In Hebrew, to know is to participate in, to enter. In Greek, epistēmē (ἐπιστήμη) means to understand. Somewhere between these two—between flesh and concept— participation and observation – science was born: the dream of separating objective knowledge from subjective belief. Technology has always promised to take the side of the objective, to build machines that know better than we do.
But the first tools were not circuits or gears—they were vessels and pigments, cosmetics and combs, medicines and weapons. Tools of transformation, tools of care, tools of harm. The Bronze Age brought metallurgy, and with it, the revelation of process: a sequence of acts that could be repeated, perfected, scaled. Jacques Ellul called this the birth of the technological society—a civilization of chained techniques, feeding on their own momentum, until technique itself becomes sovereign.
Sovereign over what? Over the spontaneous arising of action—over the way things simply are.
Follow the thread forward: the wheel, the chariot, concrete, roads, money, laws, empires, priesthoods—all architectures of ordering. Organization itself is a kind of machine, a choreography of obedience.
And then: printing presses, cameras, phonographs, telephones, steam engines, atomic bombs, penicillin, anesthesia, mRNA, CRISPR, computers, cars, planes.
Philosophers tell this story in binaries: subject and object, operator and operated.
But maybe that’s not the whole story.
Modern optimization adds a new clause: not only how do we do something, but how do we do it better? Faster? Measurably? To measure anything is to create a boundary—to make an inside and an outside. This, quantum mechanics reminds us, is the moment of rupture: when the act of measurement changes the thing measured.
Maybe the first duality wasn’t between human and machine.
So what would technology look like without measurement?