Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (The MIT Press)

hard disk drive was a landmark achievement in computer engineering precisely because it offered a solution for erasable but nonvolatile random access storage.

Gutmann's solution involves not erasing, but writing and rewriting-thus repressing the lingering effects of earlier data.

The student of formal materiality will immediately note the fact that markup's fundamental quality is that it models text with more text.

to defamiliarize the Copy command itself-a

procedural manipulation and formal abstraction. In Latour's terms, this would be called "mobilization," and it is the basic means by which digital computers work.

The core precepts of individualization construct a hard materiality of the kind that ought to resonate with textual scholars and others in the traditional humanities:

The history of codes reveals a continuum rather than an absolute rupture between human and machine reading.'

writing and reading to and from the disk are ultimately a form of digital to analog or analog to digital signal processing-not unlike the function of a modem-and that the data contained on the disk is a second-order representation of the actual digital values the data assumes for computation.

a fantasy based on the denial of ecology and labor, a dream that is also an apology for the socioeconomic power to bring together sophisticated technologies"