Oswald Wiener's narrative text describes the increasing integration of a human being with a cybernetic apparatus that envelops the human body and replaces its previous environment. Presented as a “prospectus” outlining the device's functionality, Wiener's scenario envisions a co-evolution of the machine and its human content in the course of which the latter's consciousness is transferred to electronic circuits and its body decomposed. The process culminates in a fusion of human and machine that allows consciousness to evolve unfettered by any social constraints.

In “Some Remarks on Konrad Bayer” Oswald Wiener reflects on his deceased friend and collaborator. Arguing that Bayer's personal presence was more influential than his literary work, Wiener focuses on experiments Bayer conducted in his milieu, which aimed at predicting and manipulating the behavior of others. If the other proved hard enough to predict, according to Wiener, such experiments could complicate the participants' representations of the situation to such an extent that they would induce ecstatic states. Wiener connects these experiments to epistemological questions and relates them to different literary and artistic traditions including Dark Romanticism, Surrealism, and dandyism.

The essay formulates a theory of dandyism that relates the literature of Dark Romanticism to computer science and psychology. Oswald Wiener describes dandyism as an ambivalent response to scientific and technological developments that reduce human beings to their observable behavior and seek to render them predictable. Dandyism, according to Wiener, articulates itself in social experiments in which the dandy adopts a behaviorist perspective yet at the same time distances himself from any aspect of his personality whose mechanisms he thereby understands.