C.P. Snow; The Two Cultures:

But nearly all of them -- and this is where the colour of hope genuinely comes in -- would see no reason why, just because the individual condition is tragic, so must the social condition be. Each of us is solitary: each of us dies alone: all right, that's a fate against which we can't struggle-but there is plenty in our condition which is not fate, and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle.

Most of our fellow human beings, for instance, are underfed and die before their time. In the crudest terms, that is the social condition. There is a moral trap which comes through the insight into man's loneliness: it tempts one to sit back, complacent in one's unique tragedy, and let the others go without a meal.

As a group, the scientists fall into that trap less than others. They are inclined to be impatient to see if something can be done: and inclined to think that it can be done, until it's proved otherwise. That is their real optimism, and it's an optimism that the rest of us badly need.

Hi there,
I'm not sure that what I write (I used to write a column for the Noosa News in Qld, Australia, as part of my work around sustainable living issues) is terribly academic or journalistically correct, but we used to try to take a lighter look at the big issues that are facing us. Numbers 1, 43 and 34 are around technology and 'affluenza'

Go to www.livingsmartnoosa.com > Resources >Noosa News LS Columns Archive. I'm going to keep checking in with this website now that a friend has helped me find you...Love it!
Regards
Jo

"In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines."

George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines

What better source of technology love (and hate, and inevitibility, and futurism, and just about everything else) is there than practically the entire oevre of Vernor Vinge? As a storyteller he's brilliant - his description of dog-like and spider-like species and their unique relationships to technology are truly inspired. His views on the Singularity, where basically we become so entangled in our technology that we simply evolve ourselves out of existence, are provocative. And bobbling into the future to find the clock in 10,000 years? Sign me up!

For first case in literature of car worship? See:
The Wind in the Willows, K Grahame
Chapter 2 see
http://www.projects.ex.ac.uk/trol/grol/index.htm

Saw a comment about this song... Here's the link:

http://www.godofconcrete.org

Tom Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, is a drum&bass producer. He reflects on machines in an essay called "Collaborating with machines"
http://www.warprecords.com/news/?offset=0&ti_id=789&filter=sqp

As is commonly percieved, the relationship between a human operator and a machine is such that the machine is a tool, an instrument of the composer's desires. Implicit in this, and generally unquestioned until recently, is the sovereignty of the composer. What is now becoming clear is that the composer is as much a tool as the tool itself, or even a tool for the machine to manifest its desires. I do not mean this in the sense that machines are in possesion of a mind capable of subtly directing human behaviour, but in the sense that the attributes of the machine are just as prominent an influence in the resulting artefact as the user is; through his work, a human operator brings as much about the machine to light as he does about himself. However, this is not to say that prior to electronic mechanisation, composers were free and unfettered in their creations. As a verbal langauge facilitates and constricts our thoughts, the musical tradition, language and the factors of its realisation(ie instrumentation, limits of physical ability) were just as active participants in the compositional process as the "composer" was.

As mentioned above, Roland Barthes (in Mythologies) on the Citroen DS.

Thomas Skelton dreaming about and designing his skiff in Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two in the Shade.

Geoffrey "Pirate" Prentice ruminating on his awkward Italian automatic pistol in Gravity's Rainbow.

Richard Thompson's song "Vincent Black Lightning 1952".

As Nicholson Baker observed a decade ago, the text on the back of Dover Press paperbacks has the beauty of a poem: "We have made every effort to make this the best book possible. Our paper is opaque, with minimal show-through; it will not discolor or become brittle with age. Pages are bound in signatures, in the method traditionally used for the best books, and will not drop out. Books open flat for easy reference. The binding will not crack or split. This is a permanent book."

How about the hymn "God of Concrete, God of Steel" by Frederick Clarke? See http://www.flyingfists.org/archives/003114.html for the lyrics and an MP3 of the melody.

Robert M Pirsig's "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" is alot about his attitude towards technology versus his friends who represent most people.
The first section of part 1 is a great ilustration of it.

It starts with a great passage about the love of motorbikes:

"You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming ... and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness."

Being a biker myself , I resonate with these words very deeply.

And more, about technology:
"The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha...which is to demean oneself."

From: http://virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/PirsigZen/part1.html

Dear Kevin, This subject for your next book is very inspiring and I'd love to read it when it's out.
Furthermore, your "Help wanted" section where you query your readers (collective inteligence indeed) should serve as an example to whoever wants to grow and learn.

I have to add, that one of the best texts about the love of technology (as an enabler) is YOUR wired article "we are the web", which inspired me to look you up and read your books.

