Why have societies proved so incapable of abandoning fossil fuels despite overwhelming evidence of climate change? Reviewing Peter Wagner's Carbon Societies, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Sacha Loeve's Carbon, and On Barak's Heat, a History, this essay argues that these works collectively invite historians of technology to reconsider the relationship between material determinism and human agency. Rather than treating coal and oil as passive resources or locating historical change primarily in social, cultural, or political processes, the books reveal how hydrocarbons have actively shaped modern forms of freedom, material affluence, and embodied experience. Recognizing the constitutive power of nonhuman materials need not diminish human agency. Instead, a more materially grounded understanding of the reciprocal relationship between humans and hydrocarbons offers a richer explanation for both the persistence of fossil-fuel dependence and the possibilities for overcoming it in response to the climate crisis.
Histories of agrarian modernization in postcolonial India have largely treated the Green Revolution as a decisive technological rupture centered on the introduction of high-yielding seeds in the mid-1960s. Recovering the earlier adoption of the Japanese method of rice cultivation reveals a different trajectory. Many practices later associated with the Green Revolution-including improved rice varieties, intensive fertilizer use, and assured irrigation-were first assembled and tested through this Japanese-inspired technological package. As these techniques moved through experimental stations, government programs, and village communities, theywere selectively adapted, recombined, and absorbed into subsequent agricultural interventions. The history of the Japanese method thus uncovers a longer genealogy of agrarian modernization, one in which continuity, rather than rupture, shaped the making and diffusion of agricultural technology in postcolonial India.
This essay argues that Kranzberg's first law takes on renewed significance in the age of AI. Historical data are never "raw" or unbiased, and digital infrastructures and tools analyzing, visualizing, or interpreting historical datasets co-produce historical knowledge. The many digital "interferences" in how historians think, research, and narrate the past demand critical and systematic reflection on the conditions of historical knowledge production. The essay mobilizes the concept of "screwmeneutics," extension of the hermeneutic tradition that foregrounds the situated nature of historical knowledge in the digital age and the epistemological and praxeological challenges of hybrid research and teaching practices. Screwmeneutics thus calls for "thinkering": combining hands-on experimentation with digital tools (tinkering) and critical reflection on the production of knowledge (thinking).
This essay revisits Kranzberg's laws in light of developments across the history and sociology of technology over the past few decades. It interrogates the laws' anthropocentric assumptions against recent scholarship that has expanded technological agency beyond the human. It also reconsiders "technological systems" by bringing a wide range of animate and inanimate actors into accounts of technological change. This expanded perspective also complicates Kranzberg's distinction between technical and "nontechnical" factors shaping technological trajectories. The essay concludes by questioning the possibilities of assigning technologies stable moral categories of "good," "bad," or "neutral."
Melvin Kranzberg's 1986 "laws" have long served as touchstones for historians of technology, offering provocations for thinking about the complex relationships between technology and society. Forty years later, the field has expanded dramatically through global perspectives, gender history, environmental history, histories of maintenance and failure, and new studies of computing and artificial intelligence. Reflecting on both the fortieth anniversary of Kranzberg's laws and the fiftieth anniversary of Women in Technological History (WITH), this essay argues that the laws remain remarkably productive points of departure for teaching and historical inquiry. Drawing on classroom experience and recent scholarship, it shows how Kranzberg's insights can be reconsidered alongside questions of gender, equity, power, and historical contingency. Read against the field's subsequent transformations, the laws remain useful not as settled principles but as prompts for asking new questions about technology and historical change.
