Most people assume that technology and romanticism are opposed. They share this assumption with many contemporary philosophers of technology, who tend to reduce romanticism to nostalgia. This book questions these assumptions and shows that the relation between romanticism and technology is much more complex. For this purpose it delves into the history of technology and thinking about technology, from the early Romantics to hippie computing and today’s romantic cyborgs. The book updates the literature on technoromanticism, but also raises a new question: it seems that as machines become more h ... More

Most people assume that technology and romanticism are opposed. They share this assumption with many contemporary philosophers of technology, who tend to reduce romanticism to nostalgia. This book questions these assumptions and shows that the relation between romanticism and technology is much more complex. For this purpose it delves into the history of technology and thinking about technology, from the early Romantics to hippie computing and today’s romantic cyborgs. The book updates the literature on technoromanticism, but also raises a new question: it seems that as machines become more human-like and informational, they disappear from view or merge with the human. Do we witness the end of the machine? The author then discusses criticisms of romanticism and of “the end of the machine” vision he constructed. Yet the author avoids a simplistic rejection or defence of technoromantic visions; when it comes to understanding technology, the romantic tradition is more ambiguous and also more resourceful that we might suppose. The book ends with the question if and how we could ever move beyond romanticism and beyond machine thinking. It turns out that, given the persistence of our modern-romantic form of life including language and technologies, the end of the machine is not even in sight. In the meantime, we have to live with our romantic machines, with our new cyborgs. That is, we have to live with ourselves as cyborgs: living meetings, mergers, and hybrids of romanticism and technology.