No infrastructure pilgrimage can be complete without a reverential pause before a phallic god of destructive power. Menhirs and obelisks will not do for our age. Neither will skyscrapers, which are merely symbols of humanity’s child-like greedy grasping at earthly pleasures. Out in the heartland, among the grain silos (cornucopias?) where I began my pilgrimage, are scattered very different sorts of silos. Silos containing ballistic missiles, designed to soar up and kiss space, home to our loftiest aspirations, before diving back down to destroy us. (p. 13)
We forget that nature is the first and original system of evolving creative destruction. Schumpeter’s model of the economy came along later. (p. 19)
Taking refuge in numbers when faced with technological complexity is in part an acknowledgment of the poverty of a poetically enacted humanist life script . Numbers are how we grope for the trans-human. (p. 31)
We never build technology that will actually relieve the load on us and make things simpler. We only end up building technology that creates MORE work for us. (p. 104)
Venkatesh Rao, Towards an Appreciative View of Technology
