One of the baddest dragons historians of technology had to slay was “form follows function,” the best-known articulation of modern technological determinism—the claim (or tacit assumption) that technology dictates human choice, rather than the other way around. The campaign to debunk that fallacy was part of a broader appreciation of the fact that we were too enamored of our technological “progress,” that we placed too much faith in it to solve problems and increase happiness, that our expectations of it were unrealistic, and that our trust in it was too blind, making it dangerous. So, really, this goes back to the Romantics of the early nineteenth century, the beginning of the reaction against the particular ugliness of the early “industrial age”—it goes back to “The Modern Prometheus,” the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s