The consumer complicity in technologies of surveillance is a thread lying beneath the text, as are the historical atrocities of the Holocaust and the Cold War, something Babstock has strong, albeit ambiguous feelings about. Students of Heidegger and Nietzsche have to deal with each thinker’s complicated role in the founding of a Nazi ideology, yes, but even people who have no time for phenomenology have to contend with the terms of big data and what the bloated infrastructure of a surveillance state may eventually become. “I guess what I mean is, I’m on Facebook,” Babstock says. “I happily sort of lie back and let it happen. There’s a giving over, almost in theological terms. Like the old Protestant dream of being known from the inside out.”

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