The twelve-headed dragon from Marcell Jankovics’ film Son of the White Mare is more alive than ever. is dragon has a skin made out of pixels and can devour almost everything. In this paper I take a closer look at the monster, drawing on contemporary thinkers who continue the tradition of critical theory in a postdigital age. The logic of computation has a number of consequences: in some ways it has fundamentally reshaped the world order, but in other respects it is just the continuation of the logic of capitalism itself. Our guiding thread is the concept of reification, because if we look at digitality as a process of universal reification, we can come to a critical understanding of our own contemporary practices. Art, and more narrowly literature holds particular interest among these practices; the cornerstones identified in this article suggest that we need to renew our approach to art and its interpretation.