Of all the myriad “unintended consequences” and “creative reactions” arising from ruined bits of our current system, the most important is this: inventors and corporations, every bit as much as individuals, are thinking about what can be accomplished by small actions and collective efforts. They are doing so en masse for the first time since the domestication of electricity in the 1880s. The cumulative effect of this new emphasis on “small” is to wrest control away from big men accustomed to fighting their battles on a grand scale. America’s infrastructure is being colonized by a new logic:
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