Flint

Panning back to the beginnings: flint, of the silicate mineral family and thus a salt, is not only the first tool used by man- and womankind to carve, cut, and dig, but is, more than thirty thousand years ago, also the first substance to be actively mined (an early indication of the circular spiral of our silicate dependency).

Jump-cut to our present-day obsession with silicon and its uncanny valley: birthplace of the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, home and HQ of countless Fortune 1,000 businesses, a lot of capitalism, and a growing hamlet of neural networks. The metal-oxide-silicon field-effect transistor, or MOSFET, was invented in 1959 and has since become the most widely manufactured device in our history, ushering in the Silicon Age.