Curriculum Map

History of Technology

From fire to AI, every technology is a political act. This course traces how tools reshaped societies, who benefited, who paid the cost, and why the stories we tell about innovation are almost always wrong.

20 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

The Invention of Invention

Everything you think you know about invention is shaped by stories told much later, by people with reasons to tell them that way.

2-3 weeks

Printing, Propaganda, and the Democratization of Error

Gutenberg didn't just democratize knowledge—he democratized error. The printing press enabled both the Reformation and the witch-hunting craze.

2-3 weeks

Navigation, Empire, and the Technology of Conquest

European colonial expansion was not inevitable—it was enabled by specific technologies that other civilizations chose not to deploy for conquest.

2-3 weeks

The Scientific Revolution and Who Gets to Explain the World

The Scientific Revolution was as much a social technology as an intellectual one. New institutions created new rules for who could claim to know things—and those rules excluded most of humanity.

2-3 weeks

The Industrial Revolution — Machines, Markets, and the Making of the Working Class

The Industrial Revolution wasn't just about machines—it was about remaking human beings into machine-tenders and remaking the planet into a resource to be extracted.

2-3 weeks

Telegraph to Telephone — When Distance Died the First Time

Every claim made about the internet in the 1990s—that it would unite humanity, abolish distance, democratize information—was made about the telegraph in the 1850s.

2-3 weeks

Electrification and the Grid — Whose Light, Whose Darkness

Electrification was not a gift bestowed uniformly. It came first to wealthy neighborhoods, then to profitable ones, then—decades later and only with government intervention—to rural America.

2-3 weeks

Assembly Lines, Automation, and the Promise of Leisure

Henry Ford doubled wages and people called it revolutionary. But the assembly line also deskilled workers, made them interchangeable, and created the conditions for their eventual replacement.

2-3 weeks

The Bomb — When Technology Became Existential

Before 1945, technology could destroy cities. After 1945, it could destroy civilization. The atomic bomb was the first technology whose intended use would be catastrophic.

2-3 weeks

Television, Advertising, and the Manufacture of Desire

Television didn't just transmit culture—it restructured it. It rewarded simplicity over complexity, image over argument, emotion over reason.

2-3 weeks

The Space Race, the Cold War, and Government as Inventor

Every Silicon Valley founder who claims the government should 'get out of the way' of innovation is using technologies the government invented: the internet, GPS, touchscreens, voice recognition.

2-3 weeks

The Personal Computer — Liberation Technology or Neoliberal Tool?

The personal computer emerged from Bay Area counterculture—hippies who believed technology could liberate individuals from institutional control. This ideology became Silicon Valley's founding myth and neoliberalism's most effective delivery mechanism.

2-3 weeks

The Internet's Broken Promise

The internet was supposed to democratize everything. In some ways it did. In other ways, it created new monopolies more powerful than any that came before.

2-3 weeks

Platform Capitalism and Enshittification

Cory Doctorow coined 'enshittification' to describe the lifecycle of platforms: first good to users, then abusive to serve business customers, finally abusive to everyone to serve shareholders.

2-3 weeks

Surveillance Capitalism — When You Are the Product

Google discovered that the behavioral data users generate while searching is more valuable than the search results themselves. This discovery created a new form of capitalism.

2-3 weeks

Artificial Intelligence — Who Teaches the Machines?

AI does not think. It pattern-matches on data that humans collected, labeled, and curated. The question is not whether machines are intelligent but whose intelligence they encode.

2-3 weeks

The Attention Economy and the Crisis of Knowledge

Herbert Simon warned in 1971 that 'a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.' Fifty years later, an entire industry is devoted to capturing, manipulating, and monetizing human attention.

2-3 weeks

Who Decides What Comes Next?

Technology is not destiny. Every artifact embodies choices, and those choices can be made differently. This final unit asks the political question that technical discourse avoids.

2-3 weeks

Case Study: Text READY — An Investigation Into the Government's Theory of AI Displacement

We enrolled in the Department of Labor's AI literacy course, completed all seven lessons, boundary-tested every interaction, and extracted the complete transcript. What follows is the investigation: what we assumed before the data, what the data showed, and what changed.

5-7 days

Case Study: The Voluntary Panopticon — How Consumers Built the Surveillance State the Government Couldn't

From the PATRIOT Act to Ring's 'war on crime,' how the privatization of surveillance inverted the Fourth Amendment — and why a musician's YouTube documentary succeeded where policy advocacy failed.

3-4 days

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.