Last week’s New Yorker had an interesting article on technology, how we tend to forget that technology is not just the latest digital doodads in our lives, but also the things that became part of our lives a long time ago, such as teapots and wheels. Basically any device that we use to make our lives easier is a piece of technology. However, we seem to privilege the thing that’s new, even if the most important pieces of technology we use in our daily lives are rather simple and old, and even if the older technologies are more important to what we want to do, or more efficient, or simply more effective. Moreover, the article asks us to consider how we don’t think about how alternative technologies might have been able to do the job of the technologies we currently use (as an example, the pneumatic tube, widely adopted in New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century).