In Gravity’s Rainbow (set in the immediate aftermath of World War II and published in 1973), Thomas Pynchon could already anticipate a move toward digitization, storage, recirculation, and eventual economization of everyday speech and action. Well before the advent of today’s “pocket sized and burdenless” devices; before the “little computer” screens that in the early 2000s setting of Bleeding Edge (2013) had already started to displace eye to eye contact in conversation, Pynchon recognized (with his near contemporary in Germany, Friedrich Kittler) that media, its machines and machinations, more than the conscious communications of women and men, are what “determine our situation.”