ABSTRACT
Behind technology, there is always energy—a surplus of living energy. Despite a few studies on the “materialist energies” that constitute “media ecologies,” 1 media theory today is predominantly the science of digital machines as a universe apart. The digital has become a hegemonic meta-model directed at organizing and arranging the whole of knowledge; the “language of new media” has been articulated and software finally has gained its Software Studies. Nevertheless, an energetic understanding of the media economy remains absent from this theoretical trend. A focus on the outside of media is missing, as they tend to be described only through internal languages and endogenic categories. It is not simply a McLuhanesque situation: we shape our tools and thereafter our tool shape us. After decades of digital colonization, our tools have now begun to impose their own internal language to describe themselves. Establishing an energetic interpretation of media, on the contrary, means to provide a description of the external energies traversing the machine, and in particular, a renewed concept of surplus. Any system should be defined by the excess of energy operating it. Here, surplus is understood as the general form of all the types of energy related to technology in its most fluid and turbulent state: electricity, data, information, knowledge, labour, money, desire.
