Alexander R. Galloway

“World history offers no spectacle more frightful than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers,” wrote Marx.9

For instance, Anni Albers, the protégé weaver of the Bauhaus, who would help insinuate weaving into the rarified confines of modern art, dedicated her influential book On Weaving, the culminating statement of her life’s work, to “my great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru.”

While equating computer to loom is a seductive way to rethink media history, it is clear that Babbage’s own metaphor was engine, not loom or some other device, thereby associating his machine with the steam engine, the railroad locomotive, and the various mechanical engines of the early nineteenth century.