Until recently, the term remediation has dominated the discourse on media history, describing the ways in which "new" media absorb and repurpose "old" media. As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin put it, "what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media."^{9Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999): 15.} While Bolter and Grusin are primarily concerned with historicizing the present — the subtitle of their landmark study of remediation is, after all, Understanding New Media — many have since challenged their historical methods, including its lack of human agency.^{10Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006): 9. On the passage in Bolter and Grusin quoted above, Gitelman writes: "However astute their readings of the ways different media compare and contrast at a formal level, Bolter and Grusin have trimmed out any mention of human agents, as if media were naturally the way they are, without authors, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, programmers, investors, owners, or audiences."} Implicitly, the present study of algorithmic methods of reading and writing presents a further critique, if not of remediation itself, then of a methodology that locks media history into a set of safe assumptions, thereby implicitly evaluating technologies in terms of their Darwinian "fitness" within the environment of capitalism and mass media. Rather than seeking the old in the new, the present work attempts to, as Zielinski exhorts, "find something new in the old": and "if we are lucky and find it, we shall have to say goodbye to much that is familiar."^{11Zielinski 3.}