Consider: the washing machine seems like a useful piece of technology. But to what extent does it increase efficiency, and to what degree just proliferate clothing?

Consider The Rocketeer in relation to steampunk.

This in a blog post by Sean D. Kelley:

"But there is another option available. Perhaps Nietzsche was wrong about how long it would take for the news of God’s death to reach the ears of men. Perhaps he was wrong, in other words, about how long it would take before the happiness to which we can imagine aspiring would no longer need to aim at universal validity in order for us to feel satisfied by it. In this case the happiness of the suburbs would be consistent with the death of God, but it would be a radically different kind of happiness from that which the Judeo-Christian epoch of Western history sustained."

"A practice of the order constructed by others redistributes its space; it creates at least a certain play in that order, a space for maneuvers of unequal forces and for utopian points of reference. That is where the opacity of a 'popular' culture could be said to manifest itself--a dark rock that resists assimilation...Innumerable ways of playing and foiling the other's game...the space instituted by others, characterize the subtle, stubborn, resistant activity of groups which, since they lack their own space, have to get along in a network of already established forces and representations."

(de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1988. Print.)

"Film: unfolding of all the forms of perception, the tempos and rhythms, which lie preformed in today's machines, such that all problems of contemporary art find their definitive formulation only in the context of film." (394)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"Task of childhood: to bring the new world into symbolic space. The child, in fact, can do what the grownup absolutely cannot: recognize the new once again....To each truly new configuration of nature--and, at bottom, technology is just such a configuration--there correspond new 'images.' Every childhood discovers these new images in order to incorporate them into the image stock of humanity." (390)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"Awakening as a graduated process that goes on in the life of the individual as in the life of generations. Sleep is its initial stage. A generation's experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams. Its historical configuration is a dream configuration. Every epoch has such a side turned toward dreams, the child's side." (388)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"On the theory of the trace. Practice is eliminated from the productive process by machinery. In the process of administration, something analogous occurs with heightened organization. Knowledge of human nature, such as the senior employee could acquire through practice, ceases to be decisive." (227)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"Threshold magic. At the entrance to the skating park, to the pub, to the tennis court, to resort locations: penates. The hen that lays the golden praline-eggs, the machine that stamps our names on nameplates, slot machines, fortunetelling devices, and above all weighing devices...--these guard the threshold. Oddly, such machines don't flourish in the city, but rather are components of excursion sits, of beer gardens in the suburbs....Of course, this same magic prevails more covertly in the interior of the bourgeois dwelling. Chairs beside an entrance, photographs flanking a doorway, are fallen household deities, and the violence they must appease grips our hearts even today at each ringing of the doorbell." (214)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

Paul Morand: "With individuals as with societies, the need to accumulate is one of the signs of approaching death." (qtd. p. 208)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this 'completeness'? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object's mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection....Collecting is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of 'nearness' it is the most binding." (205) The opposition of collection to utility comes to an interesting tension in the home. On the one hand, most household objects retain, at least ostensibly and often in fact, their practical function. But their very amassing, their given place and psychic investment, tends to inscribe on them a certain element of the human memory device. It is by these materials that we navigate the memory of the everyday.

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"We are bored when we don't know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold of great deeds.--Now, it would be important to know: What is the dialectical antithesis to boredom?" (105) In this regard, the revolutionary potential of the adolescent.

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"With the appearance of mass-produced articles, the concept of specialty arises. Its relation to the concept of originality remains to be explored." (43)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"The events surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes part, will underlie his presentation in the form of a text written in invisible ink. The history which he lays before the reader comprises, as it were, the citations occurring in this text, and it is only these citations that occur in a manner legible to all. To write history thus means to cite history." (476) In this regard, embrace the element of this project which finds its underpinnings in autobiography. That the suburbs composed us gives us the impetus (and the authority) to attempt their composition.

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"History decays into images, not into stories." (476) It can't be helped but to see in Benjamin a certain 'post-modernism.' Perhaps because he understands his position in fore-history and after-history, he is unceasingly prescient of things-to-come.

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"The fore- and after-history of a historical phenomenon show up in the phenomenon itself on the strength of its dialectical presentation. What is more: every dialectically presented historical circumstance polarizes itself and becomes a force field in which the confrontation between its fore-history and after-history is played out." (470)

"It is the peculiarity of technological forms of production (as opposed to art forms) that their progress and their success are proportionate to the transparency of their social content." (465)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology. Of course, initially the technologically new seems nothing more than that. But in the very next childhood memory, its traits are already altered. Every childhood achieves something great and irreplaceable for humanity. By the interest it takes in technological phenomena, by the curiosity it displays before any sort of invention or machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbol." (461)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"It is very easy to establish oppositions, according to determinate points of view, within the various 'fields' of any epoch, such that on one side lies the 'productive,' 'forward-looking,' 'lively,' 'positive' part of the epoch, and on the other side the abortive, retrograde, and obsolescent....It is therefore of decisive importance that a new partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative component so that, by a displacement of the angle of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges anew in it too..." (459)

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)

"The pathos of this work: there are no periods of decline." (458) So, too, must the suburbs be considered, not in their decline, but in their complex of potentialities.

(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.)