It was precisely this need to adapt ourselves to nature that James Watt’s steam engine purportedly liberated us from in the late 1770s, when it freed factory owners from having to find the best waterfalls, and ship captains from worrying about the prevailing winds. As Andreas Malm writes, the first commercial steam engine “was appreciated for having no ways or places of its own, no external laws, no residual existence outside that brought forth by its proprietors; it was absolutely, indeed ontologically subservient to those who owned it.”
