical innovators, it is becoming clear now, are not trivial actors on the world stage. Starting with the banks in Italy and “manufactories” of England, private owners were becoming as wealthy as royalty and, eventually, as heads of state.

Their wealth was not the result of conquering and looting the wealth accumulated by others, but by starting to identify the sources of wealth itself, and by producing more of it.

That was an entirely different approach than the clerics had always promoted, which were various forms of sharing equity, always favoring the conqueror/rulers who made the clerical way of life one of the three estates of their society.

The clerics worked for centuries on mystical solutions to life’s problems. The mystical solutions often failed. Miracles are not a method. So the clerics often settled for describing ways to accept “one’s lot in life”.

Fortunately for us, technological innovators did not settle. They produced the steam engine, and left the scholars to describe it and catch up. The “electricians” played with and demonstrated electrical phenomenon, and left the scholars to catch up. They created manufactories and division of labor, and left the scholars to catch up. They created mediums of exchange and fiduciary media and left the scholars to catch up.

Slowly these innovations, and their subsequent elucidation by scholars, changed the way we thought, spoke, lived, and self-organized societies more than the scholars and clerics alone were ever able to do.

This website is directed at clarifying that history, and uniting the clerical scholars who are focused on morality, with the technical scholars and the technical innovators who are focused on technics, methods, and tacit knowledge of actually completing well-defined tasks and providing solutions to well-defined problems.