Long before cars from Whole Foods to the Apple campus, the creek moved water from Table Mountain to the San Francisco Bay. It continues to do this just as it always has, and whether or any other humans care to notice. But when we do notice, like all things we give our sustained attention to, the creek begins to reveal its significance. Unlike the manufactured Main Street Cupertino, it is not there because someone put it there; it is not there to be productive; it is not there as an amenity. It is witness to a watershed that precedes us. In that sense, the creek is a reminder that we do not love in a simulation - a streamlined world of products, results, experience, reviews - but rather on a giant rock whose other life forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic. Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decomposition, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away - all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.

-Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing