Fifty years ago, in The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx drew widespread attention to the complex role of technology in the construction of the American pastoral image. In Marx’s reading of rural landscapes through works of literature, technologies like the locomotive appear as markers of the widespread encroachment of human society, with its simultaneously constraining and chaotic structures, into idealized spaces of gentle wilderness. Today, in 2012, I find myself identifying changing standards in computing as markers of the incessant expansion of human control systems. If the train whistle was the signal of human civilization entering the otherwise serene realm of the garden during the 19th century, what is the marker of technological incursion today if not the sensor, the ringtone, or the drone? In contrast to the violent intrusion of the train into nature, the creep of computing is much quieter, but no less jarring. Indeed, terms like “ubiquitous computing” and “pervasive computing” suggest that our latest technologies go anywhere; unlike the train, they don’t need tracks.