Good luck and all the best !

Sincerely,
Eyal.

The Victorian Internet - the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century's on-line pioneers. by Tom Standage

Berkley Books, 1998

from: http://motorcycleinfo.calsci.com/index.html#Intro

A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pana-Vision and than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree- smells and flower- smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.

Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over half a dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride one of the best things I've done.

Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.

- Dave Karlotski.

Though not literature, I always found this video provocative and it does fit somewhat into the parameters of your question. By showing technology that is capable of being 'in love' they make it more feasable for humans to actual love technology. Do human beings truly love anything that is not capable of loving us back?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wxBO28j3vug&search=bjork%20love

As someone who waxes lyrical or poetic about technology and metaphors, I submit this little poem about my friend's MRI.

The MRI

measured magnetic resonance
clicking clanks of cranial scan
expose her strokes of genius
imaged as little white dots
still shots of God's light
shining brightly from her brain

Paula R. Randall

anything by William Gibson (Case stroking his deck in Neuromancer).
Also, EM Forster's 'The Machine Stops':
"Sitting up in bed she took it reverently in her hands. She glanced round the glowing room as if someone might be watching her. Then, half ashames, hlaf joyful, she murmured 'O Machine!' and raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence."

In my book, Why We Garden, I go into depth about the sheer joy of weedeating with my Stihl string machine. Here's one small part of that chapter:

Weedeating is different from lawn mowing. I regard it as lawn mowing for the individualist hunter/gatherer, a suburban warrior’s version of weed maintenance. A weedeater operator targets individual plants one a time, draws a bead on the quarry like a Jivaro hunter aiming a blowgun at a gamebird. Like a blowgunner displaying his prowess, I feel a certain pride at my hand-to-eye dexterity. When I’m focused, I am able to sever all the chickweed surrounding a patch of pole beans without so much as grazing a bean plant. I secretly compare this acquired adroitness to the light touch a guitar player employs to coax melodies from the strings. Am I the only one who views weedeating and guitar playing as parallel art forms? Whirrrr goes the rotating string blade. One more blackberry plant artfully severed at the root.
If weedeating seems a task fit for Jivaro hunters and B.B. King, then lawn-mowing seems analogous to seems a cross between Zen meditation and a parade-ground drill. Put on your ear mufflers and let your mind drift off into the cosmic blither even as your legs goose-step around the yard. But there is nothing artful or dexterous about it. The task offers the same non-relationship to individual plants that a bombardier expresses to his individual victims when he pushes a red button to drop a bomb out of the belly of an airplane.

i always liked this one...

"We have divers curious clocks and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures and illusions, and their fallacies.

These are, my son, the riches of Salomon's House."

- Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis

A belated thanks to the many excerpts of poems, songs and writings posted below. I was particularly tickled by the fetishizing of the watch collectors. This is the sort of infatuation I was seeking. I bet you would find similar love in the other common techno-fetishes -- cars, boats, model trains and so on.

And the Nathanial Hawthorne passage is simply outstanding!

Thanks.

check out Michael Crichton's Jurrasic Park and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon

A somewhat mixed review of electricity and the telegraph from Chapter 17 of The House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851:
"Then there is electricity!--the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford. "Is that a humbug, too? Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!"

"If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye toward its wire, alongside the rail-track, "it is an excellent thing;--that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics don't get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir; particularly as regards the detection of bank-robbers and murderers."

"I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford. "A bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights, which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and holy missions. Lovers, day by day,--hour by hour if so often moved to do it,--might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some such words as these,--'I love you for ever!--My heart runs over with love!'--'I love you more than I can!'--and, again, at the next message,--'I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!' Or, when a good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him,--'Your dear friend is in bliss!' Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings thus,--'An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment come from God!'--and immediately its little voice would seem to have reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor rogues, the bank-robbers,--who, after all, are about as honest as nine people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and prefer to transact business at midnight, rather than 'Change-hours,--and for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public benefactors, if we consider only its result,--for unfortunate individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world-hunt at their heels!"

The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.

— C. G. Jung

We are, unfortunately, a nation that values technology and wealth much more than we value community, and the result is the wasted land that lies all around me. If our species is to make it through this century, the forces of science and technology must be tempered by two other forces — ethics and aesthetics. All ethical philosophies, from Aristotle on down, are based on this ecological principle as stated by Leopold: “The individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.” And as the cave art at Lascaux makes brilliantly clear, we are a species that has evolved to find beauty in the natural world. This trait serves — or should serve — an evolutionary purpose: we love what we find beautiful, and we do not destroy what we love. A strip job is more than a moral failure; it is a failure of the imagination. It is time we stopped thinking like those who conquer a mountain and started thinking like the mountain itself.

