Where Is Technology in the History of Philosophy?

What if the first technology wasn’t the wheel or the fire—but sex?

Not the act, but the knowledge of it, the knowledge that we can do things differently, in different ways to produce different results.

In Hebrew, to know is to enter. In Greek, epistēmē (ἐπιστήμη) means to understand. Somewhere between these two—between flesh and concept—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.
Heidegger saw it too: “Enframing blocks the shining-forth of truth.” Technology, for him, is not a tool but a lens, a grid, a command. It orders the world before the world has even had a chance to appear.

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.
Then come the masons and the clockmakers. Masonry—the secret art of structure. The clock—the secret art of time. The world reimagined as mechanism, God as its engineer.

And then: printing presses, cameras, phonographs, telephones, steam engines, atomic bombs, penicillin, anesthesia, mRNA, CRISPR, computers, cars, planes.
Each invention a collapse of distance, a rearrangement of what can be touched, known, or broken apart. The world dissolves into models—mathematical, chemical, digital—and is rebuilt from invisible fragments.

Philosophers tell this story in binaries: subject and object, operator and operated.
Heidegger calls it standing reserve—the world as inventory, as potential resource awaiting activation. Everything, even a forest or a thought, becomes pre-processed for use.

But maybe that’s not the whole story.
If sex is the first technology, then technology is not just external—it is intimacy with how we do anything at all. Ellul’s “string of techniques” might just as well describe our own nervous systems, our rituals, our habits of thought.

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.
Maybe it was between being and being measured.

So what would technology look like without measurement?
What would invention feel like if it didn’t need to be improved?