From the earliest epochs and hydraulic civilizations through the Axial Age, Islamic innovation, the Renaissance and the threshold of modernity — technology as a human extension.

1. SESSION 1

   Introduction

   Driving question: what is "innovation," and whose story does a history of technology usually leave out?

   • Course framing & expectations — how the 30 sessions map onto three parts, and how the pen-and-paper journal works.
   • The cross-cutting lens — every artifact is read through Environment, Governance and Social Challenge (with Economic Development added later), plus a humanities and gendered reading.

   Key idea: technology is never neutral — each invention redistributes power, labour and risk, so a "big history" has to be a humanities story as much as an engineering one.

2. SESSION 2

   Class Overview — modernity & risk

   Driving question: if every innovation solves a problem, what new dangers does it manufacture in return?

   • "Dumb Ways to Die" & the washing machine — from a viral safety ad to how a mundane appliance liberated (largely women's) labour, leading into Ulrich Beck's argument that modernity industrially produces its own hazards.
   • "The History of the World, I Guess" & the modernity meme — using internet-native formats to ask how we narrate the whole human story at once.

   Key idea — risk society (Beck): advanced modernity stops merely distributing goods and starts distributing "bads" (pollution, nuclear and now algorithmic risk) that ignore class and borders.

   • Ulrich Beck, Risk Society — the framing text: read for the claim that modern hazards are manufactured, invisible and globally shared.
   Ulrich BeckBeck · Risk Society
3. SESSION 3

   From Sumer, Iraq to Phoenicia: Time, Agriculture & Writing

   Driving question: how did writing — the first information technology — make cities, states and history itself possible?

   • McLuhan — writing as a human extension — the alphabet externalizes memory and rewires perception; "the medium is the message."
   • Gilgamesh, sustainability & gender — the oldest epic read for deforestation (the Cedar Forest / Humbaba) and for its gendered figures, as a sustainability parable.
   • Hydraulic civilizations — Sumer and disease, "This Land Is Mine," and Ancient Egypt: irrigation and the calendar as state-building tech.
   • Phoenicians — from the alphabet to Alphabet — the phonetic alphabet as the ancestor of Google's parent company; writing as the original search engine.

   Key idea: agriculture plus writing created surplus, hierarchy and bureaucracy — the template for every later "platform" that stores and processes information.

   • Gilgamesh (excerpt) — read as a sustainability and mortality myth, not just literature.
   • McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message — read for media as extensions of the human sensorium.
   • Headrick ch. 1–2 — Stone-Age tools; Hydraulic Civilizations (4000–1500 BCE) as the material backbone.
   GilgameshMcLuhan · The Medium is the MessageHeadrick ch.1–2

   See demo: idea map (writing → alphabet) · threshold 7 — agriculture

4. SESSION 4

   The Axial Age I

   Driving question: why did philosophy, ethics and storytelling all erupt across Eurasia at roughly the same moment — and is story the greatest invention of all?

   • Indo-European chariots and cannabis — mobility and psychoactive technologies spreading language, myth and warfare across the steppe.
   • Ancient Greece — Plato's Allegory of the Cave & Medusa — knowledge, illusion and the politics of who controls the image.
   • Aristotle, tragedy & the Hero's Journey — narrative structure (Aristotle → Campbell) as a portable cognitive technology for transmitting values.

   Key idea — the Axial Age: the "axis" period (c. 800–200 BCE) when reflective, universalizing thought emerged independently in Greece, India, China and Persia; story becomes the software that runs on the hardware of writing.

   PlatoAristotleHero's Journey
5. SESSION 5

   The Axial Age II

   Driving question: how do belief systems function as social technologies that hold empires together?

   • Oracle of Delphi — prophecy as an institution for managing uncertainty and legitimizing power.
   • Zoroastrianism & Manichaeism — dualist good-vs-evil cosmologies and their long afterlife in Western thought.
   • The Tao — a non-dualist alternative; technology and "the way" of non-forcing.

   Key idea: iron metallurgy and the horse let empires scale up physically; religion and philosophy supplied the shared software that made those empires governable.

