An age’s defining technology shapes the consciousness of its writers

Evidence

Odysseus and his contemporaries preceded the Iron Age and could not have known how iron’s hissing heralded a molecular hardening of historic significance. But Homer, who lived a couple of centuries after the Trojan War, was a child of the Iron Age, and thus came of age in the midst of the technological and social revolution that steel had wrought. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 43

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is there a genuine methodological claim here about technology shaping literary imagination, or just a rhetorical flourish from Varoufakis? Worth tracing when his historical materialist argument later appears.
• XREF: connects to: A fear of machine consciousness has defined Western storytelling for millennia — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 275; Modernist writers and artists modeled creative work on machine rationality. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 240; The distracted digital age prevents the contemplative conclusion that constitutes reason — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 165 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Modernist writers and artists modeled creative work on machine rationality. #exemplifies (0.90) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 240
• Computers offer poets a chance to reconnect poetic and scientific knowledge. #exemplifies (0.85) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 437
• Tools encode the structures of thought of their makers #expands (0.82) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 397
• The distracted digital age prevents the contemplative conclusion that constitutes reason #exemplifies (0.78) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 165
• Speculative technologies function as the grammar of capitalism’s vernacular imagination #exemplifies (0.75)