This book anticipates re-grounded worlds in which platforms have become less consolidated as speaking positions, less encroaching along their edges and more seamful in their composition. In their gathering and alignments of devices, numberings, sensings, and closures or captures, platforms pre-figure what they are but cannot affirm: ensembles and their vibratory sensings.

There is something at once deeply theoretically and empirically disconcerting about re-working platforms as ensembles.

On the one hand, the ensemble concept developed in this book can draw on some fairly strong philosophical support. A high-level support comes from Gilles Deleuze's account of Ideas in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 2001). Ideas are ensembles. Ensembles gather ‘differential relations and singular points’, they ‘begin with the inessential’, and their ‘essences’ are constructed ‘in the form of centres of envelopment around singularities’ (Deleuze 2001, 264). Ideas in this sense gather presentiments of divergences, approximations, and movements of ground and earth found in ensembles. Some instances of singularities or inessential points found in the platform world are terminals, chips, hashing, instruction sets, plugs, and floating point arithmetic. As starting points, they promise little, but much unfolds from them.

On the other hand, anticipating something by doing experimental ontology, and experimenting with such inessential and localized points of departure, seems to avoid central problems and controversies that affect all of us, and that many people suffer from greatly.