Technology and human life are inextricable. Whatever we do is either directly or indirectly linked with machines, tools, or digital media. Any product we buy, be it peanut butter, fruit, or a bunch of flowers is the outcome of a hidden processing chain containing numerous calculations, transport, raw materials, mechanics, administrative files, orders, and coordinative messages, many of which are carried by digital media. 17 Everything has become digitized and, thus, every set of information surrounding our lives has become digitally available. In this respect, the digital turn is a real-time operative and manifest condition that has emerged as a schizophrenic force in contemporary society, whereby we are able to both control our world digitally but whereby we can also be controlled digitally in a way that is ignorant of such control. Recognizing the importance of the digital has become a de rigueur exercise among cultural theorists, such that descriptions of its pervasive presence and power are commonplace and widely accepted. David M. Berry writes: From its early days as a mechanism used to perform data processing, the digital is becoming the de facto medium for transmitting information, communicating and for sharing social life. Through these important functions the digital becomes a privileged site for social and political engagement and therefore it is increasingly important that we understand the digital and offer the possibility of a critical theory of the digital. 18 While such a perspective is received unquestionably in all branches of cultural theory, nevertheless the shift of the digital from a functional tool to a ‘ de facto medium of information ’ is startling in its implications and cannot be taken for granted; whereas the horizon of digital objects once was a set of explorable and relatively unknown territories, wedged into limited but functioning parameters by computer scientists so that they could be employed as an external language and utilized to increase the accuracy of describing our experience and codifying the resultant data, today we ’re in entirely different circumstances. The creation of code now feeds the evolutionary and organic growth of the digital in order for it to operate with even greater autonomy, independent of the rarified controls found in a computer science laboratory. Witnessing the growth of apps available for Apple iOS as just one example – what started with 500 in 2008- 19 has now reached 1,200,000 by mid-2014 20 – is like witnessing the exponential replication of viruses and bacteria. Over the course of several decades we have been increasingly relying on the computational in many domains of our activity at a civilizational level: in business it has taken over with algorithmically-based high-frequency trading, with approximately 73% of the equity trading and 60% of futures trading in the United States occurring without any human decision; societally our ability to bank, shop and interact with our fellow human beings is increasingly governed by our digital presence, with Facebook now becoming a legally serviceable address for court documents in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany and other countries; and in cultural activity where there is a persistent decline in the education in and use of analog technology like photography film in favor of digital cameras to the point that the majority of universities world-wide are exclusively hiring digital photographers as faculty members. We are not favoring the analog and we ’re certainly not Luddites, but the digital turn has become more than just a ‘ turn ’, instead it ’s become a dominant force in contemporary society that is increasingly beyond the control of its users. Technological advancements, still to some extent based on Moore ’s law, are resulting in a logarithmically exponential increase of the computational capacity of electronic devices, but what is fascinating is that the limitations of the applicability of computational capacity may not be limited so much by hardware but rather by its intrusion into human capacity, in that there will be at some point fewer and fewer opportunities for digitalization to govern the world. We are living in a time in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to realize and act analogically. In this respect the New Aesthetic becomes a signpost, of sorts, that the digital has become more of a processual condition that our civilization is based on, instead of being just a ‘ turn ’ or a ‘ revolution ’ understood as a fixed moment in time. To simply list a series of examples of digital phenomena in our world is insufficient. From our perspective, the tendency towards pervasive digitalization could be assessed by focusing on either its ontological effects or through an analysis of various epistemological perspectives. In the case of the ontological, often an important tenant of the digital humanities, there is a tendency to move towards the conclusion that all experience is digital at its foundation. With an emphasis on the abstraction of real world experiences into digitally accounted data, through the persistence and pragmatic reduction of sequential experiences to concomitant time-related informational streams and in the increasingly complex and assumptive manifestation of desire structures of data-dependent human beings, we run headlong into situations such as Ashton ’s the Internet of Things; the convergence of connected devices starts to not only predicate decisions about replacing items in vending machines, for example, or governs market supply chains, but even more preemptively starts to choose our homes ’ temperatures prior to our return to work based on digitally evolving models of our preferences. As a result, a whole new species of semi-autonomous and autonomous beings have become vital constituents of our lives both at an individual and at a social level. A digital ontology asserts that the entire nature of reality is structured, and the digital becomes the sole means whereby the structure is effectively navigated. In the case of the epistemic, the status of knowledge has changed as it has become digitized; whereas epistemic questions once were subjected to logic and rationality, with the likes of Descartes and Kant painstakingly exploring nuances and dead-ends in the hopes of being self-satisfied that the answers to their questions were ensconced within necessary and sufficient conditions, the notions of big data and meta-data assert that the world can only be known once it has been digitized and, as knowledge itself ceases to be locally relative, that it has become singularly absolute. Things are true because we ’ve read them (not read about them, but ‘ read them ’) on the internet, which we ’re always carrying around in our pocket, with philosophical implication extending beyond the epistemic and ontological concerns into the necessity of a teleological approach.