Consider a second Benjaminian nucleus for our electronic present: Jacob Rabinow's 1952 model for a hard disk drive, the first random access storage device for computers. As Rabinow himself described it,

The notched-disk memory "doughnut" can be thought of as a kind of book in which round pages are slotted in such a way that each line on each page can be read by merely spinning the page for one revolution; the notches in the pages provide the "windows" through which the selected page can be read. In other words, the book can be read without being opened.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida foretells the death of the "onto-encyclopedic or neo-Hegelian model of the great total book, the book of absolute knowledge linking its own infinite dispersion to itself, in a circle"; yet this random access, infinitely re-writeable doughnut-shaped disk drive in many ways promises precisely that — a "book [that] can be read without being opened."^{2Jacques Derrida, "The Book to Come," in Paper Machine, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005): 15.} In fact, as Matthew Kirschenbaum points out, Rabinow's descriptions seems "to anticipate much in our own contemporary response to electronic storage media: the book has become a black box, and whatever is inscribed within its pages is designed for other than human eyes."^{3I am indebted to the work of Matthew Kirschenbaum for identifying and contextualizing this fascinating early model for a hard disk drive; see Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008): 80-81.}