[T]o Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity.  As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring -- scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power -- while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.  Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

-- The Education of Henry Adams.  1918.

It is not the rush to digitization that bothers me; I think it both understandable and inevitable that our analog culture be uplifted onto the network.  It is the question of what comes with it, that we can question only looking across the narrow angles, through the shadow and morning light of a day just breaking.

No, it is rather that we are walking away from rooms of cold stone and warm wood into tilings of glass, and all of footsteps are residing there, to be tracked through the dust of our new beliefs.

We gain so much; yet we may be losing a complexity, the nooks and crannies of private experiences, that made life bearable, far beyond the stretch of our furtherest memories.

We become embedded, inviolably, into something greater than ourselves, beyond a human-formed culture, a network of information from which we shall never again be extricated, and as we enter the weave of the cloth we are turning, we change the ways that we must perceive ourselves, and understand our world.   

Neither of them felt goddesses as power -- only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art.  All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. 

-- The Education of Henry Adams.  1918.