In a delightfully cantankerous essay included in this collection of essays, Henry David Thoreau takes aim at the utopian visions of a certain J. A. Etzler. For Thoreau, Etzler's proposal to solve every social and political problem through technology—to satisfy every human need by "a short turn of some crank"—is a typical modern delusion. What techno-utopians like Etzler forget is that each crank must be turned by another crank, and the source of all this motion is "a certain divine energy in every man … which may be called the crank within."
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