The Sunday before Thanksgiving. A good day for a long essay — a veritable “30 min,” if Substack’s calculations are to be trusted. The latest in my series of Sunday Reruns, “The Love that Lays the Swale in Rows” appeared originally, in a somewhat different form, as the closing chapter of my 2014 book on the human consequences of automation, The Glass Cage . If I have a philosophy of technology, you’ll probably find it here.

There’s a line of verse I’m always coming back to, and it’s been on my mind...