Ordinary abundance
A strong example of progress writing and interactive storytelling that makes everyday technological abundance emotionally legible through ordinary household objects.
Links: Original source
Logged at IST: 2026-08-14 12:26 IST
What it is: Jordan Dworkin's interactive scrollytelling essay about ordinary household abundance, built as a walk through a modern apartment.
Gist: The page asks the reader to move through a modern home and notice how much of it would have felt astonishing to earlier generations. A speaker becomes recorded music on demand. A lamp becomes electric light without fire. A painting and photograph become mass image reproduction. Glasses, phones, printed books, running water, imported fruit, refrigeration, spices, vaccines, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, bicycles, laundry machines, sewing machines, central heating, and flight each get the same treatment.
The clever move is not just listing inventions. Each stop pairs a familiar object with a historical quote from someone encountering, praising, or imagining the older breakthrough: Bellamy on music at will, witnesses to electric light, Malraux on museums without walls, Elizabeth Barrett Browning on daguerreotypes, Jefferson on vaccination, Susan B. Anthony on bicycles, and so on. The apartment becomes a source-backed tour of normalized miracles.
It closes with a useful progress-studies frame: restlessness about what still needs improving is good, but ordinary life is already full of past generations' heroic efforts. The point is not complacency. It is recovering some awe for the abundance we now walk past without noticing.
Newsletter angle: Nice design-and-progress item: it does emotionally what charts about abundance often struggle to do, by anchoring progress in a room full of mundane objects and the historical reactions they once provoked.