Western Electric Discovers Motivation

Abstract

National Geographic magazine published a map of the world in October, 1998 drawn from night-time satellite images. Scattered like icing sugar over a freshly baked cake were thousands of white dots, what the map called “human settlement lights.” Each white speck was itself made up of thousands of individual electric lamps. Light was so profuse in the industrial conurbations that the white dots were fused together, stretching like a Milky Way of electrical luminosity across the planet.

We can never wholly separate the human from the mechanical sides.

(Mary Parker Follett, 1868–1933)