RafaelFajardo

Sterling criticizes the New Aesthetic’s desire to make amends with the machines that increasingly rule us. “Machines are never our friends,” he says, “even if they’re intimates in our purses and pockets eighteen hours a day.” Sterling is right, but he paints a bleaker picture than is necessary. The problem isn’t that computers are going to rise up and take over, but that we do not and will never understand computers on their own terms. We will never understand them as computers. We will never understand the experience of computers as computers experience things. Nor anything else, for that matter–bats, dolphins, automobiles, or bags of Frito-Lay Garden Salsa Sun Chips. Being withdraws from access. There is always something left in reserve, in a thing. The best we can do as humans is to respect the hidden mystery of the experience of things, and speculate metaphorically about how an object like a computer or a pound cake encounters the world.