— Erik Reece, the conclusion to Death Of A Mountain, about strip mining in the Appalachians, in Harper’s, April 2005

Man’s conquest of nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be nature’s conquest of man.

— C. S. Lewis

I believe this is from an old _Wired_ article, circa 1995. I've loved it and hung on to it all these years...

"Hacking is like building a scale-model cathedral out of toothpicks, except that if one toothpick is out of place the whole cathedral will disappear. And then you have to feel around for the invisible cathedral, trying to figure out which toothpick is wrong. Debuggers make it a little easier, but not much, since a truly screwed-up cutting-edge program is entirely capable of screwing up the debugger as well, so that then it's like you're feeling around for the missing toothpick with a stroke-crippled claw-hand.

"But, ah, the dark dream beauty of the hacker grind against the hidden wall that only you can see, the wall that only you wail at, you the programmer, with the brand new tools that you make up as you go along, your special new toothpick lathes and jigs and your realtime scrimshaw shaver, you alone in the dark with your wonderful tools."

- Rudy Rucker

Read some thoughts about the Mazda Miata, you'll find plenty of love for technology. A favorite quote of mine:

"The car has a soul that not many cars have. It literally becomes an extension of your body when you drive it. Just yesterday, I bombing some mountian roads on the way home, and I realized that in some ways, it was still more fun than the new Corvette that sits next to it in the garage. It's a different kind of fun, but realizing that I knew exactly where every corner of my car was, and that she was as nimble as feral cat, and she's as tossable as a beach ball, and that she fit into spaces that no other car will fit, and the way she talks. Oh God, it's like an intoxicating siren call -- she begs to beaten, she begs to be ridden hard, she tells you exactly what she wants and she never tricks you, never lies to you, never tells you anything that you don't want to hear."

THE ENGINEER

"It is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer's high privilege.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny he did it. If his works do not work, he is dammed . . .

On the other hand, unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. No doubt as years go by the people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people's money . . .

But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolade he wants."

Herbert Hoover
President of the United States of America and Mining Engineer

Bruce Springsteen's debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ is one of my favourite albums, and has this to say about technology and sex.

THE ANGEL

The angel rides with hunch-backed children, poison oozing from his engine
Wieldin' love as a lethal weapon, on his way to hubcap heaven
Baseball cards poked in his spokes, his boots in oil he's patiently soaked
The roadside attendant nervously jokes as the angel's tires strokes his precious pavement

The interstate's choked with nomadic hordes
in Volkswagen vans with full running boards dragging great anchors
Followin' dead-end signs into the sores
The angel rides by humpin' his hunk metal whore

Madison Avenue's claim to fame in a trainer bra with eyes like rain
She rubs against the weather-beaten frame and asks the angel for his name
Off in the distance the marble dome
reflects across the flatlands with a naked feel off into parts unknown
The woman strokes his polished chrome and lies beside the angel's bones.

More about technology and love. Here's another one, fairly obscure. An Australian band called Dear Enemy. The song is called Computer One, from 1983. I have it on vinyl and found one site where a die-hard fan had transcribed the lyrics - thanks to Row on www.80smusiclyrics.com.

Computer One, I'd like to ask a question please
Exactly where does love go wrong
I thought she knew how much she meant to me
I turned around to see
She was gone

(Chorus)
So tell me
Computer One
Why did she run?
Where has she gone?
Computer One

Computer One, if you know all they say you do
Why isn't the answer on the screen
Do you sleep at night when the program's through
Or do you lie awake at night like me

Chorus

Computer One, you are the one I've been talking to
Maybe that's where I went wrong
All the secrets that I told to you
I should have told to her
All along

Chorus

Recent email signature I thought up:

Programming is the Magic Executable Fridge Poetry, It is machines made of thought, fueled by ideas.

I believe that techno-ecstacy does exist...

Overheard on a message board from someone who had just found a solution to a technical problem they were facing...

"Thank God for Google"

But it is the memories tend to be short-lived (like a dream after waking), misdirected ('I love the feel of wind in my hair' says nothing about the technical precision of the engine), and unconsciously addictive (why else would we see such unprecedented growth rates?)

It may have something to do with success & failure with inadequate user experiences...always wanting more because you know more is possible but getting caught up in today's interface quirks or power limitations. The rat that gets food everytime stops eating, the one that gets food arbitrarily keeps pressing the button.

