30 December

This is one of Ancient Rome’s sewers. Still surviving, great engineering. I don’t think it’s well recognised that technology is what actually binds us together. For example, bridges in the US currently need more than $140 billion in maintenance, to stop them collapsing. You could look on that as a technical problem, but that amount of money shows the degree of social inter-connectedness technologies require, to function. Building things binds people to those same things, otherwise they collapse and the societies they enable collapse. Engineers build societies, not structures.