MachineMachine /stream

Much of your life is now spent traveling along the American Northeast, from Baltimore to Boston. Like many who’ve plowed back and forth along this route, you’ve grown overly familiar with the spectacle of ruined industry. The railroad runs past hundreds of abandoned factories. Their graffiti-covered brickwork, their broken windows, the rusted hulks of machinery displayed in their fissured and weed-strewn vacant lots summon a sense of an age gone missing. Gone the glovers of Newark, the machinists of North Philadelphia, the arms manufacturers of Connecticut; gone the textile mills, tanneries, and foundries. In their place rose up salvage shops, junkyards, crack dens, slag piles, allegories of post-industrial American despair. Journeys along these lines can make you feel a bit like Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” facing backwards, into the past, while blown forward by “the storm called progress,” the divine wind the Japanese call “kamikaze,” which heaps ruin on ruin, disaster on di