TechNatura

We live, as a species, cheek by jowl with our devices in precisely the manner our Victorian forebears lived among the sparrows of their hedgerows — surrounded on every side, dependent for our daily comforts, and yet almost entirely unobservant of the creatures themselves. So intimate an ignorance, this catalogue submits, will not do. It proposes, with all due gravity and a magnifying glass, to look rather closer.

TechNatura undertakes to apply the whole apparatus of Victorian natural history — the specimen table, the dissecting pin, the sonorous Latin binomial — to the humbler fauna of the desk drawer and the trouser pocket. Every specimen received into these pages is classified according to the Linnæan structure, illustrated in the manner of a field journal, and subjected to the naturalist’s unhurried scrutiny: its morphology, its behavior in captivity, its vestigial structures, and its standing among its cousins in the wider kingdom of Machinatia.

Let it be understood at the outset that this is not a review publication, and the naturalist will not be drawn into rendering verdicts, however warmly invited. The naturalist observes; the naturalist classifies; the naturalist records — and where a specimen has thrived or perished upon the desk, in the hand, or in the pocket of humanity, the notes will say so plainly, but only ever with the appropriate scientific detachment, and never so much as a raised eyebrow.¹

¹ This is not strictly true. The naturalist’s eyebrows are, in fact, quite expressive, and have betrayed him more often than professional discretion would recommend.

“The original iPhone was announced on January 9, 2007… Based on the evidence available to them, early naturalists described three distinct specimens — Telephonium mirabile ‘the wonderful telephone’, Interpres reticulatus ‘the networked communicator’, and Tactus amplus ‘the ample touch’.”

— Field notes, Oculiphon jobsii