industry
Dark satanic mills
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?Monumental structures
These disused gas cylinders occupy a site on the outskirts of Stockholm. For the first ten years after moving to London, the view west across the train tracks was of a similar pair of monumental structures, transfigured by every sunset. One has since been dismantled to make way for the expanding national and international railway stations.
Savage, hostile, and cruel
Some may find puzzling or distasteful the parallel I am drawing between the study of nature and the study of technology. After all, nature is good and good for you, whereas everyone knows that technology is ugly, evil, and dangerous.
A few centuries ago—say, on the American western frontier—a quite different view prevailed. Nature was seen as savage, hostile, cruel. Mountains and forests were barriers, not refuges. The lights of civilization were a comforting sight. We took our charter from the book of Genesis, which grants mankind dominion over the beasts, and felt it was both our entitlement and our duty to tame the wilderness, fell the trees, plow the land, and dam the rivers.
Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
A Book by Brian HayesThe Factory Photographs
A Book by David LynchI love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.
Scales of cities, scales of software
An Article by Linus the SephistAmerican cities seem like a product of industrial processes where older European cities seem like a product of human processes. This is because most American cities were built after and alongside the car and the industrial revolution – the design of cities took into account what was easily possible, and that guided the shape and scale of everything.
Software has similar analogues. There are software codebases that feel much more industrially generated than hand written, and they’re usually written in automation-rich environments fitting into frameworks and other orchestrating code.
…But despite the availability of cars, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of European, human-scale cities, because ultimately cities are places humans must inhabit and understand. In the same way, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of hand-written codebases even in the presence of heavy programming tooling, because ultimately codebases are places humans must inhabit.
Age of Invention
A Series by Anton HowesI’m a historian of innovation. I write mostly about the causes of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, focusing on the lives of the individual innovators who made it happen. I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers. My research explores why they became innovators, and the institutions they created to promote innovation even further.
Life-friendly design
An Article by Ralph AmmerI suggest that our industrial heritage has been an important preliminary stage. The next step is to carefully examine and implement design values that nurture our joy of life. Just like our “industrial design” illustrated our industrial values, a life-friendly design could express our biophilic values.
This optimistic design approach differs from naive nostalgia or fear of extinction. There is no way back to nature but only forward to nature.
Several Short Sentences About Writing
Here, in short, is what I want to tell you.
Know what each sentence says,
What it doesn't say,
And what it implies.
Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.
Sonorisms V
Leave space between them for the things that words can't really say.
To suggest more than the words seem to allow.
Perhaps it renames the world.
The Anxiety of Sequence.
It was all change until the very last second.
The debris of someone else's thinking.
You'll never run out of noticings.
Names that announce the whatness of the world.
What were you trying to protect?
You were protecting the memory.
The tyranny of what exists.
Do any of them sound first?
It sets an echo in motion.
Try writing for the reader in yourself.
So call it "perfection enough".
Toward the name of the world—yours to discover.Both models are completely useless
In your head, you'll probably find two models for writing.
One is the familiar model taught in high school and college—a matter of outlines and drafts and transitions and topic sentences and argument.The other model is its antithesis—the way poets and novelists are often thought to write.
Words used to describe this second model include "genius", "inspiration", "flow", and "natural", sometimes even "organic".Both models are useless.
I should qualify that sentence.
Both models are completely useless.The shape of the sentence
You've been taught to overlook the character of the prose in front of you in order to get at its meaning.
You overlook the shape of the sentence itself for the meaning it contains,
Which means that while you were reading,
All those millions of words passed by
Without teaching you how to make sentences.The Anxiety of Sequence
Much of what's taught under the name of expository writing could be called "The Anxiety of Sequence."
Its premise is this:
To get where you're going, you have to begin in just the right place
And take the proper path,
Which depends on knowing where you plan to conclude.You can get anywhere from anywhere
And if you can get anywhere from anywhere,
You can start anywhere
And end anywhere.
There is no single necessary order.Significant everywhere
Writing isn't a conveyor belt bearing the reader to "the point" at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed.
Good writing is significant everywhere,
Delightful everywhere.It was all change until the very last second
Every work of literature is the result of thousands and thousands of decisions.
Intricate, minute decisions—this word or that, here or where, now or later, again and again.
It's the living tissue of a writer's choices,
Not the fossil record of an ancient, inspired race.Attention requires a cunning passivity.
A renaming of the already named
A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language,
A renaming of the already named.
It's meant to expire in a sudden flash of light
And to reveal—in that burst of illumination—
A correspondence that must be literally accurate.The debris of someone else's thinking
A cliché isn't just a familiar, overused saying.
It's the debris of someone else's thinking.How each sentence got that way
When the work is really complete, the writer knows how each sentence got that way.
This small internal quaver
Pay attention now:
No matter how much you know or learn about syntax, grammar, or rhetoric,
This small internal quaver, this inner disturbance,
Is the most useful evidence you'll ever get.
Someday, you'll be able to articulate what causes it.
But for now, what's important is to notice it.
Noticing is always the goal....the faint vertigo caused by an ambiguity you can't quite detect.
What matter is what it points to.
Find out what's causing it and fix it
Even if you're not sure how.The urge to be done
"Flow" is often a synonym for ignorance and laziness.
It's also a sign of haste, the urge to be done.Talking and writing
Talking is natural.
Writing is not.It may seem strange that the manual dexterity needed to hold a pencil—or use a keyboard—comes later than the lingual and mental dexterity needed to speak.
But it does.What were you trying to protect?
As the piece evolves, you try to protect those original, effusive sentences.
Only to realize, at last, that what you're writing won't come together until they've been removed or revised.What were you trying to protect?
The memory of the excitement you felt when those words "came to you."
(Where did they "come" from?)
You were protecting the memory
of the excitement of really concentrating,
of paying close attention to your thoughts and, perhaps, your sentences,
the excitement of feeling the galvanic link between language and thought.The discoveries you make in the making
Style is an expression of the interest you take in the making of every sentence.
It emerges, almost without intent, from your engagement with each sentence.
It's the discoveries you make in the making of the prose itself.Where ambiguity rules, there is no "style"—or anything else worth having.
Pursue clarity instead.
In the pursuit of clarity, style reveals itself.The virtue of already existing
It can be overwhelming—the inertia of the paragraphs and pages you've already composed, the sentences you've already written,
No matter how rough they are.Whether you love what you've written or not,
Those sentences have the virtue of already existing,
Which makes them better than sentences that don't exist.
Or so it seems.Composition and revision
Revise at the point of composition.
Compose at the point of revision.
Think of composition and revision as the same thing.Squander your material
Squander your material.
Don't ration it, saving the best for last.
You don't know what the best is.
Or the last.Do any of them sound first?
Just try out some sentences.
Lots of them.
See how they sound.
Do any of them sound first?You're holding an audition.
Many sentences will try out.
One gets the part.We have testimony
Proof is for mathematicians.
Logic is for philosophers.
We have testimony.When you're interested in what you're working on
It's never hard to work when you're interested in what you're working on.
But what if you hate what you're working on?
It helps to examine the content of your loathing.
What is it you hate?The work selects its audience
Imagine a cellist playing one of Bach's solo suites.
Does he consider his audience?
(Did Bach, for that matter?)
Does he play the suit differently to audiences
Of different incomes and educations and social backgrounds?
No. The work selects its audience.