One of the characters in William Gibson's "Idoru" uses a computer called a Sandbenders...

"Tell me about Sandbenders," Masahiko said, putting the controller away and buttoning his tunic.

"It started with a woman who was an interface designer," Chia said, glad to change the subject. "Her husband was a jeweller, and he'd died of that nerve-attenuation stuff, before they saw how to fix it. But he'd been a big green too, and he hated the way consumer electronics were made, a couple of little chips and boards inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there. . . . And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone. . . .And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions.

Masahiko's eyes were closed, and he seemed to be nodding slightly, though perhaps only with the motion of the train.

"And it turned out that people liked that, too, liked it a lot. He started getting commissions to make these things. One of the first was for a keyboard, and the keys were cut from the keys of an old piano, with the numbers and letters in silver. But then he got sick . . ."

"So after he was dead, the software designer started thinking about all that, and how she wanted to do something that took what he'd been doing into something else. So she cashed out her stock in all the companies she'd worked for, and she bought some land in Oregon—"
-----------

Also try "Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology" by David Gelernter

I second the Ted Nelson book, because it was printed back-to-back with ANOTHER Ted Nelson paradigm: Down the Computer Priesthood!

Ted in '74 was adamant about Baha'u'llah's directive: "From two ranks amongst mankind hath power been seized.... kings and ecclesiastics" (priesthoods) "I have given power to the people!"

And I, too, want people to know their God-given birthright!

"The rapid advance of science is exciting and exhilarating to anyone who is fascinated by the unconquerability of the human spirit and by the continuing efficacy of the scientific method as a tool for penetrating the complexities of the universe."

from Asimov's New Guide to Science, 1984

Well... to go way back, there's Wordsworth poem about London:

"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802"

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

is it working for me now.... I was going to point on saint-simon, and the cybercommunism essay by barbrook then went on a bit about the technorealism movement that was so big back in '99 or there about.

During the mid to late seventies - the time of the advent of the Lotus Elan sports car - the designer, Colin Chpman was asked what had enabled the notable improvements in the 'comfort' characteristics of the Elan, over the older Elite. His wonderful, succinct response: "...an ounce of rubber, is worth a pound of theory!"

You should look at Langdon Winner's critism of technical over-enthusiasm and rhetoric.

The Erie Canal was originally called “a work of greater public utility, than the congregated forces of Kings have effected since the foundations of the earth”.

I like this over-generalization by Michael Vlahos: “Because the network is everywhere, everyone can be together. And because all knowledge is in the network, everyone can find the people they want to be with”

Both found in:
Anderson, David M. and Michael Cornfield Ed. The Civic Web: Online Politics and Democratic Values. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003.

Not specifically technology, but you mentioned love of manmade landscapes, too. And to me, that brings to mind Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." It's a wonderful celebration of (among other things) New York. In part:

"
I too many and many a time cross’d the river, the sun half an hour high;
I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, 30
I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.

I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head in the sun-lit water,
Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward, 35
Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the arriving ships,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops—saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars, 40
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun-set,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening, 45
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-houses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges—the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets."

Check out the book of poems by Katharine Coles:

The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension: Poems

you will also want to read martin heidgger's essays concerning technology.

also: 2004
The will to technology and the culture of nihilism : Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marx
Kroker, Arthur, 1945-

I have a bit of a twist for you (more about the question of technology instead of the love for it). How about a story about a guy who is so in love with technology and its abitility to create wealth and save time that he forgets to think with simple reason and logic.

["When I was doing nutrition work in Tanzania some years ago, we had a visitor who was a world-renowned fisheries expert. One day after lunch I took him to a fishing village. We stopped and talked to an old fisherman who was relaxing under a coconut palm looking out onto a coral reef and the beautiful Indian Ocean beyond. The visitor asked me to serve as interpreter while he questioned the fisherman. "Why aren't you fishing this afternoon?", the visitor asked rather sharply. "Because I caught six quite large fish this morning and that is sufficient for me", replied the fisherman. The expert suggested to him that if he fished also in the afternoon he would have caught perhaps 12 fish. "But what would I do with 12 fish?" the old man responded. "You could sell them and earn money to buy a new net," replied the expert looking disdainfully at the torn cotton net at our feet, "and with a nylon net you'd catch far more fish". Looking somewhat bored the fisherman again replied, "And what would I do with all these fish?". "You could market them, and in a few months you'd have finances to buy a good boat that could go far beyond the reef, and get rid of your old dug-out canoe", said the visitor pointing at the old ngalawa which was lying on the beach in front us. This conversation went on until the expert had the fisherman with a new fiberglass boat, several nets, and a modern Johnson outboard motor.

