Friedrich Kittler Quotes

I have some problems with Christianity, but in favor of the fact that every living being, be it plant or animal, has been begotten by the lovely union of female and male. ... like many Germans before me, including Friedrich II, Nietzsche, and to a certain extent Heidegger, I am after love that is fundamentally anti-Christian.

the madman [<nowiki/>Daniel Schreber] sought to imply that everything he did and said within the asylum was written down or recorded immediately and that there was nothing anyone could do to avoid it being written down, sometimes by good angels and occasionally by bad angels.

Culture is not the accumulation of concert reviews, a bit of science and a literary journal. But that is very difficult to change... Our parents were so ashamed after the war that they didn't want to touch technology anymore. Then Adorno flew in and his student Habermas announced the separation of communicative and instrumental reason.

The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamor will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound or voice ... With numbers, everything goes ... a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of media. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop.

Take the concept of media from there – in a step also beyond McLuhan – to where it is most at home: the field of physics in general and telecommunications in particular

we are literally taught the alphabet through a sort of structural violence... How else would I have learned the alphabet? I certainly would not have learned it on my own accord. In fact, without being subject to this structural violence, I would still be a 5-year-old boy.

The only kind of politics I am interested in is military politics, to begin with. In fact, this is the only thing I can think of when one says politics.

Computer technology is an alliance of hardware and software, of physics and logic, which has taken the place of the gods who have fled far away. Zeus, as you know, was at once the mighty brightness of the Greek sky and ‘the lightning that guides everything’. Only gods and computers are in the position of predicting today whether blue skies or rainstorms will be the weather tomorrow.

And when Liesegang edited his Contributions to the Problem of Electrical Television in 1899, thus naming the medium, the principle had already been converted into a basic circuit. Television was and is not a desire of so-called humans, but rather it is largely a civilian byproduct of military electronics. That much should be clear.

Storing information and transmitting information without having to employ such obscure instances as the human ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’: such is the very definition of media.

I do not believe that human beings are becoming cyborgs. Indeed, for me, the development of the Internet has much more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies, of reacting or responding to the demands of the machine. After all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us... pursuing the cyborgian vision would have also meant that the incredible speed of Moore’s Law, that computing power doubles every 18 months or so, would have been impossible to accomplish. So, in my view, the computing industry is less interested in the development of cyborgs than it is in the development of software.

whether or not we personally ever use the typewriter is not important. What is important is that all of us are thrown into the age of typewriting, whether we like it or not. Of course, Heidegger himself preferred to continue his work in his own handwriting.

a few far-seeing scientists say ... nature is not a computer ... the only rational hope I have that we have not arrived at the end of history. Because if the digital calculators did not have a kind of internal limitation, they would truly bring world history to an end, in all the aspects that you have mentioned: time would no longer be human time, space would no longer be human space, but merely a corridor within the circuits of these wonderful little machines.

These programs are called "daemons"... You never see them, and yet they're constantly doing something for you, like the angel in the medieval Angelo Loci... we should slowly let go of that old dream of sociologists, the one that says that society is by nature made up only of human beings. Today — and tomorrow — the term "society" should include people and programs.

how are culture and politics going to react to the slow demotion of their power? For both are predicated upon everyday speech and the normal human nervous system, which are both slow. However, neither speech nor the nervous system can be handled any more without machines preparing, assisting, and, in the end, even assuming some of their decision-making processes.