Botched Little Animals

Anatomy of a Laboratory Mouse

I was reading a recent interview with the music critic Simon Reynolds — I reviewed his book Retromania years ago — when I stopped short at this:

In one of his blogs, [the late English writer Mark Fisher] talked about going to the countryside and how amazing it was. He said, ‘It really opened my eyes. I now see birds as marvellous little machines’. And I thought, why not see machines as botched little animals?

Yes, I said. Yes.

Ever since the rise, in the seventeenth ce...