"And what would I do with all these fish?" was the constant response of the fisherman. Now the expert looked pensive. He provided his final winning comment (after all he was an intelligent, civilized man). "In a year or two, old man, you would be earning enough money to allow you to hire someone to fish for you. And then you would be able to take some rest in this beautiful place."

"That is just what I am doing now", was the immediate response.]

Reference - Hunger and Society, Volume 1. An Undedrstanding of the Causes. Cornell International Nutrition. By Latham, Bondestam, Chorlton, Jonsson, and Jonsson (1988)

Kipling might have written a few things of interest; see: Secret of the Machines, Song of the Engines, McAndrew's Hymn.

Steven Johnson, in "Emergence, The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" waxes on and on about many things techno/scientific. For example, he discusses Seymour Papert's artful work on a programming language for children called Logos (for more, read Papert's "The Children's Machine"). In the same vein, he discusses some breakthrough algorithms developed by folks like John Holland, Oliver Selfridge, Marvin Minsky, etc. For another, he raves about web technologies that allow higher order and value to emerge out of simple constructs and rules, such as Slashdots' self-evaluation of postings, or eBay's rating of buyers, or ... Lastly, he devotes many pages of praise to Will Wright's SimCity.

Switching gears, there's a great collection of essays on technology and how as a society we respond to it: "Technology and The Future" by Albert H Teich (editor). It contains about 30 essays written by notable folks, and has a good mix of critics of technology as well as technological enthusiasts.

Not an answer, but a resource. The MASSIVE (Math And Science Song Information, Viewable Everywhere) database currently has over 1700 songs about math and science. The database is searchable by a number of fields including title and keyword and sometimes lyrics or sound clips are available.
http://www.science-groove.org/MASSIVE/

Without question, The Matrix.

I would have expected to see at least one Arthur C Clarke quotation: Here are some to make up for it...

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Progress is where electronic devices are so small that more time is spent looking for them than using them

For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. Corollary: When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong

Nothing is so important that you cannot make fun of it

Guns are the crutches of the impotent

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible

Kevin,

Check out the late Primo Levi's works. Some of his essays/writings discuss his experience as a chemist/chemical engineer. Some really on-target and entertaining perspective on how unusual and un-necessary stuff gets put into engineering drawings and process instructions. Almost like memetic infections.

Best,

Martin

As a contrasting image...

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. As a punishment he was tied to a boulder (?), and vultures pecked away his liver all day which regrew every evening.

Not all societies love technology.

Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a technological dream gone wrong. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis' trail--conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence--perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon. The reader is eventually led to see the project from the point of view of Aramis, and along the way gains insight into the relationship between human beings and their technological creations. This charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study, is Bruno Latour at his thought-provoking best.

From Red Nose to Bluetooth: Techno Savvy Tweens Top Retailers' Christmas List

Tweenagers' love of technology has a big impact on how parents spend their money. In addition to pester power, youngsters are using rational argument, technical expertise and brand awareness to influence the family's purchases.

here's a poem devoted to Web Standards by Molly E. Holzschlag, might be related:

Beautiful Browser

Beautiful browser, wake unto me,
Standards based web sites are waiting for thee;
I struggle with rude browsers throughout the day,
But lulled by your strength the others will pass away!

Beautiful browser, Fox of my song,
List while I woo thee with my code and my word;
Gone shall be the woes of the IE-only throng.

Beautiful browser, awake unto me!
Beautiful browser, awake unto me!

Beautiful browser, surfin' the sea,
Evangelists praise your arrival with glee;
Over our laments a new hope is borne,
That ugly browsers will fade at the bright of this morn.

Beautiful browser, you have captured my heart,
Until as the other, adrift on the sea;
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart,

Beautiful browser, awake unto me!

Fred Brooks, Mr IBM/360, has a chapter section 'The Joys of the Craft' on page 7 of The Mythical Man-Month, 1995 anniversary edition that's one of my favorite pieces about why programming is fun.

'... The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. ...

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our times. ... Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilites we have in common with all men.'

Is this the kind of stuff you're looking for?

Bruce Sterling in the Hacker Crackdown on software - " The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that human society is used to thinking about. Software is something like a machine, and something like mathematics, and something like language, and something like thought, and art, and information.... "

etc...

