I tend to ask people what they think first because I've been taught that it's sort of the polite way to debate. I can come up with ideas too, but oftentimes what you see seems a lot more clear than my ideas to me. So I've been trying to accommodate that.

I'm not saying that technology has to develop exactly the same way, but there are enough threads and comparisons that I think things do have to happen in roughly the same order. As an obvious example, the internet can't come about before computers. Or the modern transistor really can't come about before vacuum tubes, unless you say that they skipped vacuum tubes entirely somehow, which would just seem odd to me. I've been thinking of it as mostly parallel development with a bit more study of magic and mind control as well. 

To be clear, I'm no historian or anything. It's just I have enough understanding that sometimes things just don't make sense to me. Because I'm not a great historian, if I change the order on technology, the world becomes much more complicated, and I don't have the knowledge to make it make sense.

Like, the internet did not exist before the war, because it couldn't have. To have something like the internet, you need the transistor, fiber optic technology, and enough programming for at least 70-80s level computers. To me, things couldn't have developed another way, at least if the primary species is human. 

But I'm fine with making smaller decisions. Here's an important one. I really need Joseph to have been captured during or right after the war. It's just how I've imagined his backstory already. Otherwise, I need a good explanation for how he could have been a slave before slavery of magicals was widespread. Was it legal just like it was legal to have a human slave? Was it somehow off the books? Maybe the Vandros family called him an indentured servant and he was really a slave? Of course, then the hard breaking technology/magic has to have been developed prior to the war, in which case why was it developed and why wasn't it used sooner? As you can see, it starts to be simpler if he was captured during or after the war. Additionally, it would give him a bit of a connection with Erik.