Vilém Flusser (1920–1991)—a younger contemporary of Walter Benjamin and a pioneer of media studies—created a distinctive intellectual genre. Through concise, elegant philosophical essays, he reveals the structures of meaning inherent in our everyday world, its key domains, and the transformations they undergo. Flusser’s analysis unfolds as a phenomenology of the mundane objects, mechanisms, designs, and urban landscapes that surround us. At the same time, as he confronts the advent of the digital age, he observes how pure digital form increasingly threatens to consign the materiality of our world to the past. Flusser’s paradoxical mode of thought fuses his lived experience of the political catastrophes of the twentieth century with a keen historical perspective and an understanding of the risks a new civilization poses to the future of human freedom.