A cultural history of technological collapse, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic world.
The Broken Machine explores the intertwined history of machine failure, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic world. Edward Jones-Imhotep reveals how breakdowns are not the kind we imagine. Besides being merely material failures or social disturbances, since the eighteenth century, breakdowns have represented decisive moments in the definition of the modern technological self and the basic values of the social order.In Western democracies: who are the people who belong to it, what virtues should they possess, and who are outside it. The book traces the politics of collapse and belonging across two centuries and two continents, rewriting five well-known episodes in the history of technology, influential histories we thought we knew: the politics of the guillotine during the French Revolution, the causes of railway accidents, the rise of “systems” as an instrument of self-responsibility and self-government in Victorian Britain, and the surprising history of the pre-Civil War period.to the collapse of American slave cultures, the origins of the Gantt chart as a Progressive Era tool to link failure as a condition of industrial machines to failure as a type of person in the United States, and, finally, the electronic malfunctions during the Cold War that helped define the rational subjects that underpin Western democracy.