   • Headrick ch. 3 — Iron, Horses, and Empires (1500 BCE – 500 CE): the material substrate of Axial-Age states.
   Headrick ch.3
6. SESSION 6

   Islamic Innovation

   Driving question: what does Europe's "Dark Ages" narrative hide about the post-classical world's scientific and technical leadership?

   • From the pointed arch to "Arabic" numerals — architecture, algebra and the zero (via India) that later made European mathematics and commerce possible.
   • The genie & "entheogenie" — myth, language and the role of altered states in framing knowledge.
   • Magic, alchemy & the occult — proto-chemistry and the porous early border between science and the esoteric.

   Key idea: the medieval Islamic world was a central node of "collective learning," preserving and transforming Greek, Persian and Indian knowledge before transmitting it westward.

   • Headrick ch. 4 — Post-Classical and Medieval Revolutions (500–1400): the global, not just European, story of innovation.
   Headrick ch.4
7. SESSION 7

   The Renaissance(s)

   Driving question: why "Renaissances" (plural), and what fused the artist with the engineer?

   • Brunelleschi — the dome of Florence as a feat of engineering, perspective and lost-then-rediscovered technique.
   • Machiavelli — politics treated as an empirical, almost technical, discipline of power.
   • Leonardo da Vinci — the paradigmatic engineer-artist whose notebooks blur invention, anatomy and art.

   Key idea: the Renaissance reframes the maker as a creative inventor rather than an anonymous craftsman — the cultural seed of the modern "innovator."

   BrunelleschiMachiavelliDa Vinci
8. SESSION 8

   What It Means to Be Modern

   Driving question: is "modernity" progress, disenchantment, or a dangerous myth? (First session to add the Economic Development lens.)

   • Max Weber — rationalization, bureaucracy, the "disenchantment of the world" and the iron cage.
   • John Gray — the sceptic's counter-argument that faith in progress is itself a secular religion.

   Key idea: "modern" is a contested value-claim, not a neutral date — and the belief in inevitable progress is one of modernity's most powerful, and questionable, inventions.

   Max WeberJohn Gray
9. SESSION 9

   Mass Conquest: Gunpowder & Colonial Power

   Driving question: how did a handful of technologies — gunpowder, ships, and pathogens — let small European states conquer and partition the globe?

   • The modernity meme & the age of -isms — capitalism, colonialism, nationalism as bundled ideologies of expansion.
   • Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires — a genealogy mapping technology and power since 1500; the visual logic behind this site's idea map.
   • The Columbian Exchange / extraction — biology as conquest: crops, silver and disease reshaping continents.

   Key idea: "guns, germs and ships" turned local technical advantages into planetary, and deeply unequal, power — the dark side of innovation.

   • Headrick ch. 5 — An Age of Global Interactions (1300–1800): how technology globalized conquest and trade.
   Vladan JolerHeadrick ch.5

   See demo: idea map — in the spirit of Joler's Calculating Empires

10. SESSION 10

    The "Enlightened" Innovators I

    Driving question: the Enlightenment gave us instruments and classification — but in whose service, and at whose expense?

    • Telescope to the "flying telescope" — the optical instrument that recentred the cosmos, from Galileo onward.
    • Giordano Bruno — the cost of heretical ideas in an age before free inquiry.
    • Linnaeus & race — taxonomy as a powerful tool that also encoded racial hierarchy.
    • Futures trading & caffeine — financial instruments and the coffee-house culture that fuelled both science and speculation.

    Key idea: Enlightenment "reason" was an instrument-driven project that produced both liberating knowledge and the classificatory machinery of empire and race.

11. SESSION 11

    The "Enlightened" Innovators II

    Driving question: how did Enlightenment science, classification and commerce compound into a self-reinforcing engine of change?

    • Continued Enlightenment science & instruments — building on Session 10's telescope, taxonomy and finance toward systematic, institutionalized knowledge.
    • Knowledge as power & commerce — how academies, encyclopaedias and markets turned discovery into a repeatable process.

    Key idea: the Enlightenment's lasting invention was not any single device but method — a system for producing reliable, cumulative knowledge.

12. SESSION 12

    Industrialism — "Industrial Revolution," Environmentalism & Sustainability

    Driving question: when machines began to outpace human muscle, what did we gain — and what did the Romantics and anarchists warn we were losing? (Adds Economic Development.)

