Modern technology and the state evolved symbiotically, in constant dialogue. Think of how technology facilitated the state’s core working parts, helping construct the edifice of national identity and administration. Writing was invented as an administrative and accounting tool to keep track of debts, inheritances, laws, taxes, contracts, and records of ownership. The clock produced set times, first in limited spaces like monasteries but then in mechanical form across late medieval mercantile cities and eventually across nations, creating common, and ever larger, social units. The printing
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