In the mid-1990s, technocritics worried that using the Internet would be like “drinking from a firehose,” as Cliff Stoll put it.

Other industrial suburbs, southwest of the city, include Feng-t'ai, with railroad marshalling yards, bridge-construction, concrete railroad ties and asbestos-pipe factories, and Ch'ang-hsin-tien, with locomotive and rolling-stock shops.

Hence we see the amazing Subtlety of this Fire, which pervades Glass as readily as if nothing were in the Way.

Yet this crucial break did not become an environmental threat until the counion of science and technology in the nineteenth century.