Technology history – caught in the machine room

A joke is circulating on the Internet in which the question of what makes us person is answered as follows: to select all images with traffic lights. The joke works for two reasons. On the one hand, he does not need to explain himself; Anyone who is on the Internet was certainly in the situation that they have to prove their humanity with the help of a so -called captcha. At the same time, it is obviously sufficiently absurd to identify the little superiority towards the computer, a photo of a traffic light from different perspectives, to determine as crucial anthropological constant.

The fact that the joke – like every good joke – but also contains a spark of truth, becomes when reading Martina Heßler’s »Sisyphos in the machine room. A story of the fallability of people and technology “clear: What we understand humanly as genuinely only results from the difference to the machine. In the well-readable band, the historian tells technology history as “history of modern ideas of a good, a better society” by deriving the human-technology relationship of the present based on a single double figure: the faulty person and his counterpart the infallible machine.

How man became faulty

Heßler is located because of grown up this comparison as historically and contingent, not (only) to defend the human, but with the intention of becoming visible to the history of the relationship that continues to date, which we, as humans, go into the world of machine. Your thesis: As faulty, that does not mean smoothly and regularly powerful, but irrational and prone to interference, man only applies in the title -giving machine room. Humans have always been considered imperfect, with regard to physicality, the fall and errors. However, the “faulty person” is not an anthropological constant, but a relational category and thus outgrowth of “Technikchauvinism”.

The American data journalist Meredith Broussard shaped the term, since the virtues attributed to the technological devices are considered structurally superior. While Hessler is historically still presenting young approaches that critically oppose the technical hegemony of praise in humanism, their own interest applies to the human being in relation to the machine, i.e. the technology anthropology. The re -drawn relationship is complex: on the one hand, the technical devices should incorporate or overcome, cultural -historically old human imperfections, on the other hand, they make people appear inadequate in a historically completely new way.

To refer to people as “Faulty Construction”, Hessler releases the philosopher Günther, who became known as the pessimistic critic of the atomic bomb, whose thinking runs through the book like a thread. He also comes from the concept of the “Prometheischen Degen”, which describes the discrepancy between the skills of the people and the skills of the machines, the latter output their own creators in precision, efficiency and performance.

Although a variety of votes have their say in the book, the book has a significant impact. However, what does not protect him from being historized – profitable for Heßler’s investigation. Because the technology, as the author of “the antiquity of man” describes in the middle of the 20th century, is now antiquated. While said technology chauvinistic double figure of the faulty person and the infallible machine has established itself and has been working since the early 19th century, according to the author, we have been in a new technical era since the 1970s, shaped by incorrect technology.

There modern sisyphos

In four chapters that are annoyed, Heßler follows her thinking figure through these various technical epochs: from the beginnings of industrialization to the machine euphories of 20th century to artificial intelligence and cybernetic bodies. It begins to present concepts that are directed against pronounced technology optimism and in which the focus is on people. In the second chapter, she traces the figure of the faulty person into the early 19th century and pursues the ideal of the mechanical machine, showing in the third chapter the paradoxes that the double figure in does. In addition, as it began in a historical turning point in the middle of the 20th century, she traces the man and machine (including their faultiness) relatively.

The fourth and longest chapter then devotes Heßler to the mechanical mistakes – and their effects on human life: »The subjects of freedom and lack of freedom have been exchanged. Things are free: man is unfree «. The quote from Anders, who saw people, to be demoted to the “object shepherd”, describes Heßler’s title -giving Sisyphos: driven by technologically imposed belief in progress, he continues to work on the maintenance and further development of the machines, which have long since grown beyond him and its purpose. The fact that she puts another figure of Greek mythology at the side of the famous Titan and Feuerbringer Prometheus, with whom the relationship between people to technology described differently and the relationship between people to technology is more than a tribute to the philosophers. It is the consistent transfer to the 21st century.

The technology – including the world facility accompanying it – has no longer grown over their heads. As a servant in the machine room, faulty people have to construct more and more recent and more powerful machines that produce new, more complex errors and problems. In the figure of the “modern sisyphos”, which constantly corrects mistakes in the machine room of his own world because he cannot let go of the belief in the faith of the power of technology – not rolling the stone – Hessler summarizes the introduced paradox into a clever cultural history. The book is therefore not a criticism of technology, but criticism of the “technological fix”: the conviction that has become effective in modern societies that social, political or social problems can be technically solvable and the associated reinterpretation of complex facts.

Impending terminology inflation

The volume is denied as a contribution to the debate on the technical present of the classification in a technology -optimistic or anti -technology warehouse. The fact that the author does not reveal completely new knowledge does not bother, since the strength of the book in the sovereign integration of interdisciplinary approaches is a coherent connection. It is rather questionable whether new terms such as solutionism, technological fixed and technology chicvinism are really constantly steadily.

Such a terminology flation quickly forgot that, for example, many of the same thoughts have already been made under the concept of instrumental reason characterized by Max Horkheimer. The criticism of a reduction in complex facts on a number of identifiable variables was just as core of critical theory as the problematization of a technical rational reason, which is more due to the selection and application of funds in the name of efficiency than the purpose. A connection and updating of such theoretical traditions could prevent science from making itself sisyphos.

However, the author does not draw these terms herself, but only depicts the discourse very conscientiously. This is also the small weakness of the volume: Sometimes the impressive variety of references – from engineers, computer scientists, inventors, to factory owners and historical encyclopedia to philosophers and sociologists – therefore comes a little too extensive towards the reasons and arguments for the conclusions that Hessler pulls out of the collected material. This also creates the impression of repetition.

A few years ago, Heßler published a basic work on technical anthropology, which also impressed with a broad disciplinary line -up with simultaneous basic research on anthropology, humanism and technology. With this year’s book, Heßler has now given a wider audience, a step that – despite small criticisms – succeeded in entertaining and sometimes even humorous way.

Martina Heßler: Sisyphos in the machine room. A story of the fallability of people and technology. C. H. Beck 2025, 297 pages, born, € 32.