    • Frankenstein (Shelley) — the founding myth of technology out of control and the ethics of creation.
    • Anarchism — political resistance to industrial concentration of power.
    • Romanticism — the cultural revolt valuing nature, emotion and the sublime against the machine — an early root of environmentalism.

    Key idea: industrialism inaugurated exponential growth and the modern environmental conscience; Frankenstein remains the template for every "the future doesn't need us" anxiety to come.

    • Shelley, Frankenstein (excerpt) — read for the creator's responsibility toward what they build.
    Shelley · Frankenstein

    See demo: revolutions timeline · population growth (industrial jump)

Nationalism, Darwinism, the acceleration of change, two world wars, and the atomic, space and cybernetic age that seeded the digital revolution.

1. SESSION 13

   The Nation as Innovation

   Driving question: is the "nation" a timeless community or a 19th-century technology built out of print, schooling and myth?

   • The newspaper — print capitalism manufacturing a shared "imagined community" of strangers.
   • Renan vs. von Herder — the nation as a daily plebiscite (civic) versus the nation as blood-and-language essence (ethnic).
   • The Grimm Brothers & the good-guy/bad-guy myth — folklore collected and edited into national identity and moral binaries.
   • Judah Friedlander on nations — comedic deflation of national exceptionalism.

   Key idea: nationalism is an invention — a media-and-narrative technology that turns industrial-scale populations into a single "us."

   • Headrick ch. 6 — The First Industrial Revolution (1750–1869): the material base for mass print and the nation.
   Headrick ch.6
2. SESSION 14

   Darwinism

   Driving question: how did a theory of biology get hijacked into an ideology of race, empire and "survival of the fittest"?

   • The Origin of Species (1859) — evolution by natural selection as one of history's great conceptual innovations.
   • Trevor Noah on race & imperialism — how "social Darwinism" rationalized colonial hierarchy.
   • The history of Japan & the Last Samurai — rapid Meiji modernization as a non-Western answer to the acceleration of change.

   Key idea: a scientific idea is never released into a vacuum — Darwinism shows how a discovery can be bent to justify the power structures of its era.

   • Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859) — the primary text behind the modern life sciences.
   • Headrick ch. 7 — The Acceleration of Change (1869–1939): the second industrial revolution speeding up.
   Darwin (1859)Headrick ch.7

   See demo: accelerating returns

3. SESSION 15

   Midterm Exam EXAM

   Assessment (25%). A written, in-class exam testing understanding of the topics and slides from Part 1 and the opening of Part 2.

   • Format discussed in class beforehand; the hand-written journal is your built-in revision tool.
   • Scope — deep history through nationalism and Darwinism (Sessions 1–14).
4. SESSION 16

   Innovation on the Eve of the 20th Century I

   Driving question: which chemical, medical and material breakthroughs of the late 1800s quietly set the stage for both modern life and total war?

   • The tabloid newspaper — sensational mass media and the birth of the attention economy.
   • Distillation & cocaine — industrial chemistry applied to (and marketed as) medicine.
   • Freud, dreams, Jung & Nietzsche — the unconscious and the "death of God" as innovations in the science of the self.
   • Germ theory & vaccines; Arts and Crafts; oil; steel — the medical revolution, a craft revolt against the machine, and the two materials that built the 20th century.

   Key idea: the decades before 1914 bundled extraordinary medical and material progress with the very capacities (oil, steel, chemistry) that would make industrialized killing possible.

5. SESSION 17

   Innovation on the Eve of the 20th Century II

   Driving question: how did this dense cluster of innovation accelerate into the unstable, hyper-modern world of 1914?

   • Continued late-19th / early-20th-century innovation — extending Session 16's chemistry, medicine, oil and steel into the cultural and political ferment of the era.
   • Toward total war — how industrial capacity and nationalist fervour combined into a powder keg.

   Key idea: the "long fin de siècle" shows acceleration as a double edge — the same forces that promised utopia delivered the first industrialized catastrophe.

6. SESSION 18

   World War One I

   Driving question: what happens when 19th-century industrial productivity is turned entirely toward killing?

   • Chemical weapons — industrial chemistry weaponized; gas as a symbol of technology's moral collapse.
   • The tank — mechanized mobility breaking the deadlock of trench warfare.

