"In this deeply ambitious and sophisticated book, Jason Puskar invites us to think more seriously about what happens almost every time we touch one of our devices and turn it on or swipe or click. From the technologies at our fingertips to the vastly larger networks of politics and language that they operate and represent, The Switch provides a fascinating cultural history of how we have made the modern world, and been remade in turn, by the simplest of human actions and the connections they enable."-Mark Goble, author of Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life
"A dazzling, beautifully written history of a pervasive but seemingly unremarkable technology of modern life: the binary switch. Jason Puskars delightful and important book will fascinate historians of media and technology; it should be required reading for anyone curious about how fantasies of liberal agency are cultivated in the buttons, keyboards, triggers, and toys that make us human."-Justus Nieland, author of Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era