Forever Falling through the Technomass

Like so much Neon refracted through shattered glass

Forever Falling through the Technomass

Radio Spires and Bluetoothed liars

Screaming through the blackness of dead wires

Fortune Five hundreds fight over band

Upon the final spectrum they'll make their last stand

And Death will come rippin, as in the sagas of times past

Freshly Reaped Soul, Lost in the EM haze so Vast

Forever Falling Through The Technomass

T E C H N O M A S S

...crackle...crackle...humm~~humm~~
WARM commercial Broadcasts
Quickly dissipated
INTO COLD BLATANT ADVERTISING

The paper thin, foil cover of fun and friendship that disguised the commercials, the stinking commercials, evolved into a three-dimensional self empowered self reflecting mass of matrix mirrors. Full of psycho babble, cunning debauchery and the same car sales pitch from 1939; the wireless bandwith was quickly claimed out and sold. The wireless rush was on and California was all around us. With the onset of cellular phones and infrared and small bandwith being used by a whole new plethora of electronic devices to transmit data packets...~the only thing between the death of free air and the voice of truth that goes with it, is the very thing the corporate monsters helped create. These fighters for free broadband and open-source programming were dedicated to the preservation of the ideal: "The Program Will Write Itself: You Just Have To Let It." Everywhere and nowhere, these unorganized yet Unified defenders of free enterprise are collectively known as:

T E C H N O M A S S

-Travis Tate

Humphry Jennings wrote a wonderful book about the coming of the machine age as seen by contemporary observers, its called 'Pandaemonium' and it's isbn is 0 330 29508 x

A great collection of writings of their times about early science and machines

The problem with all this rhapsodic prose
is that it reminds me of the difference
between the Void Captain and the Pilot.
Here is a passage that brought tears to my
eyes when I first read it as a teenager:

The word "television" is made up of two parts -
"tele", from the Greek word meaning /far/,
and "vision", meaning /to see/.
Thus, television means /seeing from a distance/.
As used today, the word means
/the transmission and reception
of moving visible images
so that at a distant receiver
the likeness of the original scene
can be viewed/.

--/Television Service Manual/, Middleton et al.,
Audel 1969, p7

I would re-read "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush

http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier/pub/vbush/vbush.shtml

Also the lyrics by Neil Peart of the rock group RUSH speak to the need to achieve balance between the heart and mind.

"The Spirit Of Radio"

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/rush/thespiritofradio.html

"Cygnus X-1, Book II: Hemispheres"

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/rush/cygnusx1bookiihemispheres.html

Check out an oldie but goody..Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" The descriptions of the mechanics of architecture are phenomenol, the buildings described come alive in the reader's mind.

Paolo Soleri's book 'Technology and Cosmogenesis' is a great read for the spiritual technophile. I don't have it in front of me, otherwise I'd insert a quote or two..

This new ship here is fitted according to the reported increase of knowledge among mankind.

Namely, she is cumbered end to end, with bells and trumpets and clock and wires, ... she can call voices out of the air of the waters to con the ship while her crew sleep.

But sleep Thou lightly. It has not yet been told to me that the Sea has ceased to be the Sea.

-- Rudyard Kipling

Check out the Long Now Foundation. www.longnow.org and the book The Clock of the Long Now. One of it's members is Brian Eno. This is an interesting look at future and technology and the result such things have had and have on the minds of today.

Check out "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering" by Samuel C. Florman. Here's an example:

"The engineer's first instinctive feeling about the machine is likely to be a flush of pride. For all the mistakes that have been made in its use, the machine still stands as one of mankind's most notable acievments. Man is weak, and yet the machine is incredibly strong and productive. The primordial joy of the successful hunt or the abundant harvest has its modern counterpart in the exhilaration of the man who has invented or produced a successful machine." p130

It might be interesting to take look at "The Joy of Mechanical Force" and the futuristic manifesto (http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/marinetti.html)
by the Italian poet and fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
Regards
Krister Widell

An oldie but a goody:
The Deacon's Masterpiece, or The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay. It's a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes about a carriage that was so well-built that instead of breaking down, it actually wore out after 100 years of service. Can be found full-text on many websites.

