Some of his subjects seem already analysed to exhaustion by others, even as they have not actually attained reality yet: this is true, for example, of the celebrated “Internet of Things”, which in consumer terms is still largely a marketing buzz-phrase designed to get us to buy internet-connected fridges, and in techno-political terms is really a future dystopia of total surveillance of the citizenry by turning every innocent object into a spy cam. Of the first wave of popular “smart objects”, such as Amazon or Google’s talking home speakers, it is unclear how helpful it is to conclude that “they resemble Heidegger’s definition of quiescence, containing ‘a fullness of being and reality which, in the end, essentially surpasses the reality of the real’.”

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