Friedrich Kittler Quotes

It's always difficult to find the first sentence. And with "Discourse Networks" where everything was at stake, namely my profession, it was more difficult than ever. So I rolled a joint and wrote the first chapter, about Goethe's "Faust", mildly stoned.

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.

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

Ever since IF-THEN commands ceased to be a privilege of the human being, all philosophical debates about the death of the subject have been settled, simply because weapons have become subjects themselves.

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.

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.

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.

[Discourse network is ] The network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data.

The day is not far off when signal processing will reach the physical limits of feasibility. This absolute limit is where the history of communication technologies will literally come to an end.. the history of communication technologies as a series of strategic escalations. Without reference to the individual or to mankind, communication technologies will have overhauled each other until finally an artificial intelligence proceeds to the interception of possible intelligences in space.

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.