Despite having survived a fin-de-siecle anxiety attack, the industrialized world has come more and more to resemble a spook-house. With the emergence of new media and new industrial and social technologies, it has developed ever more subtle ways of creating virtual realities, inspiring fear, and offering intimations of the sublime. Although these achievements of the so called information age may seem unprecedented, they are far less novel, I want to argue, than they at first appear. These new technologies represent instead the fulfillment of a particular historical logic, a kind of monstrous repetition of the past.