Essays/The American Technological Project Turns 250

The American Technological Project Turns 250

Sangeetha Bharath

The American political experiment has, since its nascency, espoused science and technology as integral components. Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power:

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

Our earliest political leaders were all notably founders and entrepreneurs; Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were inventors as much as they were statesmen. Today, whether or not they should, tech magnates like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg take on disproportionate leadership in governance.

American science moves capital toward uncertain returns with unusual speed. The same ecosystem that produced the GPS, the transistor, and the mRNA vaccine also built the surveillance economy and the atomic bomb: the machinery of American innovation has always produced its blessings and terrors on the same assembly line.

I recently read David Nye’s “American Technological Sublime” which explores the social construction of technology and the politics of perception in industrial society. The philosophical concept of the “sublime,” as advanced by the likes of Kant and Burke, captures the feeling produced by engagement with vastly terrifying or awesome objects. Historically reserved for natural phenomena, the “sublime” in Nye’s essay newly applies to the awe inspired by man-made technology.

The “sublime” can weld society together. Moments of sublimity are unitive, tapping into fundamental hopes and fears. They allow humanity escape, if only temporarily, from division.

We have experienced the sublime in our confrontation with impressive technology, such as railroads, the steam engine, the atomic bomb, the Golden Gate Bridge, and in the last few decades, the Internet, reusable spaceflight, and cloud computing.

America has demonstrated the “power of man to manufacture the sublime,” as explored by historian Roland Marchand in his book “Advertising the American Dream,” which considers how and why advertising has become a determiner of our self-image. To advertise is to capture attention, which in the American collective consciousness represents striking new ways to capitalize on our anxieties and to promise comfort for the masses.

Today, America turns 250 years old and stands in front of its newest sublime object—AI—feeling awe, dread, terror all at once. AI has made the power of man to manufacture the sublime easier, faster, and more efficient, dramatically accelerating a changing American self-image.

Nye calls out that “a society is not simply constituted by a mass of individuals who compose it, by the territory they occupy, by the things they use and the actions they perform, but above all by the idea it has about itself.”¹ Since the early 19th century, the technological sublime has been one of America’s central “ideas about itself,” and today more than ever, the sublime has a shadow.

Man manufactures the sublime only to confront himself and his darkest fears with it. Techno-ambivalence has surged. The same awe curdles into dread. People are frustrated by engagement algorithms, paywalls, data harvesting, their lack of personal privacy, their exploitation by corporate America.

Brookings, a century-old American think tank in D.C. conducting research on how economic development and governance impact social welfare and opportunity, published a commentary called “Technology and America’s Good Times”² in 2001. I read this piece alongside Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research’s (SIEPR) outlook for the U.S. economy in 2026.³

Both essays place technology at the center of the American economic story. The 2001 essay is confident despite being written in the middle of a recession, after the dot-com crash. The internet still read as an unambiguous engine of productivity, and the essay considers how to keep it running. The 2026 essay is anxious, written with AI cast not as an engine but as an open question, its promise overshadowed by fears of a bubble, of displacement, and stagnation.

How long does it take technology to reach broad access and meaningful social good? The SIEPR brief argues that it takes decades for firms to absorb new tools. The industrial electric motor took 30 years to reach 80% adoption. The productivity surge celebrated by Brookings in 2001 was actually the long-delayed payoff of the personal computer that had, in fact, arrived an entire generation before.

By that logic, AI sits early on its own curve. This is the sublime doing what it always does, inspiring both confidence and dread. The sublime, after all, is felt instantaneously; its dividends arrive slowly, if at all.

Notwithstanding America’s “love-hate” relationship with technology, conflicted between the drive for innovation and the mitigation of its societal side-effects, the American public’s affection for spectacular technology persists. Space centers, science museums, and architectural feats draw millions of visitors yearly. Rocket launches are public events.

The technological sublime is so much a part of contemporary consciousness that I’d argue technology is America’s civil religion. If so, what is the role of faith? At 250 years old, can America still feel a unifying wonder?