In the author's words, it is 'a record of trying to think some of the unthinkables that our technologies have brought before us in this pause before the post-industrial breakfast ... '. Based on an analysis of automation (the replacement of human skills by machines, as industrialisation was the replacement of human effort), the possibilities opened up by the transmission of information by electricity, and a refuel to accept that the virtual' world is in any sense less real than the world excluding computers, Jones sees the internet as making possible an awakening from the 'frozen dreaming' of industrial life.