   Key idea: WWI is the first fully industrialized war — the assembly line of mass production becoming the assembly line of mass death.

7. SESSION 19

   World War One II

   Driving question: how did total mobilization of technology reshape society, gender and the state long after the armistice?

   • Further WWI technologies & their consequences — aircraft, mass logistics and propaganda extending Session 18.
   • Social fallout — women in the wartime workforce, the trauma of mechanized war, and the disillusionment that fed the inter-war years.

   Key idea: war is a brutal accelerator — it compresses decades of technical and social change into a few years.

8. SESSION 20

   Inter-War Period

   Driving question: between the wars, how did machines, manifestos and marketing reimagine what a human being is — and wants?

   • The robot — from Čapek's coined word onward, the machine that might replace (or become) us.
   • The Futurist Manifesto — an avant-garde worship of speed, the machine and even war.
   • Advertising, brands & logos — the engineering of desire and the birth of the modern brand.

   Key idea: the inter-war years invent the 20th-century self — part automated worker, part branded consumer — a direct ancestor of today's data-shaped identity.

   • Harari, Homo Deus, ch. 11 (pp. 533–541 & 558–565) — read on dataism and the future of meaning and consumer identity.
   • Headrick ch. 8 — Toward a Post-Industrial World (1939–2000): the transition this session sets up.
   Harari · Homo Deus, ch.11 (pp. 533–541, 558–565)Headrick ch.8
9. SESSION 21

   World War Two

   Driving question: how did the deadliest war in history also become the birthplace of the computer, the rocket and the atomic age?

   • Airpower & the rocket — strategic bombing and the V-2 that pointed straight to spaceflight.
   • Turing — codebreaking, the universal machine and the conceptual birth of the computer and AI.
   • The atom bomb & "Deaths from World War Two" — the ultimate dual-use technology and a sober accounting of its human cost.

   Key idea: WWII is the hinge of the course — the computer, the rocket and the bomb together open the digital, space and existential-risk eras to follow.

   Turingatom bomb

   See demo: idea map (computing lineage)

10. SESSION 22

    The Atomic & Space Age and the Anthropocene I

    Driving question: in the shadow of the bomb, how did post-war culture invent cyberspace, the cyborg and the idea of the Anthropocene?

    • Nuclear weapons, DARPA & the satellite — Cold-War R&D (with deGrasse Tyson on space) that seeded the internet and GPS.
    • Dalí, drugs, fast food & MTV — consumer technoculture, surrealism and the commodification of experience.
    • Huxley vs. Orwell & The Doors of Perception — two rival dystopias (pleasure vs. boot) and the chemistry of consciousness; The Doors vs. Hendrix.
    • Cybernetics, the cyborg & William Gibson — feedback systems, the cybernetic organism, and cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination"; Weird Science, WarGames and the Unabomber as the tech anxiety's dark twin.

    Key idea: the Anthropocene names the moment humans become a geological force — and cybernetics supplies the language (feedback, system, cyborg) for the digital age about to begin.

    • Huxley, The Doors of Perception — read alongside Orwell's 1946 essay for two opposite visions of how technology controls the mind.
    Huxley · Doors of PerceptionGibson · cyberspacecybernetics
11. SESSION 23

    The Atomic & Space Age and the Anthropocene II

    Driving question: what is the cultural and ecological fallout of an age that can both reach the moon and end itself?

    • Continued atomic / space-age technologies — extending Session 22 into the deeper Anthropocene.
    • Planetary consciousness — how nuclear and space imagery (foreshadowing Earthrise in Session 30) reframed humanity's view of itself.

    Key idea: the same era that gave us the means of self-destruction also gave us the first whole-Earth perspective — the seed of modern environmental and existential ethics.

12. SESSION 24

    Globalism

    Driving question: at the end of the 20th century, is the world being knit together by markets or torn apart by identity — or both at once?

    • Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld — the simultaneous pull of homogenizing global consumerism ("McWorld") and reactive tribal-religious identity ("Jihad").

    Key idea: globalization is dialectical — the very technologies that integrate the planet also provoke the backlash that fragments it, setting up the digital era's culture wars.

    • Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld — read for the twin, opposing forces shaping a networked world.
    Barber · Jihad vs McWorld

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, hyperreality, the AI cyborg and transhumanism — and the ethics of where the innovation is leading.

1. SESSION 25

   Digitalism I

   Driving question: in a world of platforms, is "reality" still where decisions are made — or has the map replaced the territory?

   • The Fourth Industrial Revolution & "These Systems Are Failing Me" — the fusion of digital, physical and biological systems, and the lived experience of its breakdowns.
   • Hyperreality (Baudrillard) & the meme — simulations with no original; the meme as the native unit of networked culture; Ursula K. Le Guin on imagining alternatives.
   • "The Future Doesn't Need Us," the drone, Facebook's foreign policy, Harari–Google–ISIS — autonomous weapons and platforms as quasi-sovereign geopolitical actors.

   Key idea — hyperreality: when signs refer only to other signs, the simulation becomes more "real" than the real; platforms govern by shaping the simulated world we act inside.

   • Harari, Nexus — read for information networks as the deep history (and danger) of human and machine power.
   Baudrillard · hyperrealityHarari · Nexus

   See demo: diffusion S-curves · collective learning

2. SESSION 26

   Digitalism II

   Driving question: what is the internet doing to our brains, attention and capacity for deep thought?

   • Networks, social media & cognition — extending Session 25 into the personal and neural effects of always-on connectivity.
   • The shallows of distraction — how a medium optimized for interruption reshapes memory and concentration.

   Key idea: echoing McLuhan from Session 3, the digital medium rewires its users — the "second brain" of search and feed comes at a measurable cognitive cost.

   • Carr, The Shallows — read for the argument that the net trades depth for breadth and trains us toward distraction.
   Carr · The Shallows
3. SESSION 27

   InnovAItion I

   Driving question: as AI and biotech merge us with our machines, is technology becoming our new religion — and could super-intelligence be "the final invention"?

   • The AI cyborg — human–machine merger and brain–computer interfaces as the next "human extension."
   • The divine digital, "fAIth" — Erik Davis on the spiritual and mystical impulses coded into digital culture.
   • Transhumanism — Kurzweil's accelerating returns and the singularity; Tegmark's "Life 3.0" that designs its own hardware and software.

   Key idea — the singularity: if intelligence can recursively improve itself, change goes vertical — the hopeful and terrifying core of the transhumanist promise.

   • Davis, Techgnosis — read for technology as a vessel for ancient mystical and gnostic longings.
   • Tegmark, Life 3.0 — read for a structured taxonomy of AI futures and the alignment problem.
   • Kurzweil (accelerating returns) — read for the exponential, "law of accelerating returns" case for the singularity.
   Davis · TechgnosisTegmark · Life 3.0Kurzweil

   See demo: accelerating returns · idea map → AI

4. SESSION 28

   InnovAItion II

   Driving question: if AI can do the knowing for us, what is education — and the human mind — still for?

   • Education in the age of AI vs. AI's role in education — should we learn with AI, learn to outthink it, or both? (The course's own GenAI policy in practice.)
   • AI and dreams; John Oliver on AI — generative models, creativity and a critical popular take on AI's hype and harms.

   Key idea: in a world of cheap answers, the scarce, defensibly human skills become judgement, framing and ethics — exactly what the course's hand-written, cross-checked method cultivates.

5. SESSION 29

   Final Exam EXAM

   Assessment (25%; minimum grade 3.5). A comprehensive written, in-class exam covering all aspects of the course.

   • Format discussed in class; synthesizes the deep-history, modern-era and digital-future arcs.
   • Stakes — scoring below 3.5 sends you to the re-sit regardless of your overall grade.
6. SESSION 30

   Conclusion: Earthrise & The Pale Blue Dot

   Driving question: standing at the edge of super-intelligence and a-mortality, what kind of future do we actually want — and who decides?

   • Earthrise & the Pale Blue Dot — the two images (Apollo 8; Voyager 1, via Carl Sagan) that turned the whole-Earth perspective into an ethic of humility and stewardship.
   • Where innovation and disruption are leading — a closing synthesis weighing the promise of human cyborgs and super-human races against their costs.

   Key idea: the course closes by zooming all the way out — from the first stone tool to the pale blue dot — to insist that the ethics of innovation matter as much as the innovation itself.