automation

But Nietzsche did not surrender. In one of his last typewritten letters he addressed media-technological complements and/or human substitu­tion: the phonograph and the secretary. “This machine,” he observed in another...

Writing, this ordering of written signs into rows, can be mechanized and automated. Machines write faster than human beings. And not only that: they can vary the rules for assembling signs (the rules of orthography)...

All writing is orderly, and that leads directly to the contemporary crisis in writing. For there is something mechanical about the ordering, the rows, and machines do this better than people do. One can leave writing, this...

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for...

[…] it is beneath human dignity to be concerned with matters that can be left to machines.

[I]t is with a clear conscience and without regrets that I state that my place could perfectly well be occupied by a mechanical device. 

Once we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading. In this sense, even though entrusted to machines, literature will continue to be...