Lives of the Machines (selections)

Ken Alder
Northwestern University

Dickinson Hall 211 & Zoom

This talk provides a brief overview—along with selections—from my current book project: a global history of technology which takes the form of ten short autobiographies by material objects.  The stories they tell are true, and in that sense this is a work of historical nonfiction, based on meticulous research in archives, libraries, and museums.  Besides, machines have a well-earned reputation for honesty, so it stands to reason that the stories they tell about themselves are true.  That said, these accounts are auto-biographies, and material objects like guns and bicycles are not usually thought capable of having subjective experiences, let alone writing about them.  In revitalizing the eighteenth-century genre of “it-narratives,” these accounts straddle the line between fact and imagination, history and fable, science and literature.  The book offers ten object lessons for our machine age, from a Mesopotamian balance weight to the UNABOMBER’s typewriter, interrogating the degree to which non-humans can be accorded qualities like liveliness, sentience, and agency.  In pushing this claim to its extreme, this book takes a reductio ad absurdum form: not to prove that machines are autonomous and purposeful, but to ask to what degree human beings are.

Ken Alder (Ph.D., Harvard, 1991) studies the transnational history of science and technology in the context of social and political change. One central theme in his work is the history of measurement—both of nature and of human beings—and the many ways that quantitative values reflect social values. The other central theme in his work is the potency of material artifacts. He has worked on 18th-century France and 20th-century America, and his new project on the history of objects carries him from ancient Mesopotamia and colonial West Africa to our own era of Chinese manufacturing and the genomics revolution.

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