The author does admit during the preface that the genesis of this work was something of a satire on the arcane academic subdiscipline of media materialism. It is never clear whether the author intends the same for this book. Whatever its purpose, the result is a tediously ideological treatment that provides relatively little understanding of the topic as indicated by the title. A much more descriptive title would have been "A Critical Theory Approach to Early 20th Century Office Equipment Advertisements." It is not surprising that file cabinet marketing material would be consistent with early 20th century culture, or express the power dynamics of the1920s office environment. Morbidly fascinated by the academic pretense, I found myself circling chronically overused academic buzzwords such as modern, gendered, mode, materiality, and verticality, which appeared an astounding number of times. Treated as hugely profound concepts, these academic tropes were repeated woven into for long, boring and uncompelling hypotheses about the motivations of office equipment designers, and the organizations that purchased their products. Perhaps pragmatic motivation provides less potential for philosophical and political speculation, but it often is the case that form does largely follow function. There are multiple practical reasons why file cabinets, and their contents, ended up in vertical arrangements. After struggling to the end of this short but difficult text, I really don't know what the book is for. If it is meant to be a legitimate academic work, and not a satire, it doesn't provide much new insight into the evolution or impact of the latter stages of physical data storage technology. It gives the impression of a naïve anthropologist, peering through the lens of their own significant expectations, attempting to assign profound symbolic meaning to objects of relatively prosaic origin. ( )