Top 15 Friedrich Kittler Quotes

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I cannot stand on American soil with much pleasure. In fact, my antipathy to America is one of the main reasons why I often avoid talking about the military-industrial complex since for me to talk about the devil is to talk with the devil. As a good friend of mine said to me lately, we in Germany should not say a word about America’s war on Iraq ... we should talk about love in Europe.

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.

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

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

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.