Technology in Teraell
Technology in the Known World is understood as a practical gift of reason. Machines exist to improve health, reduce unnecessary toil, and make a life more comfortable. What they do not do, and what nobody would want them to do, is reason for the person using them. A man who lets a machine decide for him has given up the gift of reason to it.
A thing made well
The Known World builds things to last and to be looked at. A stove is an object someone made, and the making is visible: brasswork finished properly, a case that fits, engraving where engraving belongs. Households put their family sigil on the things they intend to keep, which is most things; a good cold cabinet outlives the person who bought it. This is not frugality — Shining Reach spends enormously and replaces what it wears every season. What nobody does is buy a thing made carelessly, because a thing made carelessly has nobody behind it. Crude, disposable, and needlessly complicated machines are disdained for the same reason; the complication is usually hiding a maker showing off or one who has not understood the problem.
Somebody answers for it
Every system anyone depends on has a person responsible for it — the closest thing the world has to a doctrine about machines. An engineer answers for the pumps that raise a city's water; a Kolaerth for the collars he makes; a tender for the Fraeska in a ship's hold; someone in Clearhold for the archive vents opening on a schedule set generations ago. Nobody states this as a principle. What they say is that a man should look after his things, and everyone knows whose fault it is when the pump fails, which makes it a matter of Station rather than a philosophy of technology.
What cannot be handed to a machine is answerability, and that is the only thing the standard protects. A man's slave lights the fire and his engineer maintains the pumps, and nobody thinks less of him; the work still comes back to a person who answers for it. In practice the question rarely arises, because nothing in the Known World could take it over. A mechanism is springs and gears; it sorts, stirs, winds, strikes the hour, and plays tunes, and cannot run a house.
By city
Forgegate makes the best of nearly everything and displays working mechanisms on its guild halls. Shining Reach builds clockwork into its architecture rather than fitting it on afterward. Clearhold maintains everything to an exact schedule and considers that the whole of the art. Stormharbor keeps what it needs and keeps it working. Eldershore takes every innovation in from everywhere and has the most varied collection in the world. The Iron Coves assemble what came off a ship. Six cities agreeing on the principle and expressing it differently.
What does not emerge
Large steam engines that would move armies and cargo across the world. Industrial production making goods by the thousand. Mass-produced hulls. Weapons that fire faster than a man can aim. Anything that would let one city overwhelm another, and anything that makes goods faster than the world can absorb them. The Known World attributes their absence to the triumph of Reason and the Natural Order: such things erode character and concentrate power where it should not sit, and a people who understood what machines were for would not build them. Underneath the philosophy is something harder to argue with — people have tried, and boilers past a certain size fail, and have failed for every man who attempted one in nine hundred years. A thing that has never once worked is a thing the world concludes does not work, and the Academy has written at length on why, and finds its reasoning sound.