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.
