"The theme of modern technology as representation places Kallinikos in a long tradition of social and cultural analysis. It renews Max Weber's depiction of modern rationality as the purging of magic from the world through the specialization and standardization of the division of labour. But perhaps more relevant to Kallinikos's programme is Walter Benjamin's characterization of the modern world as 'the age of mechanical reproduction' in which modern technologies of 'reproducibility' such as photography and film promote a loss of 'aura' -We are no longer disposed to experience a world of auratic objects; we now see a world of reproducible images. This, too, is Kallinikos's argument. But instead of reproducible images, Kallinikos's technologies of reproducibility reproduce the world as a set of signs, numbers, formulae, calculable models. The world becomes not only reproducible but also manipulable and thus more usable." (Robert Cooper, University of Keele)