Technológos in Being

Wolfgang Ernst offers a contrarian vision for media studies that circumvents two of the major streams of the field over the past decades: the ecocritical expansion of the media concept and the politically engaged cultural studies approach that asks about what affordances media yield to people. Instead he focuses on the material logics and artifacts by which thought is rendered concrete and hardware is rendered intelligent. He brings a vast technical knowledge of different kinds of technical machines and their context in the history of technology and their basis in mathematics. His approach is bracingly hardcore as opposed to sentimental. Technologos in Being offers a distinct voice in a crowded landscape and will help all of us figure out how better to live with the so-called smart machines that are our devices—and ourselves. * John Durham Peters, Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies, Yale University, USA *