Sundar’s rant, anticipating items like bidets and RealDolls, seems like an unlikely spot to find our actual ideas about how industry might affect this world, but the relative efficiency of cannons versus fireballs was often a theme we’d use to describe the series.

I also used the rant (and the earlier Twitter joke with Best) to do a sort of informal crossover between Guilded Age and my other big meditation on technology, Widgetitis. That link will take you to the full collection of strips, but if all you want is the Guilded Age one, keep scrolling. As I said, decade-old jokes about Twitter are gentler than anything I’d write today, but Sundar’s line about “racial politics” in the strip below makes me squirm appropriately.