Friedrich Kittler Quotes

0.1% of all telecommunications on this planet are absorbed by the NSA’s artificial intelligence. What then happens with them, no one knows. As a rule, orders for secrecy are lifted only after 30 years. Perhaps they will no longer be necessary at all three decades from now. The Word that was in the Beginning is vanishing into computer data banks anyway. When all that is said by the inhabitants of the earth has disintegrated into bits, Alan Turing's Universal Discrete Machine will be perfected.

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.

From a 2002 interview. Quoted in Winkler, Robert A. ""Alle Apparate abschalten." Conceiving Love and Technology with Heidegger And Kittler." (2020).

Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt. [Only that which is switchable, exists.]

What is at stake is that we finally—and in the interest of Europe—go back to the Greeks in order to provide Europe with a viable foundation of thought.

When meanings come down to sentences, sentences to words, and words to letters, there is no software at all... the so-called philosophy of the computer community tends to systematically obscure hardware by software, electronic signifiers by interfaces between formal and everyday languages... This ongoing triumph of software is a strange reversal of Turing's proof that there can be no mathematically computable problem a simple machine would not solve. ... software successfully occupied the empty place and profited from its obscurity. The ever-growing hierarchy of high-level programming languages works exactly the same way as one-way functions in recent mathematical cryptography.

It has become clear that real wars are fought not for people or fatherlands, but take place between different media, information technologies, data flows.

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.

there are no such things as thoughts. There are only words.

In the case of Marshall McLuhan, you can prove that every fifth sentence is wrong and every tenth is funny and very ingenious. And Harold Innis never managed to get into technical details.

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.

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.

At best, the Internet will remain a space of freedom for a year or two, but, within a few years, it will most probably have fallen into the hands of big capital, and then the controls will be put in place. The other danger is that, along with the control mechanisms, the informational bureaucracies — precisely in order to avoid an information Chernobyl — will also expand. Thus, together, big capital and the informational bureaucracies may well simply scuttle the liberalisation of information.

Take the ongoing attempts to use the human brain as a point of departure for constructing the world. To me that’s nonsense. I believe that human brains only exist within language. Neurophysiologists are aware of this, yet they deny it with every single statement they utter.

the real connection is not between people but between machines... the most remarkable thing about Linux for me is how other people just keep coming along to embellish Torvalds’ source code, making it more and more powerful every day. And so as far as I am concerned the Internet is at its best when it is operating as a self-reflection of computer systems, when it furthers the evolution of technology.