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.
The Age of the Essay
Essayer
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Expressing ideas helps to form them
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
Flow interesting (The Meander)
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea.
The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.