You didn't specifically mention song lyrics. If you accept them, I can send you more, but here's one from Queen. "I'm in Love with my Car"

The machine of a dream
Such a clean machine
With the pistons a pumpin'
And the hub caps all gleam

When I'm holdin' your wheel
All I hear is your gear
When my hand's on your grease gun
Oh it's like a disease son

I'm in love with my car
Gotta feel for my automobile
Get a grip on my boy racer rollbar
Such a thrill when your radials squeal

Told my girl I'll have to forget her
Rather buy me a new carburetor
So she made tracks sayin'
This is the end now
Cars don't talk back
They're just four wheeled friends now

When I'm holdin your wheel
All I hear is your gear
When I'm cruisin' in overdrive
Don't have to listen to no run of the mill talk jive

I'm in love with my car
Gotta feel for my automobile
I'm in love with my car
String back gloves in my automolove

As posted earlier by Theresa, Bladerunner is a great example of love for machines and the desire which machines may have, or develop.

I can't imagine you have not seen the the film, but I would still like to emphasize on it's almost poetic view of machines.

Machines which so perfectly copy human life, or even surpase it in it's abilitys, the replicants. The most advanced replicants are so human, that their lifespan is hardcoded to only four years, because they would otherwise develop their own emotions. This brings forth the desire to prolong their life beyond these set four years.

The Bladerunner himself, a cop trained to eliminate renegade replicants, falls in love with a female replicant. It doesn't easily get more poetic about machines then that.

I could go on and on about this movie, about all the underlying philosophies which make it one of my favorites. I'll end with a quote from Roy Batty, the leader of the renegade replicants, as he is about to die his preset death:

"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.
"

Here's a link to an article about Ted Nelson and the Xanadu project, with further links.. http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0155.html
The book "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" is really the place to look for quotes about love of technology, though.

Another idea: I'd also comb some editorials from late 1800s/early 1900s newspapers during the beginnings of the "Industrial Age". Those "Wonder of the Age!" purple prose-ish writers probably have some great quotes. Maybe start around the time of the St. Louis World's Fair?

Check out books by Iain M. Banks (same as iain Banks, but as Iain M. Banks, he writes science fiction).
You will find a lot of what you are looking for there.. the series to focus on concerns "The Culture"... in addition he addresses the attraction of a "naive society" to a "culture" for whom death, gender, and need are irrelevant.

Happy Hunting..

Try to find a copy of Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted (Theodore H.) Nelson (http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Ted_Nelson), published in 1974. Fun and definitely waxing lyrical at times. He is credited with inventing the term 'hypertext', but in some ways he thinks the WWW is "doing it wrong". Anyway, the book is an early early (pre-PC) example of someone enthused about the possibilities.

"Technology wants only to execute the instruction set encoded by its creator."

The Organic Machine - Richard White
"But what seemed simple was not. From one perspective machines seemed unnatural, but from another they seemed but a new manifestation of natural forces. The natural and mechanical separated only to be intertwined." (pg 30)
"The new continental economy would be 'like one unified mmachine, one organic whole.' In this tendency to mix machine, nature, and society into a single metaphorical whole lay a vision of an Emersonian world." (pg 58)

just about the entire Dune series by frank herbert is a commentary about man technology and religion and their tense struggle to co-exist as they each try to be a dominant force in their universe...but i would bet that you've already been told that about 3000 times over...

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
Rich Cook

I've always loved this. It's not exactly what my mind was digging for, but here you go in any case...
____________
I WAS TRYING TO DESCRIBE YOU TO SOMEONE
by Richard Brautigan from Revenge of the Lawn

I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don't look like any girl I've ever seen before.

I couldn't say: "Well, she looks just like Jane Fonda except that she's got red hair and her mouth is different and of course she's not a movie star."

I couldn't say that because you don't look just like Jane Fonda at all.

I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma, Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or '42: somewhere in there. I think I was seven or eight or six. It was a movie about rural electrification and a perfect 1930's New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids.

The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn't have any appliances, like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn't listen to the radio.

Then they built a dam with electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed Electricity like a young Greek god coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life.

Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings.

The farmer's family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to "The Star Spangled Banner" or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt or hearing him on the radio.

". . . The President of the United States. . . "

I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio.

That's how you look to me.

===

from some watch fanatics:

http://marina.fortunecity.com/westindia/59/Lange1815.html

The most wonderful thing about owning this watch is
looking through the sapphire back and examining the
movement with a loupe. I feel like I am in heaven, as I
gaze at the beautiful Glashutte polishing on the
hard-to-construct three-quarter plate with seductive
reflections of German silver. I'm ecstatic while I am
examining the stunning crystal-like jewels sitting inside
the chatons with blued screws holding them together
and as I watch the operation of the escapement wheel
and gears with the stunning swan neck adjustment and
hand-engraved bridge sitting in the background.
Then, as I start to wind the creamy smooth crown for
about 25 silky revolutions, I check the time with my
reference clock and note that it is accurate to +3
seconds a day. Life doesn't get better than this!!

