From the vantage point of alien phenomenology, I would issue several challenges to the New Aesthetic that might draw it closer to the speculative object-oriented philosophy that I advocate.

Look beyond humans and computers.

Borenstein may be right that New Aesthetic strives toward a new conception of relations between things in the world. But for now, the New Aesthetic is exclusively interested in computers on the one hand and humans on the other.

In David M. Berry's words, it "revels in seeing the grain of computation," the exhaust of computer activity that courses through the non-computational world. Some of these examples are created by humans, like pixelated pillows. Some are created for computers, like the fiducial markers that facilitate computer vision. And some are created by computers, like the satellite images that let us see a familiar world in an unfamiliar way.

These are lovely examples, but they are selective ones. It's true that computers are a particularly important and influential kind of thing in the world, and indeed I myself have spent most of my career pondering how to use, make, and understand them. But they are just one thing among so many more: airports, sandstone, koalas, climate, toaster pastries, kudzu, the International 505 racing dinghy, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the brand name 'TaB.' Why should a new aesthetic interested only in the relationship between humans and computers, when so many other relationships exist just as much? Why stop with the computer, like Marinetti foolishly did with the race car?



Take the experience of objects seriously.

Despite its acknowledgement of computers as weird artifacts that have taken on lives of their own, the New Aesthetic is still primarily interested in human experience. That is to say, the aesthetics of the New Aesthetic are human aesthetics, appearances and interactions that we people can experience and that, in so doing, trouble our understanding of what it means to live in the twenty-first century.

But computers and oil derricks and toaster pastries share our universe and our century, even if their experience of that time and place is unfathomably different than our own. The New Aesthetic stops short of becoming an object-oriented aesthetics partly by limiting itself to computational media, and partly by absconding with the lessons of object-aesthetics into the realm of human concern.

Sterling criticizes the New Aesthetic's desire to make amends with the machines that increasingly rule us. "Machines are never our friends," he says, "even if they're intimates in our purses and pockets eighteen hours a day." Sterling is right, but he paints a bleaker picture than is necessary. The problem isn't that computers are going to rise up and take over, but that we do not and will never understand computers on their own terms. We will never understand them as computers. We will never understand the experience of computers as computers experience things. Nor anything else, for that matter--bats, dolphins, automobiles, or bags of Frito-Lay Garden Salsa Sun Chips.