No single material defines our era. Stone and iron are still used in massive quantities, on a scale never before imagined; the same goes for sand, all the other metals, leathers, wood, and so on. And we have added, as a novelty, plastic and all the derivatives of petroleum. The last of these has led some to think of ours as the “age of plastic,” but such a label does not follow the logic of the historians when they classified the eras into stone, bronze, and iron. Each was the replacement of the previous one. Ours optimises everything: it is the age of all materials. The age of none. The logic it brings with it is something else entirely. At the limit of what has been surpassed, globalisation leaps into concealment. Everything is pomp, everything is presence, everything is visible. Nothing is. Ours is the “age of packaging.”