The timing of the publication of Sungyong Ahns Internet-Ontologies-Things is propitious, following a year of energetic debates and panics about what life is and will become with an emerging regime of relatively autonomous forms of artificial intelligence, such as the autonomous capacities attributed to chatbot technologies. Ahns theoretical reflection on the design and ontology of Smart Objects and the Internet of Things, from the 2010s to the present, offers a valuable point of reference for addressing questions that currently, alas, are peripheral to many of these debates. This book introduces new questions and insights into philosophical accounts of ontology and phenomenology, into theories of human and non-human synergies, and for applications of governmentality in studies of contemporary forms of power. It proposes new and useful starting points and directions for cultural studies that have long placed human agency (over non-human agency) at the center of the study of culture and media-making. It also offers a very timely template for rethinking what has long been the preferred definitions of and questions about media in Media and Communication Studies. So, there is much to welcome about this ambitious book, as a reference for rethinking the current moment. * James Hay, Professor of Media Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA * This bracingly original take on the impending Internet of Things invites the reader to consider what is really at work in the promise of full submission to automated systems: the optimization of everything. When all the objects in our worlds can speak to one anotherand to us as yet another objectthe under-used capacity of the world brain is externalized. We are only using a tiny percentage of what can be known: the apparatus can use it all. There is a highly speculative element of both critique and hope in this prospect. The result is a brilliantly generative and thought-provoking analysis that will reframe our understanding of the shape of our increasingly networked lives. * Mark Andrejevic, Professor of Communications and Media Studies, Monash University, Australia *