In early 2000 at a conference in San Francisco, Seth Goldstein -- then at Flatiron Partners and now at Majestic Research - -quoted a line from hypertext inventor Ted Nelson:

"If the button is not shaped by the thought, the thought will be shaped by the button."

Technology shouldn't drive culture, it should be driven.

(I've never ben able to chase down the reference.)

Oops, forgot to emphasize. This line from the said poem is quite remarkable, i guess. Hope it helps.

"Ours is a world of desire's endless equations, the digital landscape dictating multi-user personalities."

i wonder if this helps. It ain't a paragraph though.

http://theliteraryreview.org/phil/manalo.htm

Roland Barthes and Lawrence of Arabia excerpts were just what i was looking for. I'm also tracking down an HG Wells rapsody about the dynamos of Niagra.

It's amazing how little techno-exstacy there is.

How about that great line in Blade Runner (from the scientist who created the replicants to Roy) : 'The candle that burns half as long burns twice as bright? . . . And you've burned so very brightly.'

Here's another - Roland Barthes on Citroën:
http://www.id-ds.com/Pages/Citroen/DS.Barthes.html

Nothing could be more pasionate about a man's love for a machine than Lawrence of Arabia's chapter in 'The Mint' about his beloved Brough Superior motorcycle, ('Boa' as he named all his Brough Superiors - short for 'Boanerges', sons of thunder). He was killed riding it in 1935 aged 46.
See http://www.realclassic.co.uk/news04011600.html
but here are samples,
'A skittish motorbike,' he said; 'with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness. Because Boa' - Boa was Lawrence's pet name for his Brough - 'loves me, he gives me five more miles of speed than a stranger would get from him.'

'The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me,' he reported. 'Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a shriek while the air's coldness streamed like two jets of iced water into my dissolving eyes... The next mile of road was rough. I braced my feet into the rests, thrust with my arms, and clenched my knees on the tank til its rubber grips goggled under my thighs... The bad ground was passed and on the new road our flight became birdlike.'

It was; 'the silkiest thing I have ever ridden' he said. 'At 50 she is a dream. She is extraordinarily fast, with a following wind and downhill I got over the hundred on Easter Monday in the New Forest.'

If I had a hammer,
I'd hammer in the morning.
I'd hammer in the evening
All over this land
- Pete Seeger

Here are a couple of gems (in my view). Marx and Engels are a surprising, but prescient, source-- albeit rather lamenting than waxing lyrical.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civlization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production...

Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848 (Penguin Classics edition- p. 84).

I remember some nice quotes in Aldous Huxley's Literature And Science (1963), but I can't find my copy at the moment... Take a look, if you have it.

HG Wells had an idea, in 1938, when he called for the "unifying of the general intelligence services of the world" in a giagantic and many-sided education renaissance that he described as a "world brain".

Regards

Here is a poem I wrote after a good few years on-line. The first things I wrote on line in public on-line text files were poems. The Internet has generally been positive for me. For years I read the Whole Earth Catalogue. I worked in computing where I had no word processor. Even my Vic 20 had no word processor or printer. You and the people you have support Kevin rave about code and coding some even think of it as a drug. This is all baloney. I crave words not code. Here is my poem:

Manic Modem
Really going to fry that modem.
Really going to load it down.
Download those tunes and rip those artists off.
They were the ones who in my face they scoffed.
I'll have my revenge,
my head always blown.
Monday morning noise is something I have known.
But up until dawn writing now that's the thing.

Joining in my madness,
Joining in my work,
My friendly other coworkers hammer their nails for bucks.
My time on this stage is now vying for luck.

My phone connected.
My pulse is tone.
I have words that have I want to bring.
I won't leave it until the dawn when the birds sing.

I slide into bed,
to rest my head.

Copyright Peter Timusk 2000.

check out the entire book by Jerry Pournell "A Step Farther Out" you will see some truely amazing commentary on tec and its value to mankind

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Richard Brautigan 1967

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

One of the first catalogues about "computers & arts" is
"Cybernetic Serendipity
the computer and the arts"
by Jasia Reichardt (Ed.)
Studio International London, 1968

In its glossary some items rhyme, and under "K" you find this poetic entry:

"K"
In a scientists jargon a 'K'
Is a thousand of be-what-it-may
From storage locations
To cycle durations
To the size of his annual pay.

I don't really think this fits your request, but it still is a excellent example for sudden attacks of creativity.