Jean Baudrillard died recently and the obits - this one in particular - persuaded me to give his writing a try, starting with The System of Objects (1968) which addresses the interaction of the technical and the cultural. In conversation with Steven Poole a few years ago, Baudrillard said - apparently of this book - ‘I did this critique of technology, but I would not do that any more. I am not nostalgic. I would not oppose liberty and human rights to this technical world’.

The System of Objects is aphorism dense. It is also somewhat puritanical. An example of the first:

The fact is, however, that automating machines means sacrificing a very great deal of potential functionality. in order to automate a practical object, it is necessary to stereotype it in it function, thus making it more fragile … so long as an object has not been automated it remains susceptible of redesign …

And an example of the moralising:

… sexual perversion is founded on the inability to apprehend the other qua object of desire in his or her unique totality as a person … the other is transformed into the paradigm of various eroticised parts of the body, a single one of which becomes the focus of objectification.