We are, as an advanced twenty-first century American society, increasingly devoid of awe. There is little that can surprise or excite us; we are weary of the gadgets, wary of artificial intelligence, and prepared to legislate, if possible, the poison of social media out of our lives. We can’t quit our smartphones but there’s a consensus all of this twitching and flinching and blue light can’t be good for us. Once, the tech was wondrous: the automobile, the radio, the television, the fax machine, the personal computer, the internet to meld it all, to give us an eternity of knowledge at a keystroke. If Thoreau could bemoan the encroachment of the locomotive on nature, we could agree, as time dragged on, there was plenty ameliorative to industrialization, as long as rapacious capitalism could be held in check. Modernity vaulted us forward. The successive technological revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth century made diamonds, it seemed, out of dust.
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