Strategists of the postmodern confirm that gods, like the other big stories promising eventual but deferred freedom through the labour of the negative, are moribund. With the death or disappearance of god, therefore, the standard of Being and the Same, the ends of man and machine, become contested, 'freeing' the machines into the community of their alterity, the politics of their dissimilitude? This understanding of postmodernity is an error; after all, what could be so dreadful about the end of big stories? The facile evocation of the new gods of alterity and the abyssal reflexivity of linguistic determination merely sustains ideation within a formal world, anxiously preserving its ignorance of matter. The ruling ideas never reflected, as Marx desired that they should, the ruling classes; the rule of the Idea itself is an index of a degrading species. the 'heat-death of the intellect', as Schopenhauer insisted against every Hegelian preservative. Postmodernity has nothing to do with the demise of narrativity: the 'post' of postmodernity refers not to the historicity of the present age, but to the posts in a 'second, and infinitely more complex cortex' to which the speaking animal is harnessed. What Marx only thought as 'fantasy' recodes and reassembles reality: as capital becomes the DNA of determinant technology, living Jabour is retrofitted as mere 'conscious linkages', reacting to digital stimuli, in 'an automated system of machinery ... set in motion by an automaton. a moving power that moves itself'. Capital, inheritor of the 'infinite will' and perpetrator of the romanticism of permanent revolution, the divine automaton.