Venkatesh Rao, writing for Aeon Magazine:
The Hamiltonian heartland is a land of Brobdingnagian and Lilliputian proportions. It is a land of cryptic and inaudible conversations between radio-frequency ID scanners and passing railroad cars, and records too numerous for the Guinness Book to track. It is also a land of millions upon millions of serial numbers: on doors, pieces of equipment, cowlings, pipes, pylons, and an ocean of smaller technological artefacts so vast that, in economics classrooms, they have to be collectively obscured under the label widgets.
If the proportions of the Hamiltonian heartland defy our spatial intuitions, its pace of evolution defies our temporal intuitions. In the time it takes for the heartland to change significantly — 50 to 70 years on average, in the case of major technologies such as the railroad — human-scale heroes typically grow old and die. But change does occur. Periods of technological equilibrium are punctuated by periods of rapid change, creating technological epochs. Each such epoch creates a new layer of visible changes in the Hamiltonian heartland, and corresponding changes in institutions.
I like Venkat’s writing, and I liked this piece in particular, but mostly because of the reference to “infrastructure porn.”
It’s true that the Whole Foods-ian interface to a vast and unforgiving industrial production machine is a bit of a deceptive veneer, but Venkat is passing a value judgment on that veneer, a highly Jeffersonian act in itself: the infrastructure of consumer culture doesn’t care that he’s pulled back the curtain and found it lacking.