Electric Dreams: Technology, Politics, And The Modern Imagination
Course Description
What do societies dream of when they build machines? What visions of power, order and freedom have been wired into the infrastructures of modern life? This course explores how technology has shaped, and been shaped by political ideals and social imaginations from the nineteenth century to the present day. Moving between historical case studies and speculative futures, we will examine the utopian and dystopian dreams that animate technological systems, and the forms of authority and inequality they produce.
We will begin in the nineteenth century with the “March of Intellect” cartoons and the first steam-powered fantasies of progress. We will consider how factories, railways, and telegraphs helped construct modern states and new kinds of citizens. From there, we will trace how everything from Cold War cybernetics and Soviet centralization to Silicon Valley libertarianism recoded political life through algorithms and data. Throughout the course we will ask: what kinds of knowledge count as expertise? Who decides how a system should function and for whom?
Technology will be treated as a central force in shaping what modernity is and what has been promised. We will explore how ideas of rationality, control, futurity, and innovation have been embedded in everything from computer systems to climate models. At the same time, we will examine the cultural and emotional dimensions of technological change, in particular its illusions, enchantments, and unintended consequences.
This is a course about the politics of machines, but also about the humans that dream them into being. We will draw on sources from history, science and technology studies, film, art, poetry and fiction. By the end of the course, you will be able to think critically about how technological systems operate as social systems and how they govern, imagine, and rewire the world around us. Whatever your background, this course invites you to trace the electric dreams and the discontents at the heart of modern life.
Meet the Instructor: Jana Hunter
"Hello! My name is Jana Hunter and I am an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford. I’m a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe, with a focus on how politics, technology, and time have shaped the experience of modernity. I received my PhD from the University of Oxford, where I spent all my time thinking about time through clocks, communication networks, bureaucracies, and the strange dreams people pinned to machines. My research explores everything from how factories and mines governed people’s lives to atomic utopias and socialist infrastructures. I’m especially interested in how technological systems reflect political ideals and how they rewire everyday life. I designed this course because I think that understanding technology’s past helps us ask better questions about its future. Also, I just love a good diagram, dystopia, or machine dream."
