The ambition to create such machines and enclosures has its own unexplored cultural history.
And in a league in which the cash register can spin like a slot machine, those ambitions may just decide the next N.B.A. championship.
There is no impishness about Spacey's Frank Underwood, just numb, machine-like ambition.
Now, there something with similar ambitions: Data Cocktail, a "machine" that turns Twitter data into a drink.
This Nashville is a city of flash, which valorizes fame and arena-size ambitions and the machines at work to make those things happen.
"There's no doubt there's speculation fed by the fact that he has built both a fund-raising apparatus and a political machine that suggest ambitions beyond the state's borders," said Ralph Reed, Georgia's new Republican chairman.
It's an eerie setting in many ways, a limitless vista of futuristic visions and broken dreams, of soaring ambition and once-modern flying machines brought sadly back down to earth.
Archaeologists believe that only a third of the site has yet been uncovered, and I sit for a while at the top of the amphitheatre, looking out over the Mediterranean, and try to imagine how such a place was constructed without technology and machines, created from ambition and determination and a belief that the lives of slaves were cheap.
She had put so many quarters in the shiny slot machine of their mutual ambition.
An overwhelming image of a space shuttle, taken at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral in 2008 depicts, from below, the tiled, metallic belly of this great space-reaching machine, born of human ambition to reach the stars.
